When Legal Tech Comes of Age

AI adoption can mean trading speed for skill

A recent LexisNexis report shows 82% of lawyers using or planning to use AI and 71% praising its speed. But this race towards AI adoption, fueled by the relentless pressure of billable hours and office overheads, has me worried. We're so obsessed with 'how fast' that we've forgotten to ask at what cost?'

By 2025, we'll need to confront some uncomfortable truths about this trade-off. Sure, AI can scan through information like no human can, but does that actually make lawyers more efficient? And are there areas of law where we don't want AI to be quicker? When I did my MSc in Cyberpsychology, we delved into System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking. Gen AI is a System 1 powerhouse, but is that always what we need in legal work? Sometimes, we need slow, critical thinking. Sometimes, we need emotional intelligence. Law isn't just about speed; it's about judgment, nuance, and understanding the human element. 

This tension between efficiency and expertise will shape how legal technology evolves in 2025. While speed matters, the real innovations will come from understanding how lawyers actually work with information and documents. Here's what I see coming:

The evolution of legal-document interaction

Something fascinating is happening in law firms right now. The next generation of lawyers interact with information completely differently than their predecessors, and by 2025, they'll be making technological decisions. I think that'll drive bigger changes than any AI breakthrough.

What's really exciting is what I call "conversational contracting." Being blind, I've always dreamed that somehow the internal dialogue in my mind could be expressed digitally through voice, touch, or whatever feels natural. Imagine looking at a clause and thinking "I wish I could see something similar," and having the document respond in real time. Or asking "what else would I need to update if I change this?" and getting immediate insights about necessary edits throughout the document.

It's not that far-fetched—we're already building the foundations with semantic search and other tools. By 2025, I think we'll start seeing the first real implementations of this kind of natural interaction between lawyers and their documents. The missing piece right now is the ability to understand intent—to take that internal legal dialogue and convert it into action—but that's exactly where the technology is heading.

The rise of domain-specific AI

Here's the thing about AI in law that nobody wants to admit: a solution that works brilliantly for contracts might be useless for criminal law or regulatory work. They're completely different beasts. I think 2025 will be when we finally accept that one AI system can't do it all. The legal tech companies that survive won't just be the ones with fancy AI models - they'll be the ones who actually understand the domain they're working in. Trust me, there's a reason people go to law school for four years and then do training contracts - you can't just throw an LLM at that kind of expertise.

The critical balance of human and machine

By 2025, we'll need to confront a crucial question: are we using technology to enhance legal reasoning, or are we just deferring to it? There are three states we need to think about - developing core legal skills, augmenting those skills with technology, and deferring to technology entirely. The risk is that we'll skip straight to deferral without building the fundamental understanding that makes augmentation powerful.

I think firms will need to get much smarter about how they train the next generation of lawyers. You need to understand the structure of legal documents and develop proper legal reasoning before you can effectively augment those skills with AI. Otherwise, we risk creating lawyers who can process documents but can't truly understand them.

The emergence of AI adversarial systems

This might sound a bit sci-fi, but I can see us heading toward something really interesting: AI systems designed to debate legal documents with each other while lawyers moderate. Imagine setting up two adversarial bots to argue about the strengths and weaknesses of a contract based on the entire document's context. It won't be widespread in 2025, but I think we'll see the first implementations, especially in more innovative firms. The technology is nearly there. We just need to figure out the right way to apply it.

The US-UK Innovation Gap

Having worked with law firms on both sides of the Atlantic, the difference in approach is stark. US firms just move quicker - they're more likely to go firm-wide rather than "give me 50 seats". It's cultural. They have a different kind of hunger for efficiency and aren't afraid to take risks. By 2025, I think this gap will be even more pronounced, especially in areas like contract automation, where scale really matters. UK firms might find themselves playing catch-up, particularly when competing for international work.

What's interesting about all this is that none of these predictions are really about technology itself; they're about how people interact with it. That's what I've learned from being both a blind lawyer and a tech founder: the best technology isn't the most advanced. It's the kind that works the way people naturally want to work. In 2025, I think that'll matter as much as ever.