The Future of Legal Technology

Nikki Shaver is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor who works at the intersection of law and technology to help drive innovation in the legal industry. Nikki has practiced law at major firms in Australia and led knowledge and innovation teams at Stikeman Elliott and Paul Hastings.

Today, Nikki is the CEO of Legaltech Hub, which she co-founded in 2019 after realizing that there were no searchable centralized resources on legaltech that firms could use to evaluate new technologies. She advises firms on legaltech procurement, teaches a class on AI and legaltech at Cardozo Law School, and is a frequent keynote speaker.

We sat down with Nikki to discuss the future of legaltech and her predictions for how the legal industry will evolve in the face of new technologies. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The AI market is overwhelming at the moment. It’s nearly impossible to start a technology search by looking at everything that’s available, then trying to choose a solution based purely on comparative product features.

Instead, start with your people and determine what they need. Identify what your AI priorities need to be in order to drive your business in the right direction, the types of solutions that will have the highest impact, and what you require for your culture and systems environment. Only then should you go into the market.

Anchoring your search around clearly defined needs instead of chasing what looks flashy enables you to ask vendors the right questions and narrow the field to the few solutions that can truly help you achieve your goals.

AI will only continue to improve — it’s inevitable. I’m optimistic about what that means for future legal professionals, who will have better support than they’ve ever had before.

Instead of distinguishing themselves by billing more hours, they’ll distinguish themselves through distinctly human talents: their creativity in advanced problem-solving, their empathy for client perspectives, and their strategic partnerships and relationships.

Tomorrow’s lawyers will have access to more data and greater insights, allowing them to offer better, more targeted advice. They will collaborate more with their clients, developing a deep understanding of their business and using technology to predict and prevent legal issues from arising, rather than coming in as firefighters once a problem already exists. This highly strategic approach will increase the overall value of legal services.

Anyone entering the legal profession will have to understand both how and why to use AI. In the coming years, legal work and the technology that powers it will become inseparable — mastering a workflow will mean gaining proficiency in both the legal analysis and the platform your firm relies on to execute it.

We’ve seen this shift already in areas of legal work that transformed early. In electronic discovery, for example, competence requires fluency in the governing legal principles as well as the systems that deliver them. Increasingly, all legal work will involve a similar combination of substance and technology. Young lawyers who enter the profession understanding this and eager to embrace new ways of working will thrive, even as the legal industry continues to evolve.

Traditionally, legal technology adoption and appetite for innovation has been higher in regions with smaller legal markets, where competition is fierce.

In Canada and Australia, for example, gaining market share often means displacing another firm. Leveraging technology to deliver greater efficiency, effectiveness, or cost savings has been a necessary strategy. In contrast, firms in larger markets like the United States have historically faced less pressure to differentiate, resulting in slower uptake.

Since the rise of generative AI in legal, this dynamic has shifted. We’ve seen regional differences shrink as fear of disruption sparked a global surge in interest from lawyers and law firm leaders. For the first time, technology is viewed as a strategic imperative rather than a foundational support. The key distinction now is no longer geographic, but structural: which firms have the agility to adopt quickly, and which face deeper internal barriers to keeping pace.

Law firms are not technology companies, so building only makes sense when it offers a clear competitive advantage. There are two key considerations.

First, firms need to assess which internal use cases can be effectively addressed by third-party solutions and which cannot. If no suitable third-party product exists for a priority area, it may be worthwhile to build a proprietary solution — especially if the long-term value outweighs the effort required to develop it.

Second, firms need to recognize the growing strategic importance of ongoing research and development (R&D) in a rapidly evolving market. The firms that invest early in developing new revenue streams and innovation capabilities are tomorrow’s winners, able to stay ahead of (or even outpace) more agile competitors.

This is why we’re seeing more firms adopt a hybrid “build and buy” strategy, which is both pragmatic and forward-looking. My advice: Choose a platform that supports both approaches — one that offers productized solutions as well as the ability to build custom tools with integrated support. This will cut down on the internal resources necessary to build while allowing for ongoing R&D.

There are two key hurdles to adoption.

The obvious one is that lawyers are hired to do legal work. They’re compensated by the amount of time they spend doing that work and not professional development-style tasks, so taking time to learn how to use a new technology solution is not a priority.

The other is that law firms focus their legal tech programs on training around specific tools. You should be focused on helping your lawyers understand why they should use those tools and how to incorporate the tools into their workflows. If lawyers don’t see the value of the tools at their disposal, why would they bother to learn them?

My advice to firms seeking to drive adoption of AI or any other new technology is to start with educational programming that demonstrates why adoption is critical to the future of your firm, and to build incentives into your programs so that lawyers recognize their professional success is tied to that adoption. And it’s always a good idea to emphasize how these tools will benefit the lawyers who will actually use them, whether it’s through efficiency gains, automation of manual processes, or more time for substantive client work.

We are approaching three years post-ChatGPT. We’re at the point where we’ll start to see meaningful shifts around law firm business models, new competitors, and the legal tech landscape. Here are my predictions: