Artificial Lawyer’s Part Three predictions for 2025 include: Kerry Westland + team at Addleshaw Goddard, Liam Brown at Elevate, Rawia Ashraf from Thomson Reuters, Jana Blount, Ian Nelson at Hotshot, Emma Sorrell at Burges Salmon, and Matt Miller from Litera.
Additional thoughtful views will be shared on the question of what to expect in 2025 in terms of innovation and legal tech change. Look out for Part Four. Enjoy.
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Kerry Westland + Michael Kennedy + Elliot White – Addleshaw Goddard
‘Where the conversation shifts to GenAI being part of the delivery toolkit and not the deliverable itself.’
LLM Progress
Slowdown of LLM progress may result in a bigger focus on the application of SME knowledge alongside existing models to create niche specific / task-oriented solutions.
Client / In-House Self-Serve
Savvy in-house teams will unlock budget and resource through leveraging the wider company’s AI strategy, as well as taking advantage of their outside counsel’s learnings from private practice application of AI.
AI Benchmarking and Metrics
People want to be able to compare solutions in the market, pushing vendors to share benchmarking and metrics on performance. We will see this pick up speed however there will potentially be many differing standards.
Buy, Build, Partner
A hybrid approach will still be the best bet, with a mixture of purchasing best in class solutions alongside bespoke builds or potentially builds alongside delivery partners being a core component of most law firm’s strategies.
Agentic AI
Smart workflow solutions and ‘Agents’ will take off due to the capabilities now available being much further ahead of where we have previously been when building process into applications.
Education on the Actual vs Perceived risks of AI
The risks of GenAI will start to become clearer, with less focus on the data / training risks as people start to understand the technology and more focus on potential over-reliance, how to verify effectively and ensure human oversight.
Unlocking data to accelerate largescale projects
GenAI tools will become integrated enough into work delivery methods to enable data unlock at scale, enabling rapid deal execution and more advanced data analysis.
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Rawia Ashraf, VP Product, Legal Technology, Thomson Reuters
We will see larger firms move from experimentation with Gen AI to concrete, practice-area specific use cases. The firms that have spent the past 12 months testing out tools now have the learnings to apply and start to roll out Gen AI capabilities on client facing work more regularly. Small and solo law firms have been doing this for a while now.
2025 will also be a year of focus on using GenAI on a law firm’s own data and documents. We’ll see expansion of RAG and stronger AI powered search, curation capabilities and adoption. Firms that have invested in Knowledge Management will be able to reap the benefits of that investment 10x now in Gen AI powered tools.
I expect some bolder in-house counsel to start deploying Gen AI and to a) keep more work in house, and b) to expect their outside counsel to demonstrate how they are using legal technologies to improve delivery of services.
Finally, agentic workflows will be the new rage, and we will start to see more experimentation there. To me, it is an unanswered question whether lawyers want or will adopt agents that can perform work more autonomously. 2025 will be a year of learning for all of us in this space.
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Jana Blount – Legal Innovation Consultant, Jana Blount Consulting
2024 has been a year of introspection. What does AI mean for me, for my team, my clients, my firm, my company? This was necessary and perhaps long overdue.
2025 will be the year law firms, in-house teams, and hopefully the public sector, start to apply that learning to their work, in real ways. I don’t predict massive shifts in the way that legal services and advice is experienced or offered, YET. I do predict that the processes by which the services and advice are offered will be reworked to include technology, and AI.
One of the positives of the AI wave-of-introspection is that lawyers are also seeing the benefits of technology and process re-engineering using existing tools most likely within their existing tech stack. The tools and expertise that have existed in legal for at least a decade, but haven’t had much uptake, are now being rolled out across the board and assumed as BAU. This will provide efficiency gains right away, and I see this increasingly happening over 2025, both in law firms and inhouse.
This will require lawyers to work hands-on and directly with professionals in change management, product and service design, and technology to implement more streamlined and efficient ways of working. This will also require legal departments, firms, and companies to really get to grips with their data so that they can implement the technology effectively and of course roll out AI in ways that work.
My hope is that by the end of 2025 lawyers will have experienced better ways of working and getting things done. This will then free up time, and headspace, to not only work on the strategic advice but to also really rethink the role of a lawyer and what advice and services we should be providing going forward.
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Ian Nelson, Co-Founder, Hotshot
Prediction for 2025: Training Takes Center Stage
In 2025, lawyer training and development will emerge as a top strategic focus for law firms and firm leadership. With GenAI continuing to take over many routine tasks traditionally performed by junior associates, the role of the associate is evolving. Firms will need to invest heavily and think differently in preparing associates for higher-value work, emphasizing skills like critical thinking, judgment, and advanced client communication.
We’re likely to see a surge in experiential training programs – mock deals, simulations, and better support for on-demand learning – that provide associates with real-world practice and knowledge in a controlled environment. These approaches will help associates develop the expertise needed to interpret and leverage AI-generated work product while building confidence in navigating complex legal and business challenges. Firms that prioritize training will be better positioned to meet client expectations and prepare their lawyers for the GenAI era.
