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The cornerstone concept for this year’s playbook is “agility.” Today’s firms must stay agile and nimble in a world where the ground is constantly shifting.
Easy intake and document automation to auto-populate your templates.
The cornerstone concept for this year’s playbook is “agility.” Today’s firms must stay agile and nimble in a world where the ground is constantly shifting. The key to growth this year is understanding AI’s trajectory: where it’s going, and how to prepare for even bigger changes in the future. According to Thomson Reuters’s 2024 Report on the State of the U.S. Legal Market, the majority of attorneys are optimistic about AI (60%) — specifically about its ability to boost productivity and efficiency.1
Any specific strategy that works today may not work in six months, but the general strategy of planning for multiple eventualities, staying on top of tech trends, and preparing for drastic changes is all but guaranteed to serve your firm well in the coming year and beyond.
With that understanding in mind, this year’s legal trends, like the rise of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), specialization, and new pricing and service models, all unify under a broader conceptual framework. They are all, to varying degrees, results of the progress in AI research.
As Sam Mollaei, founder of My Legal Academy, puts it, “It's not the best lawyer [who’s] going to win…the lawyer that adapts is the lawyer that's going to do well for the next 10 years.”2
To that end, we’ve arranged this guide to help your firm stay ready and flexible. In today’s landscape, maintaining the status quo is not an option. Staying in place means treading water while wave after wave comes crashing down on you. The only way forward is to think like a surfer: learn the conditions of the ocean, spot the waves as they come, and ride them to shore.
“2025 will bring market segmentation between law firms that know how to leverage AI to enhance the work of lawyers and those who do not grasp the many benefits of the technology. By now it is clear that AI tools streamline routine tasks and allow attorneys to focus on more complex, value-driven work that enhances their client service. The challenge in front of the legal services industry is how to thoughtfully integrate these technologies and ensure they complement the critical thinking, human judgment, and subject matter knowledge that our attorneys bring to the table.” - Anthony V Lupo, Chairman, ArentFox Schiff3
The first step in tech preparedness is becoming familiar with the technology itself. According to a LexisNexis survey, 51% of lawyers had already used ChatGPT in their work as of March 2023, and we can assume that number is significantly higher now.4
But using ChatGPT is just scraping the surface of the AI tech landscape — it’s the best-known model but not necessarily the best-suited to legal work. The key to truly being future-ready isn’t relying on a single tool but rather figuring out how all the various tools fit together. In tech, combining various tools is called building your “stack.” As a lawyer, you need to build your legal stack.
The data is clear: 77% of law firms surveyed for Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report reported improved firm efficiency as a result of using technology, and 65% said it enhanced their ability to meet client expectations.5
In addition, Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex Lawyers, notes that “lawyers who started using AI in 2024 and early 2025 will begin to separate from the pack. They will become known as experts, will be seen as indispensable by clients, and will command higher fees for their tacit expertise.”5
What today’s lawyers need to do is build a toolbox, and that means choosing tools that aren’t just useful on their own but work well together. Each tool in your toolbox should fill in a specific gap. Tools with significant feature overlap create redundancies and add superfluous weight to your toolbox — increasing costs without providing justifiable benefit.
The market is currently saturated with hundreds of legal tech tools, and it would be impossible to cover all of them. But beyond that, it wouldn’t be useful either: the legal tech marketplace is changing at such a rapid pace that any list we provide could be outdated in a few months. Instead, what’s most important is to understand the various categories that tech tools fall into. That way, you can swap tools in and out as needed.
Today’s legal tech tools broadly fall into the following categories:
Some tools also integrate with others. When evaluating a new tool, check out its integrations to make sure it works well with other tools in your stack. For example, Gavel integrates with Clio Manage and DocuSign for easier signature collection as well as more streamlined client, matter, and billing management.
According to Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report, when lawyers and clients asked what matters most when hiring a lawyer, lawyers tended to overestimate the importance of competitive pricing and underestimate the importance of reputation, knowledge, and general competency in clients’ purchasing decisions. In other words, clients are more willing to pay a premium for top-notch legal services than lawyers realize, meaning that attorneys may be losing out on potential revenue by focusing too much on lowering their prices to stay competitive.7 Pricing your services too low may make your firm come across as lower quality, which doesn’t instill confidence when clients are looking to you for help with sensitive legal matters.
96% of legal operations professionals who participated in a recent Blickstein survey indicated that they want law firms to propose new delivery models, which can include offering self-service options and incorporating automation.7
A further disconnect between lawyers and clients regarding pricing is that clients tend to want to work with lawyers who offer flat fees. In contrast, lawyers are hesitant to abandon the billable hour model. However, lawyers are becoming increasingly cognizant of the need to switch to alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). A 2024 survey conducted by Citi indicated that 72% of lawyers expect AFAs to become more common.8
On the client side, flat fees improve budget foresight, as clients know exactly what they’re paying before they receive the bill. However, lawyers tend to be hesitant to adopt flat fee pricing, as it can be difficult to estimate the scope of a matter, which opens up the risk that profit margins could end up being slim — or even negative.
However, with the improvement of AI tech, flat fee pricing is becoming more viable, as many tasks can be automated to large degrees and even provided as self-service options. According to a recent survey by Thompson-Reuters, lawyers report spending 40-60% of their time on document drafting, and 96% of those attorneys report that their tools are inefficient and not well-suited to the task.9
Document automation tools, like Gavel, can cut down document drafting time by up to 90%, which means lawyers or their paralegals, admins, secretaries, or assistants can get back up to 54% of their time — or around 20 hours per week. Additionally, tools like AltFee can help attorneys with fee administration.
This reclaimed time offers two opportunities. First, lawyers can focus more on higher-level negotiations and legal matters, and staff can be reallocated to other tasks to improve efficiencies. Second, those automated documents can be productized and sold to clients with high profit margins. For example, forward-thinking lawyers can offer self-service contract drafting services that leverage automation tools like Gavel and bill their clients directly through Gavel’s Stripe integration. Clients can input their information via a white-labeled client portal, and Gavel can automatically generate the contract. Then, the attorney need only check it and do their due diligence. This provides clients with a convenient and cost-effective way to get the services they need and offers lawyers a revenue-generation opportunity that gives clients the flat fees they want without sacrificing the quality of the legal work product.
Automation is the key to growth in the coming year: by automating rote tasks, lawyers can simultaneously reclaim their time and spend it on higher-level work while also productizing automated services in flat-fee and subscription service models. Gavel’s document automation software, Gavel Workflows, takes one of the most time-intensive tasks off lawyers’ plates. It cuts document drafting time by up to 90% and gives attorneys an average of 20 hours per week back.
Whether you have proprietary documents or you want to use no-setup automated legal forms, Gavel Workflows can get you up and running fast. Upload Word or PDF documents and our software suggests smart questions to populate your templates.
This automation improves your client experience through easy intake that clients love. All your forms can be hosted on a white-labeled client portal, where clients can input their information and have it directly sent to your CRM. Plus, automated processes reduce the risk of human error, meaning that it’s less likely you’ll make a mistake that could cost you money — or your reputation.
Elevate your practice further with Gavel Exec. Our legally-trained AI instantly redlines contracts in Word, identifies issues based on your risk tolerance, and summarizes complex language for clients. Get smart rewrites that match your style while ensuring consistency across multiple documents. Close deals faster and protect your clients better. Start redlining smarter today.
Want some inspiration? Take a look at how firms have accelerated their business with Gavel:
Try Gavel Workflows for free for 7 days — no credit card needed — or schedule a demo with our team of legal professionals. Ready for contract review? Download Gavel Exec today.
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