Adoption is inevitable. Adoption won’t follow past patterns built around gaining early adopters and trying to grow from there. Product life cycles in legal, which have generally been unbearably long will quickly become distressingly short. Every legal tech tool will quickly become (at least in part) an AI tool. And there simply won’t be the time for targeted legal AI tools to get traction before bumping up against irrelevance or obsolescence. Moreover, buyers will soon find there is no “opt out” option. This may not be your experience in 2024, but i can guarantee you it will be in 2025. In a recent video, former Google chair Eric Schmidt forecast that in the next year, the combination (at scale) of very large context windows, agents and text-to-action computing, will have an impact on the world greater than the past 2 years of LLM development and of even social media. Hyperbolic? Maybe. But not really as he was mostly applying a conservative extrapolation of capabilities now in broad use. The LLM capabilities available today enable legal tech suppliers, firms and clients alike to create powerful tools that unlock significant value quickly, cheaply and robustly. Today’s version of the “early adopter” is the organization active in creating its own future, but unlike with prior legal technology, its choices have no bearing on what, how or when the early majority, late majority or laggards follow as AI adoption by all (and in many forms) is now inevitable.

Law schools should be teaching law students skills like collaboration, communication, matter and document management, transactional skills (document drafting, review, negotiation). Too often law schools focus their curriculums on the past rather than the present and the future.