MPL Legal Tech Advisors: The Legal AI Brief

Thursday, 16th October 2025 - 6th Edition​​​​

This Week’s Theme

The biggest myth in legal tech is that success depends on picking the right platform. It doesn’t.

Every call I had this week; whether with law firm founders, consultants, tech lawyers, or practice admins; pointed to the same pattern:

AI fails not because it’s weak, but because firms refuse to change their habits.

No tool will save you from sloppy naming conventions. No “AI-powered” CLM will overcome PDFs that were scanned sideways in 2014. No chatbot will make sense of emails if every intake looks different.

The winners aren’t early adopters. They’re early discipliners.

Insight of the Week: AI Discipline Beats AI Spend

1. List the work

Write down the 5-10 workflows that show up across matters; not just the glamorous ones, the frequent ones.

2. Measure the pull

Count how often they happen, how long they take, and how many people they interrupt.

3. Rank by drag

Priority isn’t set by importance, it’s set by friction. High frequency beats high prestige.

4. Isolate the unit

Extract, compare, classify, rewrite. Find the smallest repeatable action inside each workflow.

5. Match by task

Choose tools only when the work is defined and measured, not when a demo looks impressive.

AI isn’t an ideas exercise. It’s capacity triage.

Legal AI in Action

🎬 Measure Legal AI Usage

Where AI is already being used in your team (without policy)

🎬 AI Funding Doesn’t Equal Legal Adoption

Stop buying hype. Start measuring usage.

This Week’s Big Risk Signal

AI rollouts are still being handled like software procurement, instead of habit change.

• Firms approve tools without defining usage.

• Pilots run without owners.

• Intake stays chaotic, so every result is unreliable.

The danger isn’t “picking the wrong AI. ”It’s scaling bad process faster.

What The Legal AI Frontlines Are Saying

1. Setup breaks before AI does

Naming conventions, file structure, and migrations; not models; are where platforms fail.

2. Governance beats features

Tools don’t drive discipline. Cadence does.

3. Adoption isn’t onboarding

If usage isn’t measured weekly, the pilot is already dead.

Looking Ahead

🎙 Airing this Saturday at 2pm!

Conversation with Knut-Magnar Aanestad, Co-founder of Saga Legal and one of the sharpest legal tech voices and strategists.

Let AI introduce more friction, not less

Each edition of Legal AI Brief brings practical lessons from firms using AI safely.