In this episode of The Geek in Review, guest host Marcie Borgal Shunk of the Tilt Institute joins Marlene Gebauer for a thought-provoking discussion with Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera. As someone who led the company through both pre- and post-AI boom eras, Avaneesh offers an insider’s perspective on what it takes to guide a legal tech organization through profound technological and cultural shifts. He speaks candidly about why he returned to Litera, what has changed internally, and how AI is being integrated not just into products, but into the DNA of the company itself.
Avaneesh shares how Litera transitioned from an acquisition-heavy growth strategy to one that prioritizes internal AI innovation. This shift required rethinking everything from leadership talent to product development cycles. He emphasizes that meaningful adoption of AI goes far beyond surface-level integrations, calling instead for a reinvention of workflows, organizational structure, and employee mindsets. Daily AI usage is expected at Litera, but not in a checkbox kind of way. Instead, teams are challenged to use AI tools to accelerate decision-making, increase efficiency, and share insights across departments.
One of the more pressing challenges Avaneesh highlights is “adoption fatigue.” While excitement around generative AI brought in billions of investment dollars and an explosion of legal tech startups, the sheer volume of pilots and proof-of-concept tools is starting to wear thin with law firm users. To combat this, Avaneesh argues that AI needs to be native to workflows—integrated directly into Word, Outlook, and other familiar environments—so lawyers aren’t forced into unnatural digital pivots just to use new tools.
The conversation also explores agentic workflows—AI-driven processes that take action based on inputs, like automatically triaging emails or assisting in business development. Avaneesh shares that Litera has several of these tools set to launch, all co-built with customers. But he’s cautious: if AI doesn’t return value within a six-minute lawyer mindset, the tools get dropped. It’s not about flash, it’s about results.
Looking ahead, Avaneesh envisions a legal industry where AI removes the “busy work” and gives lawyers the space to tackle truly complex problems. Rather than displacing attorneys, AI will help them focus on higher-order thinking, better client service, and proactive problem-solving. But for that future to arrive, the industry needs to move past its fear of change, embrace a growth mindset, and be willing to reimagine what legal work looks like from the ground up.
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Blue Sky: @geeklawblog.com @marlgeb
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
Greg Lambert (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert with the Geek in Review and I’ve got Stephanie Wilkins from Legal Technology Hub here to talk about their latest AI legal tech map.
Stephanie Wilkins (00:10)
Yeah, thanks, Greg. We just came out with our latest iteration of the Gen.AI map. For those who maybe aren’t familiar with it, the map is a project we first launched earlier this year in an effort to track how many of the Legal Tech product offerings that we have in our directory incorporate Gen.AI, because we know it’s been a big topic, but we wanted to really get at how many solutions we’re talking about. The initial map was published on March 6th, and it showed that as of February 19th,
We had 400 Gen.AI-powered products in the directory across 17 different categories. And so we published that in the beginning of March and we got such an overwhelming response, either from companies we didn’t know about or companies who had Gen.AI features that we didn’t know about, that we decided to rush and do another update to the map just two weeks later to coincide with Legal Week. And in those two weeks, that initial 400 products grew to 505 products across 18 different categories.
And so we’ve decided to keep the project going, but on a more rational cadence of every quarter, we will update it. And our latest map just came out. And as of June 26th, it features 638 Gen. AI product placements by over 500 different vendors across 19 different categories. We had to add a category for AI governance, which is great. The areas where we saw the most increase in sheer number of solutions since March were
AI legal assistance, contracts, law firm operations, and litigation management. And then also in terms of percentage increase in the category since March, we saw a lot of growth in AI development, collaboration, compliance, and legal ops. So we’ll do another update at the end of September. So if anyone out there has anything they want to add to the map, you can email us at curation at legaltechnologyhub.com.
But we also gave a sneak peek with this map into something else we’re working on, which will come up very shortly, which is a similar logo map that will encompass all of the products that have announced agentic AI offerings. If you’ve been following the news at all in legal tech you’ve seen tons of announcements about agents, probably every day, so that number will continue to change. But so far, we’re over a hundred of them. Who knows what it’ll be even a week from now if we finalize the map, but stay tuned for that.
