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Legal Tech Trends in 2025: A New Era for the Industry

  • Writer: Alex Baker
    Alex Baker
  • Dec 12, 2025
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jan 16

SRA Approves First AI Law Firm


The Solicitors Regulation Authority has just approved its first AI law firm, Garfield AI. They offer £2 legal letters to help businesses and individuals recover small debts.


This isn’t just a milestone; it’s a precedent for what’s coming.


➡ Today: low-value debt collection.

➡ Tomorrow: AI-driven law firms moving up the value chain.


This isn’t only about cutting costs or empowering lawyers with AI. It’s about reshaping the future of legal services and transforming client access.


If you’re a law firm exploring productisation or a lawyer who’s spotted an opportunity to turn part of your work into a client-facing application, we have a big announcement coming later this month.


And if you’re even a little curious about this space, feel free to reach out for an early preview of what’s to come.






Will Harvey become a law firm? They’re learning best practices and workflows from some of the smartest lawyers on the planet.


They’ve built an immense team of lawyers who bring further knowledge and experience. Even regulators could be on board. The SRA has already approved AI-native firms in the UK, and ABS provides the same opportunity in some US states.


We’ve recently seen Lawhive acquire a law firm and Eudia acquire an ALSP.


Harvey may not want to upset their current customers just yet, but is it really so far-fetched to imagine them directly competing with their existing customer base in the future?




Legal Tech Founders Report


Legal tech is a uniquely tough space to scale in. Selling to lawyers takes longer than anyone ever expects. Buyers don’t just need to like the product—they need an undeniable reason to change.


Many startups assume that if their tech is good, firms will buy. That’s just table stakes.


The worst part? Most first-time founders don’t realise what’s really slowing them down until they’re months (sometimes even years) into their journey.


We spent over 300 hours in deep conversation with legal tech founders in 2024, from seed-stage to scaling. Our findings are compiled in our Legal Tech Founder report.





Why Lawyers Often Struggle to Build Successful Ventures


Startups are brutal. Around 95% fail. They move fast, thrive in ambiguity, and talk to customers before they have all the answers.


Lawyers, on the other hand, are trained to eliminate risk, control variables, and master detail before acting. This is why they excel in law but often struggle in venture building.


But it’s the market, not the founder, that has the answers. Clients know their pain points better than anyone. The best founders don’t assume they’re right. They test, listen, and adapt.


If you’re a legal professional with an idea, the question isn’t whether it’s good. It’s whether you’re willing to find out by challenging your own assumptions. Accept that you might be wrong.


Accepting this mindset shift is half the battle.




Can Non-Lawyers Run a Practice, a Business Unit, or Innovation Teams?


“The big challenge for law firm management is their difficulty looking outside the legal sector.”


“The people who rise to the top realise what they don’t know.”


These lines from a recent FT piece stuck with me (link in comments).


So, should non-lawyers run a practice area, business units, and innovation teams? What about the firm itself?


To be clear, this isn’t about replacing legal expertise. It’s about surrounding it with operational, commercial, and technological excellence—and critically, giving those people real authority.


In most industries, the answer is yes. But why does this idea still feel provocative in law?




Legal Tech Collective Features in Financial Times


It’s great to see the work we’re doing on the productisation of legal services being recognised in the Financial Times.


Some of the examples mentioned really stand out:


  • Noerr, with about 1,000 people, shows how even mid-sized firms can use AI effectively. They’ve built a prompt library playbook they now sell to clients.


  • The most advanced evolution of legal work will likely come from partnerships between law firms and AI companies—not just internal innovation teams.


  • Hervé Ekué, Managing Partner at A&O Shearman, captured the conundrum perfectly. While it’s hard for law firms to house products and services under one roof, AI is now so ubiquitous it makes little sense to separate them.


Several of the firms mentioned are already working with Legal Tech Collective on initiatives that benefit both the firm and their clients.


If your firm is exploring how to productise services, build AI-enabled tools, or scale existing products and platforms you have developed, I’d love to connect and share what’s working across the market.




What Does It Actually Mean to Be an AI-Native Law Firm?


What does it actually mean to be an AI-native law firm? It’s a label we’re starting to hear more often. But if you ask ten people to define it, you’ll get ten different answers.


We originally defined an AI Native Firm as one where the technology does the work and human lawyers validate the output. But this feels narrow in definition.


We wanted to get a better sense of what it means to be AI Native—not as a rigid classification, but by establishing emerging patterns.


  1. Service Design - AI-native firms design their services from first principles, ensuring that AI execution is the foundation rather than an add-on.


  2. AI Infrastructure - Standardised inputs and structured data capture across all services with in-built feedback loops so every matter improves the underlying model.


  3. Commercial Model - Pricing tied to outcomes, speed, or value—not time.


  4. Operating Model & Culture - Humans focus on exceptions, strategy, and client experience with clear accountability for model behaviour and outputs.


  5. Client Experience - Client-facing portals deliver outputs with real-time status and audit trails. Faster, clearer, and more transparent services.


  6. Metrics & Measurement - AI-native firms can measure everything, using data to improve accuracy, performance, and service quality over time.


What have we missed? What would you add or challenge?



 
 
 

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