MPL Legal Tech Advisors: The Legal AI Brief

Thursday, 18th December 2025 - 15th Edition​​​​

This Week's Theme: Your Data Is Buried, Not Missing

Law firms generate enormous amounts of data - time entries, emails, matters, contracts. And then mostly ignore it.

Not because the data isn't valuable, but because it was never treated as an asset in the first place.

This week is about why "dark data" is quietly blocking AI, analytics, and better decision-making inside firms, long before tools even enter the picture.

Insight of the Week: Your Firm Already Knows More Than It Uses

Every six minutes is tracked.

Every email is logged.

Every matter is categorized.

Every contract is drafted, revised, signed, and stored.

That's way more than just administration. It’s structured intelligence about profitability, risk, workload, and client behavior.

Gartner calls unused operational information dark data. And Splunk's research shows most organizations leave over half of their data unused.

In law firms, that data ends up locked inside PDFs, scattered across systems, or reviewed once a year - if at all.

The result isn't a lack of insight, it's insight that never reaches a decision.

Legal AI in Action

🎬 Why AI Tools Keep Failing in Legal (Your Data is a Mess)

Why legal AI breaks in practice.

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🎬 The 3-Part Legal Data Audit That Reveals Why Your AI Tools Keep Failing

A practical AI-readiness audit.

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Red Flag of the Week

If partners only see operational data once a year in a retreat slide deck, the firm is operating blind the other 364 days.

Pricing, staffing, client selection, and risk decisions are being made on instinct, while the evidence already exists inside the firm.

As with the rest of things, AI doesn’t fix that. It amplifies it.

What The Legal AI Frontlines Are Saying

Impressions after working with law firms extensivelly this year:

1. AI tools stall not because they’re advanced, but because the data feeding them is fragmented and unreliable.

2. "Analytics" features rarely change decisions because they're add on top, not built into the workflow.

3. Firms underestimate how much value already exists inside time logs, contracts, and matter data.

Until that foundation is visible and usable, every tool sits on sand.

Looking Ahead

🎙 This Saturday at 2pm CET!

This week on Rok’s Legal AI Conversations: Martin Ertl (CEO) and Kurt Collins (Chief of Staff) from Recital. We talk about why contract tech fails when it pulls lawyers out of Word and email, how Recital finds contracts across SharePoint/Outlook/drives, and what trust actually requires in legal AI (accuracy, security review, data privacy).

Legal tech can help firms grow faster

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