And in the meantime, you can find the current GEN.AI map on legaltechnologyhub.com.
Greg Lambert (02:38)
I’m glad somebody’s keeping tally of all these all these products. Thanks Stephanie
Stephanie Wilkins (02:44)
Thanks Greg.
Marlene Gebauer (02:53)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer. Greg’s taking some well-deserved time away, so we have a very special guest host, the amazing Marcie Borgal Shunk founder of the Tilt Institute. Hi Marcie, so glad you could join us.
Marcie Borgal Shunk (03:10)
Hi Marlene, it is a pleasure to be here going from listener to guest to trying to fill some very big shoes as the guest co-host.
Marlene Gebauer (03:19)
Exactly. Exactly.
We are so happy that you are here. We are also delighted to have Avaneesh Marwaha who is the CEO of Litera on the show. Avaneesh welcome to the Geek in Review.
Avaneesh Marwaha (03:32)
Thank you, really excited for today. I like the change or it’s gonna be a conversation, feel like. Good swap out.
Marlene Gebauer (03:36)
Yeah.
Yeah,
I agree. We’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. So thank you for making that time. You led Litera before the AI boom and you left and then you returned during a period of dramatic change. ⁓ How did that journey shift your view on leading cultural and technological transformation inside a legal tech company?
Avaneesh Marwaha (04:05)
Uh, was quite eye awakening. We, for a long time, it felt like we were in the AI game at Litera prior to the boom. You know, Kira Systems has been around for almost 10 years, has been the LLL game for a very long time, industry leading in that aspect. A of our drafting tools for a long time leveraged, parts of AI to
help identify issues and help fix problems and documents. I think we felt looking in as a chairman saying this is exciting because all the hype being created with the new startups and with OpenAI, ChatGPT and Harvey, it created an opportunity for us to reposition our products, actually build what we wanted to build for a long time and felt like customers were ready for it. But now with all the excitement, maybe there’s a chance for us to actually come back and go do something.
that we’ve wanted to do for years. And that drove a lot of the energy to me for me to come back. Our business looks different. ⁓ Sizes could truly be different than it was before. Before I would say we were one of the best software companies. We follow the best practices. ⁓ When I came back, I would say the same thing in October, November last year. However, looking forward,
I was worried that we weren’t going to keep up pace with new software companies being developed and being created. You know, there’s this very strong belief that there is a unicorn being built today by one person, right, in a garage. And we have 1,200 people, at Litera. 500 R&D. We should be doing a lot of good stuff with that size and population and experience. So earlier this year, we brought a lot of AI tooling into our R&D organization to support, to change how we run a business.
And I think I’m confident again to say in our industry, in the business category of software, think Litera is leading edge again of how we built tools. so not only are we putting AI, GenAI thoughtfulness into our products, we’re using it in our business. So we’re able to really talk the walk that we want firms to also be doing going forward.
Marcie Borgal Shunk (06:24)
And as I understand it, Litera moved from an acquisitive growth model to more of this prioritization of the in-house AI development. And that inevitably, I imagine, required some changes. What types of cultural or structural changes have you needed to make inside the company to make that possible?
Avaneesh Marwaha (06:46)
Couple of things, what worked for us in the past doesn’t work for us going forward. We’ve had to look for some really strong leaders who are doing the business from the C level to the VP to directors that are coming with fresh perspectives of bringing new ideation of how to engage with our customers and the end users, ultimately their clients to have better outcomes. How do we tell our story all the way through that customer journey?
And so we’ve had to really look at all of our folks and say, what are we missing? What do we need? And bring that horsepower into our organization. In the comments that I’m buy versus build, we are building a ton. Between now and August, the amount of releases that will come from Litera is substantial of net new features, net new products, bold new offerings, new ways of working, new ways of engaging partners and Rainmakers.
And that means we need new personas in our own business. We need folks here to understand those use cases that partners. So there’s a lot of investments that we’re doing in that space. I will say, I will, we will buy stuff, right? It’s not a zero sum, no, acquisition, Litera. We’re just much more mindful of, is this a long standing innovative product feature or is it a data play, is it a platform? We just can’t buy features for the sake of features anymore.
