Legal AI is being sold on the promise that it will fit into the way that lawyers currently work. That is precisely backwards: the technology’s real advantage is personalisation, and you can only unlock its true value by learning to use the raw system yourself.
All of a sudden, legal AI solutions are all the rage. Harvey, the leading legal AI company, is now valued at $11 billion, while Legora, its nearest rival, just raised $550 million in a single round, at a valuation of more than $5 billion. Even domestic startups are riding a wave that shows no signs of cresting. All these solutions offer tools for lawyers to use AI, easing the transition for a profession that has always been averse to change. But there is no way you will get the best out of the technology if you have handed it off to someone else to design.
The Last Transformation
When I started practising law, three decades ago, the profession was utterly analogue. There was just one computer in my first office, and its sole purpose was to serve as the backup machine when the fax wasn’t working. We did have electronic typewriters, but they were used by the stenographer pool, and every document had to be dictated and typed up from scratch. Even after the firm obtained VSNL-issued email accounts, they were barely used. Most partners preferred to have their emails printed out each morning so they could dictate their responses to their secretaries, who would type them up and send them out on their behalf.
But even in those early days, I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of technology. I quickly figured out how to repurpose the office modem to connect to the bulletin board services active in the city— and through them, I learned about the wonders of networked computing. To use the modem in this manner, I had to learn my way around the command line interface and, through hands-on experimentation, became computer-savvy years before my peers.
In time, even the legal industry could not forever ignore the benefits of digital technology. Lawyers began to learn to use the technology themselves, reading and responding to emails and marking up documents without relying on their secretaries. But even today, many senior lawyers know just enough to get by, relying on junior associates to do the heavy lifting.
New technologies unlock workflows that were previously impossible. But you can only achieve these results when you learn to use the technology yourself. The lawyers who took the trouble to learn all that their word processors could do dramatically improved their abilities to serve their clients. They built template libraries and macro workflows that significantly reduced the time required to produce documents and conduct research. And since legal drafting is both an art and a science, experienced lawyers who had mastered the use of technology leapt far ahead of the competition.
Pre-built Workflows
Three decades later, the same thing is about to happen once again. Artificial intelligence (AI) will most likely have an even more profound impact on the practice of law than the introduction of computers did at the beginning of the millennium. And yet, despite the lessons from the past, law firms are going about incorporating AI into their business processes in precisely the wrong way.
Today, most Legal AI products are sold with a promise that they are aligned with existing legal workflows. Harvey says legal teams need “tools that fit their processes, not the other way around”; Legora insists that it “adapts to your workflows, not the other way around.” While these statements are meant to reassure, they describe a process that is fundamentally antithetical to what we really need to be doing.
The real advantage of frontier AI models is in their ability to be highly personalised. That payoff only comes when you understand everything that the model can do and shape it to act in the way that you yourself work. The legal AI systems we are being sold bypass that process, offering users pre-built workflows based on assumptions these companies make as to what the average lawyer needs.
While these workflows may offer an upgrade over what lawyers do today, when compared against what the technology can actually do, they fall hopelessly short of the mark. You will not be able to get the most out of AI if you adopt someone else’s idea of how you should be using it. It is only when you learn to use the technology yourself that you will be able to get it to do what you really want.
Building Your Own Workflows
I have been using frontier AI models ever since they became available and have built my own workflows that no off-the-shelf product can match. I have a drafting assistant that generates text in my own personal style that I use to generate first drafts of almost everything I write. I have built custom “skills” that can produce agreements, policy documents and memos that are good enough to send to clients with minimal review. I have a series of agentic workflows that help with business development, client relationship management and even basic HR and administrative functions.
None of this took technical skill. All it required was a willingness to play with AI and learn as much as I could about all that this new technology was capable of. What I realised was that frontier AI is far more intuitive than we assume—a few days with an open mind is enough to get a sense of how best you can use it for what you need. This is often what separates most lawyers from those who have learned how to get the most out of AI. And it is a barrier of will, not of aptitude.
Very soon, the best lawyer who refuses to learn AI will be no match for the average one who does. That is not a reason to ease the transition.
It is a reason to stop pretending there is time for one.