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Liam Brown, CEO, Elevate
- Several legal tech and legal services businesses will trade in 2025. Some private equity investors are now convinced of the opportunity to build large-scale legal platforms and will begin to drive consolidation.
- We will also see VC-backed legal AI software companies (with their handsome valuations) buy legal services businesses intending to AI-ify them. It’s too hard to AI-ify the messy inbox problem law firm lawyers face (see attached), but we’re seeing good progress applying AI to legal work that has already been processified and put into a digital platform, think ALSP work such as contracts, discovery, and spend management.
- Legal tech companies and their investors have realized that software alone will not deliver the business transformation promised to customers (often legal ops buyers, see below)
- Legal ops as a movement needs to find its mojo: too many legal ops people, legal tech providers, and consultants made promises to transform their law dept or law firms, spent money on software before doing the necessary process improvement and change management work, and have failed to deliver the promised business impact
- ALSPs still need to deliver on their promises to investors and customers. Many have delivered on the promise of cost savings by using people in lower-cost jurisdictions to do the work the same way they have always done without improving processes or implementing technology; that is, they have not actually improved efficiency.
- The Big 4 have exited legal ops to focus on being law firms
- It will become cool in 2025 for all of us in legal tech and innovation to continue to dream big about what the future might look like but be realistic about the steps to get there, how much work it will be, and how long it will take – and then actually do what you say you are going to do!
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Emma Sorrell, Innovation Manager, Burges Salmon
Market Consolidation: The legal tech and GenAI space will continue to experience acquisitions and consolidations, alongside established providers integrating GenAI capabilities into their existing products. While in the long-term this consolidation may simplify the market, making it easier for law firms and in-house teams to navigate the array of solutions, 2025 is likely to remain a busy and complex landscape.
R&D mode plus: Law firms will continue to prioritise R&D, actively exploring and evaluating pilots of GenAI technologies. We can expect more announcements of firms onboarding legal focused LLM solutions for legal specific tasks such as generating insights from large datasets. Simultaneously, a number of firms will delve deeper into their exploration of “build”, developing custom AI tools tailored to their specific needs. By pursuing both adoption and forms of custom development, firms are positioning themselves to stay agile and responsive to the evolving technological landscape. The development and deployment of agentic AI, capable of performing tasks autonomously, is expected to expand significantly and will be another area of focus for 2025.
Engagement, Change, and AI Literacy: With the ongoing evolution and improvement of technology, and firms continuing to onboard GenAI solutions for pilot or wider roll out, the importance of behavioural change will become even more critical in 2025. Ensuring teams are proficient with new technologies and embedding them into ways of working will be essential for realising benefits, and equipping legal professionals to leverage these tools effectively. The “people, process and tech” framework will live on in 2025, enhanced with the addition of data and digital/AI literacy to fully harness the potential of these advancements and drive meaningful adoption. It’s one thing having a plethora of tools available to choose from, but ultimately the value in all of this comes from when people embrace change and adapt their ways of working. This journey of transformation is ongoing, and bringing people along will be essential for sustained success.
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Matt Miller, VP of Strategic Solutions at Litera
The Rise of Small Language Models (SLMs) in Legal Tech
Matt emphasizes the growing impact of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the legal sector. SLMs, such as Microsoft’s Phi-3-mini series, are designed for efficiency, operating on devices with limited computational power while maintaining performance comparable to larger models like GPT-3.5.
In the legal tech space, SLMs offer privacy advantages, reduced latency, and cost-effective customization, making them ideal for tasks like contract analysis and document drafting. While SLMs won’t fully replace Large Language Models (LLMs), they excel in niche roles requiring specialized legal knowledge, offering law firms the ability to train these models on industry-specific content.
Miller also foresees a significant rise in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which combines LLMs, SLMs, and external knowledge bases for enhanced functionality. For example, Microsoft 365 Copilot employs a RAG-like approach, using Microsoft Graph connectors to pull contextually relevant data from enterprise sources like SharePoint and OneDrive. This integration ensures generative AI tools are grounded in precise and relevant information, a trend poised to revolutionize document management and streamline legal research.
There is a huge wave in AI development, and 2025 will bring an influx of AI agents and AI-driven workflows. Microsoft’s expected release of Copilot plug-in capabilities for Word will be a game-changer.
As AI tools become more embedded in legal workflows, data management emerges as a critical priority. Robust data strategies are essential to ensure these tools are trained on high-quality, bias-free data. Poorly managed data risks inaccuracies and biases in AI outputs, underscoring the importance of proper oversight.
Some forward-thinking firms are already addressing these challenges by creating roles like ‘AI Data Strategist’ to safeguard data quality and maximize AI performance. Firms are also creating data lakes to lay the groundwork for centralized repositories that enable seamless data storage, integration, and analysis.
These data lakes support robust data strategies by breaking down silos, allowing for improved data accessibility and quality control – key factors in ensuring AI models receive clean and unbiased inputs. Data lakes can enhance the role of an AI Data Strategist’, providing them with the infrastructure to design and implement sophisticated data pipelines. This combination of technology and specialized roles positions firms to mitigate risks like data bias or inaccuracies more effectively.
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Many thanks to all of the above for their predictions and insights. Look out for Part Four in Artificial Lawyer!