We can make those pretty quickly. We’ve got to buy something that has to be innovative and really lead frogs our existing road map in some way.
Marlene Gebauer (08:16)
Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that because we’ve seen in the news some of these strategic alliances. We just saw one the other day with Lexis and Harvey. ⁓ so I’m wondering what your thoughts are on how that’s impacting the market or how that’s possibly impacting Litera.
Avaneesh Marwaha (08:39)
I would say welcome to legal. is how it’s supposed to be. Litera has been integrated into every other large ecosystem for 20 plus years. We integrate with all DMSs. We integrate with all finance systems. We integrate with Thomson and Lexis where necessary. This is called providing value to your customers and users. We’ve been doing it for, since day one. So.
good on them to recognize that that’s a much needed outcome for their customers and users that if data flows more easily, it’s more meaningful and actually has value and potentially better adoption of the tools. maybe some folks are shocked by that, but if they didn’t integrate with the rest of ecosystem, I’d say that’s more concerning. This is the right things you should be doing as a software vendor of scale.
I always view us as a very open middle layer between documents and time and billing and Litera sits in the middle doing all that work. So we believe that every API should be open to everybody. So this feels like the right thing for folks to be working on. If not, I’d be more concerned that they weren’t connecting to other partners in the ecosystem.
Marlene Gebauer (09:55)
So I want to shift a little bit. I’ve heard you say on other podcasts that every Litera employee is expected to use AI daily. So I’m hoping that you can unpack what that looks like in practice ⁓ and what’s meaningful use and how are you ensuring that it’s not like a checkbox exercise and that people are using it mindfully.
Avaneesh Marwaha (10:10)
Yeah.
The, the mindfulness piece and making sure that you could, you could easily just say you something right. You just search in teams and go to Copilot and do one simple search and say you’ve done it. I think we, we realize the value when we see the quality of work increase or we see decision making get faster and you’re seeing, yeah, we’re seeing like myself included asking my team, why is it taking so long?
Marlene Gebauer (10:43)
So you’re checking it. ⁓
Avaneesh Marwaha (10:50)
this should be something we can do pretty quickly or your teams will put together pretty quickly. And then they’re asking the same question of their teams. It trickles down like, are we spending a lot of muscle on this topic? Why aren’t we just getting the outcomes that we need with the stuff we have in front of us? So it requires a lot of sharing of ideation. So in teams, we’re always talking about what we just used it for, what’s a new skill set we’re leveraging the models for, or what are some skills we’ve
put together to go make our jobs easier and better. And so we share ideas. We inquire why things take time. ⁓ And if those things don’t work out, I think we start figuring out where it’s not working well and then try honing it and why it’s not. We’ve also created a culture here where employees, there’s a cohort of our employees that meet regularly to meet as a working group to talk about departmental needs, what investments they want to make on new tools.
And then we validate that with development and make sure it’s safe and secure. And then we roll it out. So it’s not just top down. It’s a bottoms up approach of finding champions that really want to drive change long-term. And then they’re the ones that hold each other accountable much better than I do. don’t last thing you want as a CEO holding an individual contributor responsible for their day job. You want to have the team take care of themselves. So I can tell you the output that we have at Litera today is much greater than it was in January.
and our business has not grown in employee size.
Marlene Gebauer (12:19)
Is there any particular example that you’ve used internally that you think is pretty cool?
Avaneesh Marwaha (12:28)
I have a few that I do personally. ⁓ As a business, we’re finding huge value in autonomous developers that can go build code on their own. We’re finding huge value opportunity and support where autonomous agents can handle support tickets and triage problems much more quickly than humans can. But it’s not to say that that’s taking away from that skill set. It’s augmenting and allowing us to do more and give greater value back to our customers that have
May have waited three days for a wholesome response, or now getting at least a wholesome response in maybe an hour. And that’s a big change in customer experience. As a individual, I’m using it for various things. I’m using it to attend meetings. I left a meeting going out right now that I could be a part of because we’re having a chat. And so it’s recorded, I get the transcript, it’s dissected for me. Obviously, if they say my name in different parts, I can go to those video clips and catch up real quick. I can watch it at 2x speeds, I can capture more of it.
