Kicking off your Legal IT Insider mid-week latest news bulletin, an independent group has launched an AI Adoption Index aimed at providing a more accurate and holistic picture of where law firms and in-house teams really sit on the AI adoption curve, globally.
The Index is designed around an adoption framework that focuses on four key elements:
● Alignment: AI is strategically supported by leadership and aligned with the organisation’s goals for its business, people and clients
● Access & awareness: The organisation ensures its people have access to, and awareness of, available AI tools and how to use them
● Ability & enablement: Support and incentivisation is provided to enable the secure and effective use of AI in the workplace, and to build new skillsets and mindsets
● Augmentation: New value is being created and measured for organisations, their people and their clients
Key to this new framework is the sensible premise that true adoption requires much more than tool deployment, and that achieving wide-scale usage and benefits realisation in any organisation will necessarily take considerable time and focused effort in order to achieve cultural change.
The index creators – former DLA Piper ‘change maker’ turned consultant Jana Blount, and ex-Ashurst chief digital officer also turned consultant Tara Waters (pictured above left and right respectively) – hope this holistic approach will create a more accurate and multi-dimensional picture of AI adoption as it currently stands.
Law firms, legal teams and legal professionals should complete the survey relevant to their role:
● Law firm representative: https://forms.office.com/r/CMx4y2xUG6
● In-house legal department representative: https://forms.office.com/r/pGue58B8Kf
● Individual legal professionals: https://forms.office.com/r/qvjPfD5EkD
Submissions are open until 31 May 2025.
It is expected that the first survey results will be made available during June 2025 at https://www.AiAdoptionIndex.com. The AI Adoption Index will remain public and free for all to participate and access. The survey data will be refreshed annually to enable industry participants to track the trajectory of AI adoption over time.
Owen Oliver joins Legora
Returning after his wedding & honeymoon, Owen Oliver, former legal SME lead at StructureFlow, announced this week that he has joined legal GenAI startup Legora.
“I’ve joined because I believe this wave of AI is going to reshape legal work as we know it,” he said on LinkedIn. “Not in a ‘one day, maybe’ way, but in a ‘right now, it’s already happening’ way. The kind of shift I didn’t want to watch from the sidelines. Legora has incredible momentum – and spending last week in Stockholm, I saw why. This is a team of hugely ambitious, motivated, and committed people, led by the indomitable Max Junestrand and Sigge Labor.”
Legora is an AI assistant that helps attorneys with research plus document review and drafting. Its customers include Goodwin, Bird & Bird and Addleshaw Goddard.
iManage publishes legal AI strategy survey
iManage today (23 April) announced the availability of a new research report – Ground your legal AI strategy firmly in the basics – that distills survey responses from more than 1,200 legal professionals across the United States, UK, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. The survey, conducted by SA Market Insights, finds that respondents prioritise fundamental technology features such as repositories for storing and retrieving precedents and templates; automated monitoring to ensure compliance; compatibility with e-discovery platforms; and internal real-time collaboration tools and workspaces, before looking to more advanced capabilities such as generative AI.
In a post announcing the raise, co-founder and CEO Josh Schwartz (pictured above), who was previously CTO of Chartbeat, said: “The legal tech space is booming, but eDiscovery — one of its largest and most entrenched categories — has received little attention. Legacy systems are slow, labor-intensive, and overly complex. We believe there’s a better way.”
Schwartz says that Phaselaw’s product started with redaction consistency, helping teams apply redactions uniformly across large, messy document sets. Today, nearly two dozen organizations — from Fortune 500s to public-sector teams — are already using Phaselaw to modernize their workflows.
“We’re proud to be backed by Pear VC, Defined, BoxGroup, and Twelve Below, who are joining us in building the future of legal software: secure, AI-native, and designed for humans,” said Schwartz.