{"id":132894,"date":"2025-09-08T16:07:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T00:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/09\/08\/explaining-ai-tech-vendors-are-from-mars-lawyers-are-from-venus-or-vice-versa\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T16:07:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T00:07:00","slug":"explaining-ai-tech-vendors-are-from-mars-lawyers-are-from-venus-or-vice-versa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/09\/08\/explaining-ai-tech-vendors-are-from-mars-lawyers-are-from-venus-or-vice-versa\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining AI: Tech Vendors Are From Mars, Lawyers Are From Venus\u2026 Or Vice Versa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The biggest argument I\u2019ve gotten into lately \u2014 in the legal tech space anyway \u2014 is over so-called \u201cAgentic AI.\u201d I say, \u201cso-called\u201d because most of the tools billing themselves as \u201cagentic\u201d don\u2019t bear much resemblance to the \u201cAgentic AI\u201d being talked about in every other sector. Consumer AI companies extol the virtues of agents that autonomously make reservations for you based on scanning your horoscope that morning. \u201cAgentic\u201d is the buzzword of the hour. It\u2019s what gets all the VCs setting their money on fire<\/del> investing in AI so excited and the technophiles intrigued. And so legal tech companies need to adopt that vernacular too. <\/p>\n

However, lawyers considering new products aren\u2019t necessarily psyched about the idea of AI using black box decision-making. Because the buzzword we use for that in this profession is \u201cmalpractice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The good news is that, despite the moniker, most of the products being described as agentic in the legal space more closely resemble a batch file of professionally manicured chat prompts<\/a>. Which is good! The providers behind these elaborate automations have spent a lot of time and money to make sure the AI provides the best possible results. AI hallucinations are real, but the greatest source of error remains between the keyboard and the chair. Bad prompts lead to bad results\u2026 and even hallucinated ones. Lawyers \u2014 whether in-house or at a firm \u2014 are likely to feel a lot better about a product described as \u201can expert-curated workflow to maximize AI\u2019s potential while protecting against errors\u201d than an \u201cautonomous agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The legal industry gets its cues from the tech providers and those providers need to be able to communicate what they can offer in terms that lawyers are ready to hear.<\/p>\n

Plat4orm<\/a> and Lumen Advisory Group<\/a> just dropped a report to help translate technobabble to legalese: From Hours to Outcomes: The Legal Tech Executive Playbook for Value Creation in the AI Era<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s the first in a series of planned playbooks, this one offering a strategic guide to coach up legal tech providers on how they can guide their own clients through the AI waters. As someone who interviews tech providers all the time, it\u2019s usually clear when a company is represented by folks like Plat4orm and when they aren\u2019t. This guide offers a slice of insight into why.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AI providers will always talk about time-savings, but it matters how they describe time savings. Silicon Valley tech bros describe time savings in terms of AI \u201ctaking over\u201d decisions. They gush about how they<\/em> have built something to replace humans. And, yes, they\u2019ll probably drop something about it being \u201cagentic\u201d and \u201cautonomous.\u201d <\/p>\n

Contrast that with the description above. Note that words like \u201csecure\u201d and \u201ctrained on their own contract data\u201d show up before<\/em> anyone mentions time. Note how it\u2019s stressed that the AI created \u201ca strong first draft,\u201d implicitly reassuring the lawyer customer that we\u2019re only talking about a draft out of the gate. Legal advice is \u201chigh-value\u201d and \u201cexpert\u201d \u2014 keeping those egos stroked \u2014 while describing a literal decimation of billable time.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t leave it in terms of billed time lost, focus on real time gained. \u201cReframe the conversation from \u2018hours saved\u2019 to \u2018strategic capacity unlocked,’\u201d as the playbook explains. <\/p>\n

An MIT study found that some 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact. There\u2019s no single cause for this, but at least part of it is the general confusion among lawyers over what all this stuff even means. How do you make the plunge and sink resources into AI \u2014 and once you do, how do you commit to overcoming the adoption hurdle \u2014 when you aren\u2019t even sure you\u2019re making the right AI decisions? The resulting inaction ends up like a middle school dance: everyone standing awkwardly along the walls while the unruly kids try to spike the punch with bootleg Four Lokos while no one\u2019s looking. People using ChatGPT for legal research are the Four Lokos kids of this analogy.<\/p>\n