That’s the easy stuff. If we’re not doing that today, if we’re not doing that today, then we’re missing the opportunities of scale. ⁓ Research is the easy spot, right? Deep research is really meaningful right now. When I’m thinking of new ideas, competitive modes, angles opportunity, how we shape up with the marketplace, what do folks care about, starting there as my first point of content is pretty interesting. I also dump.
a lot of financial statements and opportunities into our secure, in the internal version of Co-Pilot. And then I’m able to do a of FP&A work on my own now as well and ask different if-then statements. If I do this and that, what’s this look like to the model? So a lot of my time has gone into maybe not asking for help, asking somebody to do something for me, I just do it myself. And that’s allowed me to go a lot faster.
Marcie Borgal Shunk (14:21)
So all of the things that you’re just describing in terms of everything from the blocking and tackling all the way to the creative uses of AI involve a level of adoption. And as we know, the legal industry overall may not be the fastest to dive into anything that is new and innovative, though we hear quite a lot about it. I actually…
hosted, it was part of a panel moderating a panel this week for the College of Law Practice Management, and we asked the audience how much is AI impacting the industry? Is it doing it right now or is it one or two years away, three to five, etc.? We did have one pessimist who said it’s not going to happen, but 43 % did say that it’s already having a significant impact on the industry. So I’m curious from your perspective, what is a tactic or at least one tactic that is
Marlene Gebauer (15:00)
You
Marcie Borgal Shunk (15:12)
helping law firms move from this curiosity to a consistent use model.
Avaneesh Marwaha (15:19)
Yeah, we’ve got some roadblocks to this that have resulted from success. The amount of startups that have popped up in this environment has been great. Right? $3 billion of venture capital money has entered our ecosystem, focused on GenAI So that’s amazing that we need that innovation to show up. need the ideation to show up. However, that’s created a massive blocker now because most teams are getting tired of testing, testing, piloting, testing.
Asking attorneys their points of view. Is it working? Is it not working? We’re going to go through a period now, I believe, of plateau or even depression of using generative AI for new use cases because of the fatigue that is set in and because partners and lawyers want to get back to their day job and not just pilot tools over and over again, right? That’s happening and talking to customers in the last three months, fatigue is setting in. To get real true adoption here,
Tooling, the model, the machine, all of those things have to be inside the native workflows that people are using today. Copilot works for me because it’s just there in Teams. It’s right there, right? I don’t have to go to a Teams application on my computer. It’s sitting there. And I used to be an attorney and I recognized window switching is the worst thing you do to an attorney. It’s the worst thing you do to a generational partner who’s already at their wits end with technology.
Having them go do something new is the worst thing you can ask them to do, even if the output is great. So my point of view on this is I want to bring really interesting workflows, skills and agents using General AI to augment the work we do today inside Word and Outlook. That’s it. I don’t want to ask people to go anywhere else to do their job. Litera already sits in Word with our drafting tools. We’ve enhanced it with Litera One. We’re doing it in Outlook.
and everything that you want with Litera sits there, so you’re already gonna work there. And then wherever GenAI makes sense, we’ll put it in. Not everything requires generative AI. If I gave you a heat map of all the features and functions that Litera can offer to a law firm, I would tell you most folks want to have 100 % GenAI and everything. I think it’s probably like 20 % of things could be automated or should be automated, and you can do it with high degree of trust today. Do I believe GenAI belongs in the practice of law?
Not fully as much as other folks do today. A senior associate and a partner already know what they want to write, they already know where the content sits. It’s faster and a higher degree of trust if they do that themselves. If they got to check the work over and over again, you start losing some of that value over time. Where I do want to apply the application, where we’re focused on it, is on business development activities, it’s basic workflow management of your matters. There are areas inside the workflow that can be
100 % managed with agents and skills and then other areas where we can use to do some deep research, some Q&A, all make sense. And that’s where think the attention has to go. Right, that to me feels like a near term win for our industry to move forward and say, yes, legal industry is using GenAI every day because partners using it for business development, rainmakers using it to find the next client. Those are areas that we should really invest a lot of time and energy in. And that’s where
I have pivoted our business extremely well, I think, this first half of the year to rethink the business development dilemma that partners sit in today.
