LexisNexis AI Symposium Charts Transformative Change

This is Ari Kaplan, and I am privileged today to be speaking with Nik Reed, the chief executive officer of Knowable and VP of AI product at LexisNexis, who moderated a panel today called Lawyering in the Age of AI: Preparing the Next Generation for Practice at the LexisNexis AI Symposium today at the Harvard Club. Hi, Nik. Nice to see you. Hey, Ari.

Good to see you. And of course, Roland Vogl, who is the executive director and co-founder of CodeX at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, who moderated Redesigning Legal Practice for the Client-Centric Agentic AI Era. Hi, Roland. That's right.

Hi. And more importantly, was my TA when I was in law school once upon a time. Nik, tell us about your background and your biggest takeaway from the panel you moderated, particularly because the theme of today's event was the legal AI inflection point, designing the future of legal practice. By way of background, I came into legal tech completely by accident.

I was in law school in 2009, 2010, and a classmate of mine, Daniel, poked me on the shoulder one day and said "Hey, Nik doesn't it seem weird that the technology that we're being taught to use as lawyers feels like it's 10 or 15 years old, and there's all this cool stuff happening in tech today? And so that got us thinking about what we could do if we were to use the latest and greatest and build something. Nights and weekends, and two years later, we started a company called Ravel Law out of Stanford Law School.

It was born of the big data era, using things like data visualization, early AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and fast-forward 15 years we've got GPT, Claude, Protégé, CoCounsel, Harvey, Legora. The world is abound in amazing AI technology for attorneys, and what our panel was really about is how do you prepare this generation to use these tools? Is it exciting? Is it scary?

What are law schools doing? What are law firms doing? And what are third-party companies like Factor that have training programs where they're going into companies and law firms to help people learn how to use this really awesome technology. We had a mix of people representing the spectrum of those who are teaching young associates, soon to be attorneys, and in-house lawyers how to use AI.

It was fascinating. It was very cool. Roland, tell us about your background and your biggest takeaway from today's discussion. I'm originally from Austria.

I came as a student to Stanford over twenty years ago, then had a short stint in private practice as an IP lawyer doing trademark and copyright law for a tech law firm in Silicon Valley, and then had this opportunity to go back to the law school as a teaching fellow in law, science, and technology, and then connected with some folks in the computer science department, and we started to vibe around the idea of taking the computer scientist lens into the legal system and all these information and transaction cost problems.

And we said, we should start a center around this, and I get credit for having come up with the name CodeX as the intersection of legal code and computer science code. At the time, there was a bunch of things started at Stanford and around Stanford with an X in it like, BioX, MediaX, SpaceX, and so CodeX seemed like the logical choice for a name. We still are a relatively small research center between the computer science department and the law school with the mission of bringing information technology to the legal system to make it more efficient for all stakeholders in the legal system.

Although it was never part of our plan, we were fortunate to have people like Nik coming through the center and others with some really amazing ideas, and they started using CodeX as a sounding board and place of like-minded people to hang out and exchange ideas. So we started building this community around the center and it's in addition to the research and the teaching, bringing together the thought leaders and innovators is something we're really excited about and we really value because we're learning a lot from everything folks are trying to do in the marketplace and that's enriching what we do.

Lexis kindly invited me to moderate Redesigning Legal Practice in this Era of Agentic AI, where AI can handle complex tasks and chain them together and do some amazing things that go beyond just giving answers to questions. And this was one of several panels. We had an amazing keynote by Jeff Bleich, GC of Anthropic and panels focused on legal practice, everything that's going on with AI, agentic AI and legal practice, the business of law and the needs of clients. And then the panel that Nik ran on the future of legal education, one of the most pressing issues too.

I always feel as a moderator, I get to introduce people and then get out of the way of the talent. We had some amazing thought leaders who are doing interesting things in the marketplace. Danielle, who's the head of applied AI at Baker McKenzie, and Ilona, who's the chief AI officer at Herbert Smith, and then Kurt, who's a senior director at Blackstone. They just gave us so many different exciting dimensions of what they're trying to do and it was very insightful.

