I’ve been terrible at writing this column each week. There, that’s my 2024 confession. I’m going to be much better in 2025, that’s my New Year’s resolution.

The reality of writing a weekly column in 2024 has been a hard and sometimes impossible choice of where to start and end. And, along with all of you, I’ve been working on identifying the trends, new and emerging, amidst the avalanche of information, surveys, reports, articles, blogs, events…

So, in my last column for 2024, I’m taking the 40,000 metre view and looking at four things impacted by the tech that resonated most with me in 2024 and, that I think will stick around in 2025…here’s where I landed:

1. Crunch time has landed for legal…big time!

The legal industry collectively pushed through scepticism and resistance of GenAI in 2024 and accepted the tech is here to stay. Crunch time for legal echoed around the industry as did the need to double down on business acumen and agility for a market place best described as volatile and dynamic.  For many, 2024 meant being focussed on maximising engagement, experimentation and starting to develop different pricing models and metrics. For this group of early adopters, the jagged edge got a little smoother with GenAI enhancing the efficient delivery of legal work with a human still firmly in the loop.  

This change in approach to and application of the tech was also evident in the many new practice directions, guidance statements, and resource hubs that emerged from professional legal member associations, organisations and the courts in 2024. This laid the foundation, not necessarily deliberate but nevertheless inevitable, for more talk about mandatory tech competency requirements in places where they did not already exist. More cases emerged in more places about inappropriate use of the tech and that spawned debates about penalties – was a stick vs carrot best or did we still need a little of both? Who has or should have the power to make that determination? And, if we still need time to get up to speed with the tech, how long can or should “mistakes” be tolerated?

This was THE year when our colleagues, competitors, clients and regulators could readily access  information that helped them understand the adverse consequences of technophobia in 2024, the need to decide which side of the digital divide they sat on, and that remaining in the middle of that divide in 2025 will be like Humpty Dumpty sitting on top of a crumbling brick wall! 

2. New business opportunities embraced… and more lost for law firms?

The rampant experimentation in 2024 identified new business opportunities across the board. Things were done differently. Agility was key for all size law firms.

• Big law is well and truly off and running – it skilled/reskilled/upskilled the workforce; reimaged full-service legal practice and legal plus (the now well established business services/consulting practices) – it was about starting to rebuild from the ground up.
  
  
• Solo and small law – there was a doubling down on personal relationships; new or an expansion of boutique or general practices (depending on your client base); and leveraging tech to reimagine the workforce from how many lawyers you needed to the role of business development professionals; and everything in between. In 2025, tech advancements could kick open the door to more new or expanded areas of practice. Lean practice will remain “the word and the reality” in 2025.
  
  
• Mid-tier = Action - here, even more than the other two groups, a focus on “value” and differentiation from “AI-Generated homogeneity” reigned supreme. The key for these law firms this year and next, is differentiation and putting down stakes in quick sand i.e., claiming or reclaiming the middle ground from expanding solo and small firms, deconstructed large firms, and expanding ALSPs and law companies. A deep data analysis of client bases and competitor offerings coupled with experimentation, will be key for this group in 2025. As a direct consequence of advances in tech/AI, there will also be an opportunity to go head to head with big law and solo practices in new or expanded areas of law e.g., tech/AI regulation, IP rights, and ethics.

And now to the different market segments:

• B2B: All indications (read here reports and surveys this year) are that B2B clients will expect their service providers to use the tech and proactively discuss how savings will be passed onto them. These clients are using the tech too, will use it more, and retain more work. Discussions throughout 2024 suggested inhouse counsel are using the tech or exploring the use of AI tools more than their law firms. Budget has often stood in their way – too little of it – so tech became an integral part of outside counsel engagements. This will continue in 2025 and start to find its way into law firm panel member selection too. In the B2B market, issues around privacy, confidentiality and data governance will remain key as will compliance with a raft of AI/tech focused guidelines, regulation, and legislation coming down the pipeline everywhere…fast!
  
  
• B2C: For law firms, the big competition here will continue to be ALSPs and law companies. Access to the consumer market has been limited by the legal industry’s protected monopoly. That’s been breaking down for a while and the democratisation of knowledge via GenAI has made significant further inroads. What lawyers MUST do to the exclusion of all others in the B2C market will come under more scrutiny in 2025 especially as the D2C (see below) market continues to grow.
  
  For inhouse counsel with access to tech, there will be a doubling down on self-serve or part-serve options (Agentic AI is going to feature prominently here) with the opportunity and need for GCs to be accessible and visible in matters relating to compliance, changing risk profiles, and ethics – these matters will become increasingly complex especially for multinational companies.
  
  
• D2C: It won’t take much for the B2C self-serve or part-serve options to be repurposed for the D2C market. I’m not suggesting it is a direct conversion but the foundations and impetus are there to answer this need and seize the opportunity to close the A2J gap.
  