Marlene Gebauer (18:53)
So it’s interesting because you’re talking about workflows and agentic workflows are sort of getting a lot of buzz but are in sort of very early stage. And you’re also saying that GenAI doesn’t necessarily belong in everything in a law firm. So I’m curious if.
Litera’s piloted anything in the Agentic Workflow space, what that was and what did you learn from a real world implementation.
Avaneesh Marwaha (19:27)
So from our product space, we have a ton coming out in August. And they’re all being co-built with customers. And the reason why I think it works in our ecosystem better than not is that you can do so much in our ecosystem. You can use Foundation as the experience data to get really curated matter-specific content, which you can’t get unless you have Foundation. You can leverage Kira to parse.
and break apart documents to really curate that content. And so you can use Clocktomizer to do pricing. There’s so many aspects to Litera’s ecosystem that when you ask a question, you legitimately don’t have to leave Litera to get an answer. And so you can build really good agents and then build skills on all your products and features that deliver results. And so we have built some really interesting prototypes and products that’ll be coming out in next like 60 days around
What do do when an email comes in? What steps do partners and associates take manually after an email comes in? What work do they go do? Can we manage, can we just do that for them? And the answer is yes, we can. And so the list of things we can build is massive. We’re chipping away by what do customers think is high value? What do end users think are high value and produce them in a way that ⁓ has results right away? But I think when you…
just go by an agent or just get something to do something by itself, it’s really hard. So as a person, again, I use Co-Pilot. Within Co-Pilot, you can touch Salesforce and you can leverage this connection and have a Salesforce agent go give you stuff. But it’s not as clean as if it was a one singular ecosystem, right? We have our team has refined the Salesforce engine to make sure it works for us and vice versa. Had Co-Pilot and Salesforce been one company, it’d be such a…
clean Q&A experience, automation experience. So I think we’re seeing some of those things where if vendors don’t build robust APIs to allow the agents or skills to be used by anybody, you’re gonna have a not clean experience. those areas, when people pilot and test, if they don’t work right away, they get super frustrated. If you have attorneys and partners, they work in six minute mindset, right? Everything has to in six minutes. If it breaks in one, we’re done, we walk away. So.
How often will they test something before they’re you know what, let me just do it the old way. I can do it in four minutes. I’m not saving that much time anymore. So we’re really cautious and talk a lot about internally the six minute dilemma. Are we making an impact within six minutes? Is it taking longer than six minutes? Where do we sit in that with everything that we do? And that’s the only way I think you make good product right now is thinking really minutia of the impact you’re making and the ROI you get from that.
Marcie Borgal Shunk (22:15)
I spent many years working in market research and client research and we used to joke that our biggest competitor was bad research, right? If they’d already seen bad research that their appetite to do it again was really low. So.
You’ve given some examples of, you we talk about the highest and best use in an attorney’s time. And you’ve given some examples, business development, some of the basic workflow pieces, that you said potentially shying away from the actual legal services delivery work. Are there areas in the, whether it’s document review or drafting, are there places where there is
an opportunity to be using these tools and how far along do you think we are realistically in getting lawyers out of the work that perhaps they shouldn’t be spending a whole lot of time on?
Avaneesh Marwaha (23:11)
This is an interesting question. And my points of view are, I’ll say are very specific to me. My point of view is some of Litera’s as well. We, as an industry, I think we forget how much we’ve already automated. And everybody forgets how much of, if you think of high volume, low impact documentation is down to a Q&A. You answer a set 10 questions, then you can do a binder of documents. That already exists today, right?