One of the points that came out is a lot of the work and thinking needs to go in how to restructure the processes around AI, so the question the panel posed was, are we retrofitting, are we just changing little things around the edges, but the basic structures of the firm stay in place, like the pyramid structure, the billable hour, and we sprinkle AI over it to just streamline the old ways of doing things versus a rebuild where we think how legal services can be made available in a AI-centric, client-centric way?

But that's really hard to do when you come from a traditional law firm, so a lot of them are still in a retrofitting era. The folks on the panel gave us a really good sense of some examples of what rebuilding means. That's been going on for a long time, we're just doing better and more efficient, and maybe at lower cost and can make this available to more clients now because we can scale our talent in different ways. But panelists also hinted at new legal products that legal professionals can now make available that weren't accessible to us in the past.

Nik, what should law schools, law departments, law firms do in terms of training programs, and how should they change them to prepare lawyers for an emerging AI native practice? Our panel had Stefanie Lindquist, who's dean at WashU School of Law. She's been incredibly transformative in the last two years, thinking about how we bring AI into the curriculum and not just making tools available to law students, but making them part of the teaching. Similarly, Hugh Carlson, who's the CEO, was managing partner at Three Crowns, one of the giant international arbitration law firms in the world.

He has been thinking about how we use AI to teach our young attorneys and gave us some really cool examples of practicing with AI for cross-examination of witnesses. In their firm they developed an AI bot. The young attorneys, before they go into court, are practicing with AI, which I thought was really cool. And then Alex, the third panelist, is the Head of AI Innovation for Factor, which is a managed services company.

They've created Sensemaker Academy, and brought in to law firms and companies to teach attorneys what to do with AI. He was remarking on everyone's accepting that this is part of what you're gonna be doing, but people don't know what that means. Beyond spell-checking your email or reformatting a document, we're at this fascinating moment 'cause everyone knows It's about to do a lot more and it's going to happen really quickly, and they're puzzling together what that is. The common thing that we heard, whether it was at law school, at the firm, or in-house, is we're at the tipping point.

People are like, "Okay, we've been dabbling, and now we're going all in. Let's launch experiments, and see what works 'cause no one quite knows what the thing that's going to hold is going to be." In my panel discussion, I was lucky to speak with Lorie Almon, who is chairman and managing partner of Seyfarth Shaw, Lacey Bundy, executive vice president and general counsel at PetSmart, and Anton Levchik, chief financial officer at Seward & Kissel, and they all talked about this idea of trying to find the answer.

Whether we're talking about pricing or the billable hour or law firm economics in general, corporations want the same thing that law firms want, and they're trying to figure out how to get there collaboratively. From an educational and a future practice standpoint, there was a lot of similarities in terms of that theme. Lorie was saying, we need to be radically transparent with our clients to collaboratively figure out the value that firms bring to the legal department. How do we charge for this value we're creating since the billable hour doesn't seem to be the right currency anymore?

But it's all pretty fluid. There's no specific best practices just yet. There's some ideation and some potential paths forming, but nothing's been settled yet. We're in this phase of experimentation.

At one point, I'm not sure if I can completely repeat it the way he said it because he was so eloquent, Jeff Bleich, and you moderated this amazing fireside chat with him, where he said that he tells his junior lawyers you never get dinged for making a mistake. You get dinged when you're not taking on complex enough problems that will allow you to make a mistake. There are challenges that came out of my panel too around how we integrate human expertise with the AI. His discussion was so inspiring because he talked about the humanity of the profession and how important it is to preserve the humanity and supplement it with technology, but not let technology lead.

Nik, what skills stood out as essential as we approach this next generation of legal? Part of the conversation was this graduating class from college is the first GPT era of graduates. So, we're going to have AI native graduates coming into law schools and then eventually filtering out into law firms and in-house. There was a lot of conversation like what does it take as a lawyer, as a user to use these tools and understand it?

Jeff said creativity and a little bit of an appetite for risk because we don't know exactly all the ways this is going to help you. We're at the point where the inevitability of all of us using AI in our day-to-day has come. It's accepted. I remember in 2014 when Daniel and I first presented Ravel in a law firm and we explained what we were doing, there was a partner in the back of the room that laughed and he said, guys, there's no room for the letters A and I in the law.