What this playbook offers is a responsible chaperone for that dance.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Explaining AI: Tech Vendors Are From Mars, Lawyers Are From Venus\u2026 Or Vice Versa<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(Photo by ChatGPT)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The biggest argument I\u2019ve gotten into lately \u2014 in the legal tech space anyway \u2014 is over so-called \u201cAgentic AI.\u201d I say, \u201cso-called\u201d because most of the tools billing themselves as \u201cagentic\u201d don\u2019t bear much resemblance to the \u201cAgentic AI\u201d being talked about in every other sector. Consumer AI companies extol the virtues of agents that autonomously make reservations for you based on scanning your horoscope that morning. \u201cAgentic\u201d is the buzzword of the hour. It\u2019s what gets all the VCs setting their money on fire<\/del> investing in AI so excited and the technophiles intrigued. And so legal tech companies need to adopt that vernacular too. <\/p>\n

However, lawyers considering new products aren\u2019t necessarily psyched about the idea of AI using black box decision-making. Because the buzzword we use for that in this profession is \u201cmalpractice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The good news is that, despite the moniker, most of the products being described as agentic in the legal space more closely resemble a batch file of professionally manicured chat prompts<\/a>. Which is good! The providers behind these elaborate automations have spent a lot of time and money to make sure the AI provides the best possible results. AI hallucinations are real, but the greatest source of error remains between the keyboard and the chair. Bad prompts lead to bad results\u2026 and even hallucinated ones. Lawyers \u2014 whether in-house or at a firm \u2014 are likely to feel a lot better about a product described as \u201can expert-curated workflow to maximize AI\u2019s potential while protecting against errors\u201d than an \u201cautonomous agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The legal industry gets its cues from the tech providers and those providers need to be able to communicate what they can offer in terms that lawyers are ready to hear.<\/p>\n

Plat4orm<\/a> and Lumen Advisory Group<\/a> just dropped a report to help translate technobabble to legalese: From Hours to Outcomes: The Legal Tech Executive Playbook for Value Creation in the AI Era<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s the first in a series of planned playbooks, this one offering a strategic guide to coach up legal tech providers on how they can guide their own clients through the AI waters. As someone who interviews tech providers all the time, it\u2019s usually clear when a company is represented by folks like Plat4orm and when they aren\u2019t. This guide offers a slice of insight into why.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AI providers will always talk about time-savings, but it matters how they describe time savings. Silicon Valley tech bros describe time savings in terms of AI \u201ctaking over\u201d decisions. They gush about how they<\/em> have built something to replace humans. And, yes, they\u2019ll probably drop something about it being \u201cagentic\u201d and \u201cautonomous.\u201d <\/p>\n

Contrast that with the description above. Note that words like \u201csecure\u201d and \u201ctrained on their own contract data\u201d show up before<\/em> anyone mentions time. Note how it\u2019s stressed that the AI created \u201ca strong first draft,\u201d implicitly reassuring the lawyer customer that we\u2019re only talking about a draft out of the gate. Legal advice is \u201chigh-value\u201d and \u201cexpert\u201d \u2014 keeping those egos stroked \u2014 while describing a literal decimation of billable time.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t leave it in terms of billed time lost, focus on real time gained. \u201cReframe the conversation from \u2018hours saved\u2019 to \u2018strategic capacity unlocked,’\u201d as the playbook explains. <\/p>\n

An MIT study found that some 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact. There\u2019s no single cause for this, but at least part of it is the general confusion among lawyers over what all this stuff even means. How do you make the plunge and sink resources into AI \u2014 and once you do, how do you commit to overcoming the adoption hurdle \u2014 when you aren\u2019t even sure you\u2019re making the right AI decisions? The resulting inaction ends up like a middle school dance: everyone standing awkwardly along the walls while the unruly kids try to spike the punch with bootleg Four Lokos while no one\u2019s looking. People using ChatGPT for legal research are the Four Lokos kids of this analogy.<\/p>\n

What this playbook offers is a responsible chaperone for that dance.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The biggest argument I\u2019ve gotten into lately \u2014 in the legal tech space anyway \u2014 is over so-called \u201cAgentic AI.\u201d I say, \u201cso-called\u201d because most of the tools billing themselves as \u201cagentic\u201d don\u2019t bear much resemblance to the \u201cAgentic AI\u201d being talked about in every other sector. Consumer AI companies extol the virtues of agents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":132881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Headshot-300x200-3kOa9S.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}