Law Firm Tech Adoption More Important Than Ever When It Comes To AI
Don't sit around waiting for AI... get out there and help build it.
The biggest roadblock to legal tech adoption often rests between the lawyer’s keyboard and the chair. It’s not that firms aren’t out there buying technology — either with the help of IT professionals or well-informed consultants — but after the money gets spent, there’s still a battle ahead to get lawyers to actually use this stuff. In a notoriously tech-skeptic profession, the challenge is almost always about adoption.
Which presents an all new problem when it comes to generative AI. Because unlike a new accounting tool, merely building a worthwhile AI product depends upon adoption.
The release of Clio Duo — the company’s foray into generative AI — dominated the Clio Cloud Conference this week. For now, the offering is focused on Clio’s core product Clio Manage, with plans to spread its capabilities into the rest of Clio’s products going forward.
But I saw Clio Duo a year ago and found it a solid product even then. So what took so long to get to wide release? Obviously, it’s mostly about beta testing and perfecting the product at the margins, but one thing I hadn’t considered before this week is that AI flips the product development path on its head, making the profession’s adoption problem an even more pernicious hurdle.
“The build cycle for AI to be useful is completely different than the feature cycle of the past,” said Jonathan Watson, Clio’s Chief Technology Officer. “Because you actually need to release things, and people need to legitimately use it, not just give you their opinions on it. So you can fuel the self-referential learning that needs to happen to improve the quality of the overall product.”
Past products need a handful of dedicated testers to pass along their notes and observations and engineers to methodically add improvements until everyone is ready to go gold. But generative AI doesn’t work like that. Even old machine learning didn’t work that way! With the non-generative AI tools of the past, a developer could jam it full of a bunch of data, check the outcomes, and keep training until the outcomes were consistently right and call it a day.
But generative AI products improve by getting fed data, context, and a hefty dose of real-world applications. There’s a unique, symbiotic relationship between lawyers and AI. That’s where the legal profession’s historical resistance to new technology becomes a problem because getting this stuff right can’t rely on a couple of true believers, there needs to be a critical mass of adoption at the beta stage.
Watson said, “We need you to use this thing and it’s going to get better every day over the next like month because we’re refining and tuning based on information that we’re getting back. And if you don’t do that, it’s going to take us a lot longer to work our way through it. And I believe every AI product is suffering or struggling with that in many, many different ways.” Imagine that… a situation where lawyers getting involved actually makes the world better.
In the past, firms could afford a little tech conservatism. But if AI is really the future of legal work, lawyers can’t wait until it’s “perfected,” they need to dirty their hands with the technology to advance the ball.
The Clio 2024 Legal Trends Report showed that a plurality of clients want lawyers on AI and roughly 70 percent either want firms using AI or have no preference. Unless that support collapses, lawyers need to invest in the tech and that will mean crossing the adoption threshold sooner than later.
The good news is that lawyers seem more willing to engage with AI than they have with previous tech advancements. We’ve already seen generative AI drive more lawyer enthusiasm than past products and the Legal Trends Report reflects faster adoption than normal.
Which did carry over to the Clio Duo development process. As Watson said, “we feel so good where it is now, because we’ve narrowed down on the problems, we know they’re meaningful, we have feedback that tells us, ‘yes, I use this, and it saves me time, and I miss it if it’s gone.’ And all of these really great signals that tell you you’ve hit that level.”
Clio has the luxury of serving a relatively tech-savvy slice of the legal community. But the testing adoption issue might prove more problematic for other sectors. In any event, if lawyers really believe in the potential for generative AI to improve their workflow, they can’t afford to wait until some magic product drops from the heavens. Get in on the development process now.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
