Lawyers who utilise AI will ‘outpace’ those who don’t
As AI becomes increasingly integral to legal practice and with the vast majority of lawyers utilising AI in some way, leaning into this tech will be increasingly important moving into 2025.
Jack Newton is the founder and chief executive of Clio, and Denise Farmer is the Asia-Pacific general manager.
Speaking on a recent episode of LawTech Talks, produced in partnership with Clio and recorded at the 2024 Women in Law Forum, the pair unpacked some of the headline trends around tech and AI and what the rapid adoption and utilisation of new and emerging technologies mean for lawyers moving forward.
Newton said 2024 has been the year AI has moved from a “concept with a lot of hype” to the profession seeing some really practical, pragmatic, and high-impact ways of leveraging AI day-to-day.
“We already see AI starting to become an increasingly integral part of our lives, the way we manage our day-to-day in a way that we would have a hard time imagining what life would be like without it. And I think about 2008 as a year where the cloud really came into the fore when we had the release of the first iPhone, and it only took a few years to very quickly arrive in a state where you had a hard time imagining not having a smartphone and not having the cloud making your data available everywhere,” he said.
“And similarly, I think we’re, in 2024, very rapidly entering an era where it becomes hard to imagine an era without an intelligent assistant in your pocket, an intelligent assistant powering your legal practice management system, an intelligent assistant helping you draught everything from emails to complex documents. And 2024 is the year that we saw, from a quantitative perspective, also a dramatic rise in AI adoption in law firms.”
Australian practitioners, in particular, Farmer added, have adopted AI at pace compared to global counterparts.
“Australia is a very tech-forward market, and we certainly see very similar adoption levels and attitudes in Australia to what we’ve seen in North America as well. And I think I read a statistic that said that one in three Australian lawyers are using some form of AI in their daily lives, whether that’s authorised or unauthorised usage in their law firms,” she said.
“And they’re very much seeking efficiency and productivity gains and starting out with some simple things, maybe experimenting a little with some basic stuff and then, you know, I think we’ll see that adoption really rapidly increase in some more official authorised usage in law firms as well.”
Moreover, Farmer said the vast majority of lawyers are using AI in some way, shape or form, without the market being completely saturated yet.
“I don’t know if we’ll reach market saturation, but I think we will see most law firms adopting it in some way, shape or form. And we’ve already seen some law firms, particularly at the top end as well, rolling out their own AI initiatives in Australia. And we’ve also seen the first legal-specific AI come into Australia this year with things like Thomson Reuters and Lexis+AI,” she said.
“So, I think we’ll see a real rapid rise in adoption of both non-legal GenAI, but also some more legal-specific tools in 2025 in Australia.”
Although there are still some key challenges and hurdles around the increased adoption of AI, Newton said that he’s seeing a “vanishingly small number of lawyers trying to hide from this trend”.
“One remarkable statistic that we saw in our 2024 Legal Trends Report, which we just published last month … we saw AI adoption rise to 79 per cent over the course of the last two years in law firms. And to give you a comparison point, the cloud took over a decade to reach that same level of adoption in legal. And it just reflects the fact that the vast majority of lawyers intrinsically recognise the value that AI presents and are actively pulling it inside their law firms. I don’t think lawyers feel like they’re being sold AI,” he said.
“What I truly feel is that lawyers are pulling AI into their law firms because they intuitively recognise what a disruptive and powerful force this is. With the cloud and the internet, I certainly saw a cohort of lawyers that thought this is a fad, this will pass us by and I can just bury my hand in the sand and continue using my old systems or maybe even continue using pen and paper. Lawyers realise that AI is different [from] the cloud, and it’s helping drive this mass adoption cycle. I think we need to be cautious when we look at those adoption statistics because adoption, of course, exists on a wide spectrum.
“What’s key is that lawyers recognise that they need a completely different mental model of how to use AI as a tool as compared to how we might have used tools like Google or Wikipedia in the past, where you could really trust 99.9 per cent of the time what you’re seeing in those tools. With AI, we need to realise they are not infallible; they are at risk of hallucinating and making other errors. That, at the end of the day, reinforces the fact that no one can replace our role as human beings in being the ultimate arbiters of what is the right level of quality that we’re delivering to our client.”
Particularly as the pace of change is so fast, Farmer emphasised the importance of lawyers leaning into AI rather than being resistant – and being left behind.
“There’s going to be lawyers who are using AI and lawyers who don’t use AI, and we know exactly which one is going to outpace the other. And it’s about being able to take on more matters. It’s about being able to do more strategic work that you enjoy. It’s about being able to broaden your client base. It’s about being able to do higher quality work,” she said.
“So, I think there’s absolutely potentially a tipping point, and that’s why we’re seeing this move to at least experiment with AI and start to become familiar with the tools. Because I think it’s just the pace of change is so fast as well. I think that they have to get on board.”
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Jack Newton and Denise Farmer, click below:
Lauren Croft
Lauren is a journalist at Lawyers Weekly and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from Macleay College. Prior to joining Lawyers Weekly, she worked as a trade journalist for media and travel industry publications and Travel Weekly. Originally born in England, Lauren enjoys trying new bars and restaurants, attending music festivals and travelling. She is also a keen snowboarder and pre-pandemic, spent a season living in a French ski resort.