That was 2014. 10 years later, that's all there is room for. We've come a long way and it's pretty exciting. Roland, your mission for your discussion was to figure out where does agentic AI fit in, and so what did you take away as the most likely practical use case for agentic AI in the next 12 months?

Some of the conversation was around this tension between traditional firms and AI native law firms. It sounded like some of the clients of these AI native firms have initially focused on lower level contract review. NDAs came up several times. But it's pretty clear that this is only trending upwards in terms of the complexity that these players will take on of legal tasks.

We also talked about how some of those AI-native firms, they're hiring people who worked for very high-profile law firms before, even managing partners of some of those firms, to signal to the market that they can take on very complex legal tasks. We got some examples for how agentic AI can help create a global compliance roadmap, where the agentic AI can pull data from different countries and allow a client to navigate work that may have been extremely expensive having human lawyers manage before.

We got examples for cyber breach compliance tools where agentic AI plays a role. The sky is the limit in terms of what specific workflows and legal skills will be handled by agentic AI. Greg, who's the CTO at Lexis, gave an overview of some of these concepts that are still pretty new. Legal skills that AI can handle now and that's part of offerings of legal AI platforms like Lexis Protégé and Antropic's legal skills.

And then, how does that relate to workflows? How does it relate to harnesses? That was very interesting to learn how leading legal AI platform providers thinking about putting out these new skills and then making them available to the market. And it's not only the skills they make available, but they also provide the technology that will allow law firm customers to create their own skills.

That's part of the transformation that we'll see or learning that we'll have to see in firms as to understanding what is it we're doing here, and then thinking about how to leverage AI and agentic AI to replicate some of those workflows. Think about the human oversight layer coming in, and to understand how to evaluate the outputs. That's a big role that human lawyers will have to figure out. One of the takeaways from my panel was also, AI is amazing in all its capabilities and all the outputs it can generate, but the bottleneck is human cognition.

It will become clearer in the very near future how to integrate humans, how to get a level of comfort that humans can have with AI outputs and the frameworks and environments where, as a human lawyer, you can rely on this output that agentic AI generates. One of my favorite aspects of your panel was that the panelists started asking each other questions. They're such gifted members of the community, they were curious what each other thought, so they could bring that back. Nik, how do you suggest that law firm leaders and law department leaders balance the promise and pitfalls of implementing AI at this stage?

There was a point in our conversation where responsibility came up. Hugh Carlson has been a litigator for a long time and managing partner running a law firm spoke about the responsibility we have as lawyers to understand AI and what it can and can't do and as Roland said, when we verify the output. Obviously, the news recently has had lots of examples of where apparently attorneys have not verified the output, so there's two sides of the equation. On the one hand, it's understanding the products you're using, and if you're generating a motion or a brief and you're citing case law, much as we used LexisNexis to do it in law school, use Protégé to do it today because the citator is built into the product, and I think it's incumbent on us to understand what each product does, where it can benefit us.

When can you use Claude? When can you use Protégé? How can they complement each other? What are the trade-offs?

And to take that idea of responsibility as serious with use of AI as we have with every other part of being a good lawyer. That was really interesting to me. That was the cautionary side, but I think the positive side was overarching, which is, we are going to be able to do so many things that have been either time-consuming, stressful that make the practice of law not the most attractive industry for everyone, a lot faster and is this the moment that a lot of attorneys get to spend more of their time doing the things higher up the value chain?

It's been a recurring theme since I've been involved in legal tech for 15 years, but the sentiment today is maybe we're there again. Less rote activity, less painful discovery, document review, more time thinking, negotiating, doing the higher value activities that is why you went to law school in the first place. And in the fireside chat, Jeff Bleich talked about the importance of having the tools work in concert so that you can trust and verify simultaneously. I thought it was fascinating the way he wove his experience as a very young attorney Shepardizing for the first time and the attorneys in the law firm thinking he was a magician because they had no idea LexisNexis existed on a computer yet.

They were still writing with pens. Fast-forward, it's the same paradigm again. It's let's wow partners with how fast we can turn things around, but with that same rigor that a good Shepardizing session would've brought back in the day. Roland, what was the sense on your panel about what it really means from a practical standpoint to redesign legal practice?

Redesign means doing everything that's already going on faster, radically cheaper that came out of your panel. It seems like some of those outside players are promising, really reduced rates on some of the tasks. But also excitement around law firm and legal professionals can now take on tasks that were previously not considered part of what a law firm does like being predictive about certain risks and alerting clients to specific risks and not just being reactive when a lawsuit has been filed and gearing up around that.

But I want to go back to Nik's point. Throughout the whole event, there's excitement around what it means to be a lawyer and a lot of people said this is one of the most exciting times to be a lawyer. People go to a lawyer when they face some really complex questions and being able to help clients with those and then having the drudgery handled by the AI or the AI helping support us, but how do we train the next generation of lawyers? And, we talked about simulation tools.

Some of my colleagues at Stanford are doing exciting work on that. We talked about digital twins, trying to capture human expertise and an organization's entire institutional knowledge. There's all this excitement and new opportunities that agentic AI brings. But Hugh threw in this little wrinkle which was something might be lost.

Nobody enjoyed being in a warehouse and going through due diligence and doing work that is part of the apprenticeship model of becoming a lawyer. We could have spent that time better but there's something that we are losing while we don't have to do this anymore. There are questions about how we train the next generation and maybe it's a better way that we're training, and that came out from what we learned from the the law school dean. Personally, I don't espouse the view just because we had to do it, you have to do it next generation, and I thought Stefanie had a great point where she said they're not teaching people to write in cursive anymore and it doesn't mean you're not going to be a good lawyer.

In fact, I thought the message was very clear about this being a wonderful time to be in the legal profession. I asked Jeff Bleich, Is 2026 a good year to become a lawyer? And he said yes, and he was very encouraging about it. And then someone on your panel said This is the best time in legal.

it's just a wonderfully exciting time. I loved how all of the sessions built on each other. Jeff really set the tone. It was inspiring, it was informative, and then your panel started us off with this great discussion of innovation and transforming the profession.

I was lucky to interview a group of people who talked about, what does the model look like? How are we going to finance it? What does pricing look like? What does outcome-based and value-driven pricing look like?

And then you really capped it off with how do we shape the generation? What does that look like? So, to close out, what advice would you give a new associate, a law firm leader, a corporate department leader? Be curious, but do so carefully.

Take risks, but responsibly, and do so responsibly. 10 years from now, when we look back, it will have changed the practice of law. I don't know that I believe the billable hour's going away. I don't know that AI robot lawyers are going to be serving people tomorrow or anytime soon.

But what a lawyer looks like 10 years from now is going to be very different. Much as it has changed, it's going to change a lot faster, and that's really exciting. So, for this new generation for young attorneys right now, you're there in that moment and you're defining it, and that is super exciting to be at that moment where it's going to change. Number one takeaway is you should be excited.

It's cool, and you're part of what it means to make that change. What can I add to that? Just ditto, okay? Plus one.

One other anecdote was an early Sam Altman podcast interview and he mentioned when Garry Kasparov lost to AI in chess, everyone said it was the death of chess, and it turns out 10 years later, chess has never been so popular because no one wants to see an AI robot play an AI robot in chess. We want to see people playing chess. There's an analogy for the law there. I haven't quite put my fingers on it, but we want people to represent us in court.

We don't want AI to represent us in court. We want what Jeff spoke about. That human side of the law is quintessentially part of the law, and I don't think it's going anywhere. It's going to be enhanced, modified, changed.

But it's there. One of my favorite takeaways from your discussion was that we don't know what we don't know. We may not even be able to anticipate, plan for, or even imagine what's possible. At the end of my panel Lacey Bundy, who's the general counsel at PetSmart, talked about this dream of how this will be a even more collaborative and more empowering profession, and I feel like that's the goal, and was a real theme from our session.

Roland Vogl, Nik Reed, it's really been a privilege. Thank you both so much. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks for having us. All right. Take care. Thank you.

Bye, everyone.