December 23, 2024

discovery trends flexible resourcing legal operations innovation artificial intelligence

Elevate is an expert-led, software-powered law company and the end of the year is an apt time for our experts to offer their thoughts on their areas of expertise:

AI and Legal Tech – Rob MacAdam, Director, Products

In 2025, the noise around Generative AI in legal tech will intensify, with law departments and law firms moving from experimenting to exploring how to harness AI effectively. This will require them to evaluate their organisation’s entire tech stack and knowledge management strategies. By doing so, GCs, managing partners, and legal ops leaders can shift the conversation from ‘How can we use AI?’ to ‘How can we optimise our infrastructure, processes, and data to enable AI to deliver real value?’

Talent and Staffing – Matt Todd, VP, Flex

In 2025, two trends will accelerate: law department and law firm Talent transitioning to flexible, bespoke career paths and law organisations expanding ‘just-in-time’ and ‘fractional’ use of specialised, senior legal expertise. As a result, the best practitioners will increasingly turn away from the large corporate-owned staffing providers where they are seen as deployable assets and instead turn to ones that give Talent a platform for establishing themselves and their personal brand, having more control of their career, while being supported every step of the way to the extent they want to be supported, and with a revenue sharing model aligned with those choices.

Litigation – Nicole Nehama Auerbach, VP and Founding Partner, Elevate’s integrated law firm

In 2024, clients sought greater use of technology, particularly AI-powered tools, to reduce the time and costs spent on litigation. Two Elevate AI-powered offerings garnered strong interest that will continue in 2025: an AI tool to assist lawyers in responding to written discovery requests and a testimony intelligence tool to harness testimony data with unparalleled speed and depth of analysis.  When paired with skilled attorneys, these technologies are not merely reducing costs and accelerating litigation but also positively impacting the outcomes.

Law Firm Strategy – Pedro Campos, VP, Consulting

Across the AmLaw, average PPEP is up nearly 40% since 2019, but the top 10% of firms grew profits by nearly 80%. These are the firms that created and are executing multi-year profit-growth strategies that focus on profitability levers like realisation and cost-per-lawyer. With intensifying competition for customers and talent, breakaway profit growth will bolster a firm by creating a positive cycle that makes it easier to secure top talent, attract quality customers, grow revenue, and make the required investments in new technology.

Discovery – Jake Hills, VP and General Manager, Legal Ops and Discovery

In 2025, we will see GenAI achieve even greater accuracy and productivity compared to benchmarks of traditional analytics and human document review. A human+AI approach will gain momentum, driven in part by stricter requirements of data breach notification regulations and the explosion of discoverable data in litigation. One key challenge will be how to leverage technology and automation to reduce data sets in active litigation and thereby limit the amount of data due to opposing counsel.