Four or five vendors that have been doing it for decades now, or let’s give your client a Q&A document, they answer 10 questions, and here’s all your trusted estate documents. So we’ve already built a bunch of that stuff. At Litera, else where that stuff already exists. So if we were to go put GenAI on that, what are we gaining? I’m saying we don’t do it, but what’s the gain for that? What’s the ROI from something that’s already heavily automated? It’s already commoditized, it’s already become a flat fee.
project for most firms. I got a new trust. was like, was it “X” fee, There was no… That was the cost. It didn’t matter if it took four hours, 10 hours. That was the cost. We already automated some of these things that are ⁓ mundane and commoditized. But to me, that’s where GenAI is the safest place to live, where it’s commoditized because the error rate, we de minimis because the volume of data is so great. Where folks are trying to apply it today is complex documentation.
All the M&A documents that are 200- 300 pages in length and the machine stops somewhere halfway through it and you get hallucination. So for me, that’s where it’s not fit for purpose yet. You can use it for maybe checking and other things, but you can’t use it for the creation of 200 page M&A document with 100 % confidence. Everything there is good. And if it’s not doing that, then what are you gaining? Because now a first year associate still has to proofread it. A third year associate still has to proofread it.
a fifth year associate will still proofread it and then a partner will get it. So what do we gain by doing that? Again, nothing today. Maybe in two or three years we’ll get to a point where it’s 95 % plus confidence, but not today. And then the other side of it, I’m a client of legal services. Litera spends, I think, from $5 to $15 million a year on legal fees. We use one primary firm and two secondary firms. My primary firm wants me to believe I get everything bespoke.
As soon as that feeling goes away, I have a new primary firm that’s cheaper. I use that firm for the white glove service. I use that firm for the experience I get. I use that firm because I toss over a problem and I don’t think about it. But as soon as I know that they’ve got rid of their hiring practices and gone to GenAI as soon as I know that their apprenticeship is dead, all that stuff’s gone, what’s the value of that shoe white glove service? I can get that next door at a firm today.
I think there’s a cautionary tale here of what are we trying to push the industry to? What are we trying to maximize for? Is it just because we want to say as an industry we did it and we won because everybody thought that our industry is the one that should do it? Again, I think it’s fit for purpose for a lot of different things and it has high value, high ROI for a lot of things that are practiced a lot, but it’s not the ones that we’re focusing on.
Marlene Gebauer (26:32)
So I like what you said before about the six minute mindset that basically if it’s not going to sort of solve that problem and in a minute it’s like I’ll do it the old way because I know how to do that and it’s faster and easier. Or in some instances maybe doing it the old way is actually better financially for that particular practitioner.
What mindset or skill sets do legal professionals need now and in the future to thrive in a tech powered legal environment? ⁓ know, are there, are there blind spots we’re not talking about enough?
Avaneesh Marwaha (27:13)
I joined the practice of law in 2005. That’s when I became a lawyer. It hasn’t changed. Had we had a growth mindset the last 25 years, we’d be a different industry today. We’d be 100 % cloud first as an industry today. We would have zero on-prem products today, right? There’d be so much more we would have done with the growth mindset. But when you’re in a partnership model,
where generational partners own the wallet and want to protect their bonuses or don’t want to move their cheese because that’s how they did it and they feel like if you don’t do it their way you’re not a good lawyer. We’re in trouble, right? No matter how good these tools get, the adoption of it’s going to take a long time until we’re able to get new equity partners into firms. We get new firms to get started. get firms to break up and start something new. We need a growth mindset. Growth mindset lives everywhere else in the ecosystem of the world.
Why are we struggling with it in legal? I don’t understand it 100%. I was at a firm in New York three weeks ago and we’re talking about drafting in the cloud, which is a funny conversation, having to do that 2025. And we’re taking 15,000 customers to the cloud starting last month, probably for an 18 month journey. And that person asked me with a very straight face.
When we take draft into the cloud, who’s going to test the desktop images? And I said, those will also go away because Microsoft’s making all these changes. And ultimately it came down to the concern of that person and their team. What are they going to do for a job? What am I going to do if I’m not testing desktops? What am going to do if I’m not doing training because the tool just works and you can train them through the app? What happens to all the roles that have been built for the last 30 years supporting an infrastructure that’s now changing? So I think some of the roadblocks we face.
are yes, partner led, ⁓ but there are some that are still back office led. Like, don’t move my world, don’t move my cheese. That’s gonna hold us all back in the end. It’s not everybody, but there is a lot of that conversation that happens still. Like, if you do that, what am I gonna do? And so I think we gotta do that carefully.
Marlene Gebauer (29:30)
Yeah, people are uncertain. People are very uncertain
about what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen to them.
Avaneesh Marwaha (29:35)
That’s a growth mindset. think believing that if you are ⁓ excited and motivated, you’re going to find what you want to do. You’ll pivot, you’ll train, you’ll educate, and you’ll keep moving forward. But to say we’re not going to do drafting or do something else in the cloud because you’re worried about your job, I think that we’re holding back the industry.
Marcie Borgal Shunk (29:57)
So we’re really just trying to understand, if we fast forward a few years from now, what do you think will surprise us most about the legal tech ecosystem and how lawyers are working within it?
Avaneesh Marwaha (30:11)
I think we’ll get to a spot, hopefully in three years, maybe five, where work happens. We are less inclined about the product. Yeah, less inclined about the product name, less inclined about whatever, but when an email comes in or an action’s been created by your client, things just start happening. And that thing that’s happening isn’t the actual work, but it’s giving the partner and the attorneys thinking time.
Marlene Gebauer (30:22)
Just happens. Just happens.
Avaneesh Marwaha (30:41)
and giving them time to actually solution and network and go learn because
No one wants to do what we do today as associates. A first year associate no longer wants to do copies. That was a known thing 10 years ago. Please, first year associates no longer do one copies. Now, first year associates don’t want to do other things. And I think the machine can take care of all those in the coming month, if not year. But what are we going do with all that? I think there’s a lot of un-ven work. I think there’s clients out there, including Litera, that have work firms could do for us, and we don’t even do them, to be compliant.
to be better stewards in the economy, to do better things ecologically. There’s so much we could do. And we had more active firms calling us and had their fees adjusted because the work they’re doing for us is different than M&A. I could keep firms busy for a long time, but they can’t even get to that work today. So this general fear of like, what’s GenAI gonna do? Is it going to kill… No, it’s not gonna kill the industry. It’s gonna make the industry much more proactive and not reactive.
Lawyers love coming in and fixing their problems. We’re great at being fixers. Get us in the room. Get lawyers in the room when decisions are being made so we can de-risk bad ideas. But we need the time and space to do that. I think GenAI can help augment a lot of the stuff that doesn’t need to happen. But it’s not because I want to reduce the size of lawyers and partners. It’s because I think there’s so much for them to do. There’s so much to go work on.
We’re all logical thinkers coming out of law school. Give us the big problems. Let us go work on them and take us out of the mundane day to day. And that’s where I think I’m hopeful in three to five years, we see an industry that’s much more inquisitive. Um, that’s much more thoughtful, much more engaging in what’s happening around the world and actually doing the job that we all put our hands up for, respecting different constitutions around the world. Like go do that. Go do that. But
We’re on our own way right now. We can’t do it because we’re so busy with the busy work. Let technology do the busy work. You go be a lawyer. Go think of the hard problems and go fix them. And three to five years, hopefully we’ll do more of that work and less of the work we do today.
Marlene Gebauer (32:58)
Avaneesh Maraha, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and thank you Marcie Borgal Shunk from the Tilt Institute for guest hosting today.
Avaneesh Marwaha (33:08)
Thank you to both of you. It’s been a great conversation. That crystal ball question was amazing. I’ve been talking about it internally. I feel excited to share that externally now where I think we’re going to see a shift. So great, great chat.
Marlene Gebauer (33:22)
Yeah, I love it. Casting away the busy work and focusing on the good stuff. sounds good to me. ⁓ And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.
Avanish, are there any particular places that you’d like to point listeners to to learn more or to reach out to you?
Avaneesh Marwaha (33:50)
For me personally, obviously you can reach out on LinkedIn. the link in the great spot for conversation ⁓ and then i would point to seeing us at ILTA. It’s going to be a busy three days ⁓ a lot of news updates ⁓ Q&A session so was a great near-term opportunities that to engage.
Marlene Gebauer (34:12)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you so much, Jerry, and thanks everyone for the great conversation today.