  Here’s what resonated on that front for me in 2024:
  
  • The new and reimagined role of the paraprofessional – it’s been happening for a long time and well advanced in some places, but these professionals now have a plethora of AI tools in their toolkit, consumers have those tools too, what they can achieve together and the outcomes they can produce is going to be available at scale and look very different.
    
    
  • The D2C tech marketplace is changing – the opportunities to repurpose or purpose tech for these consumers is now on the radar screen. The rise of Agentic AI is going to have a huge impact in this space. This is a VERY BIG market, where low cost and high volume could make it both viable and realistic for significant investment.

3. Reshaping the legal workforce

A little from empirical data but a lot from the many conversations I had with people across the ecosystem in 2024, three areas jumped out where tech and the legal workforce intersected:

1. Succession Planning and Retirement: For some, the need to embrace constant change – learn something today and then learn something different tomorrow – was too uncomfortable to embrace. There was too much information, too much constant change and uncomfortably distant from where they started in legal. They retired from practice. There’s not room here to present all the arguments for and against this, but it is important to note that the relationship building, coaching and mentoring skills, as well as the institutional knowledge lost every time an experienced practitioner walks out the door, is significant. And, these departures are typically under planned and under managed in law firms. The impact of this tech, yes the tech itself but the new pace and constant change, is impacting our well-being like never before – change needs to be understood, managed, communicated, and resourced much, much, much better in 2025!
   
   
2. Recruitment and Retention: the level of firm engagement with tech and the pressing need for digital and data literacy showed up in interviews and employment decisions (employability) in 2024 in two key areas:
   
   • Prospective lawyer employees making choices about prospective employers – if those employers aren’t using the tech, won’t permit its use or worse, have yet to engage with it, then lawyer grads and lateral hires will be making a career limiting move to work at those places. They know it. They are asking questions about it. They may even have to work in those places for a bit but they cannot, literally cannot, stay.
     
     
   • The rise of reimagined multidisciplinary teams: While lawyers were gainfully employed (high demand) around the world in 2024, so too were multidisciplinary and allied legal professionals. Tech did drive demand for these allied legal professionals. For some of them, this translated to joining transformation teams in large law firms or taking on or expanding a legal ops role inhouse. For others, it meant opening or expanding large and small consultancies focussed on the small and medium law firms markets or offering the same services directly to inhouse legal departments. In 2024, the composition of the consultancies changed. At one time, this was a market dominated by ALSPs, with a sprinkling of tech/change management focused boutique consultancies - they stayed and many expanded but, tech vendors also became more visible in this space, making  the skills of their staff directly available to the tech purchasers in areas like product onboarding, education, and customisation. Tech vendors became partners and colleagues!
3. Education – the key to reshaping everything: I might be biased but I believe education in AI, GenAI and human skills is going to explode in 2025 but, it is going to need a change in focus and funding for that to happen! This year, we saw a bunch of traditional legal education providers in this market some, like Vanderbilt Law School, offered this education at scale in partnership with global providers like Coursera. They weren’t alone. Private legal education institutions jumped into the fray and made inroads. By private I mean the academies laser focussed on digital and data literacy operated by large law firms for their own staff and clients (e.g., King Wood Mallesons and  MinterEllison); reimagined CPD/short course/microcredential providers (e.g., barbri with Skillburst and Hotshot); new partnerships between education platforms and professional associations (Ontario Bar Association and Praxis AI);  or education providers and industry (AltaClaro).  In 2025, my money is with the private education institutions in this space…but again, I’m biased!

4. The need for more women in AI (including legal AI) – CLI + collaboration opportunity in 2025

A little while ago, I saw news from the amazing Cat Moon about an inaugural Women + AI Summit taking place on February 1, 2025, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. I’ve been thinking for a while about how AI, and especially GenAI, is exacerbating bias but could also help to combat it. We’ve seen this in the recommendations for sentencing, to images of professionals, and everything in between. We’ve also known for a long time about the lack of diversity in STEM, in tech founders, and in funding for start-ups. So, this event struck a chord when I saw it and has inspired me to do more…

In 2025, we’re going to do more…that’s not a resolution, it’s a promise:

• First, I encourage you to attend the inaugural Women + AI Summit.
  
  
• Second, let us know if you would like to be part of an APAC regional women and AI full-day event on 29 July in Sydney – if you would like to collaborate by being a member of the organising committee, faculty, attend, support or sponsor – we want to hear from you please. We will charge for this event but our goal is to make it accessible for everyone who, like us, thinks it’s time to do more. If this has inspired you to commit, and I hope it has, please express your interest by 13 January 2025 here.

The last word…tech to watch in 2025: Agentic AI – learn about it, understand it, apply it, and critique it – if it goes the way I think it will (and I am definitely not the only one on that train) this will be THE legal industry game changer!

That’s it for 2024…our very best wishes to you all and your families for a restful and joyful holiday season. We’ll be back on 13 January, and you’ll see that week how well I stick to my New Year’s resolution!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Terri

Terri Mottershead
Executive Director
Centre for Legal Innovation at the College of Law