Legal Tech’s Next Inflection Point: Responsible AI, Litigation Services, and the Future of Law Firm Strategy
For years, the legal industry has been described, often lazily, as slow to adopt technology. We have all heard the offhand remarks that law firms are 10 years behind, that lawyers resist change, that the billable hour blocks innovation, and that every new tool eventually finds its way into a narrow use case rather than transforming the profession.
After my recent conversation with Nishat Mehta, CEO of Lexitas, I found myself thinking about that narrative differently.
Reframing the Narrative
Nishat does not dismiss the legal industry’s caution. He reframes it. “The easy answer, I would argue, the dinner conversation answer is, ‘oh, legal is slow to adopt technology,’” he told me. “I take a very different approach. I think legal is focused on responsibly adopting technology.”
That distinction matters.
The current conversation about AI in legal services centers on whether firms can adopt it in a way that protects clients, strengthens legal judgment, improves access to justice, and creates a business model that can withstand the pressure now coming from clients themselves.
What Technology-Enabled Litigation Services Actually Means
Nishat leads Lexitas, a technology-enabled litigation services company focused on court reporting, medical records retrieval, legal talent supply, and solutions to support litigation. His perspective is grounded in the daily realities of how legal work actually moves through the system.
When asked what technology-enabled litigation services means in practice, Nishat was clear in his response. “At a high level, our goal is to provide the full suite of litigation services that many of our clients look to outside companies to provide,” he said. “We think all four of these areas are areas that are extremely useful to litigators, and again, things that are better done at scale.”
Scale is the key word. Litigation is a process-heavy business. The work involves documents, transcripts, records, filings, deadlines, people, judgment calls, and risk. Some of that work can be improved through technology. Some of it should never be separated from human expertise and judgement. The strategic question for law firms is knowing the difference.
Intentional Innovation and the PDF Lesson
Nishat described the approach as “intentional innovation.” That phrase should resonate with law firm leaders because it captures the kind of innovation legal buyers are increasingly demanding (i.e., useful, reliable, low-friction, and risk-aware).
“It’s not just innovation for the sake of innovation or taking the newest things that can be done and introducing them to our client base,” he said. Instead, the question is “how we best do that in a way that doesn’t introduce any additional risk, that is as easy to use as people are used to already working with things that we offer.”
That is a practical lesson for law firms. The firms that succeed with AI will be the firms that integrate technology into client service in ways that feel safe, useful, and familiar.
Nishat gave an example of AI-generated deposition summaries. The technology could have been delivered through a new platform, a dashboard, or an interface that required lawyers to change their workflow. Instead, it began with a format lawyers already know: a PDF.
“For us, our first version of that product was a PDF document,” he explained. “Use the same interface that lawyers are already comfortable with and deliver a five-page PDF on the front end of the deposition transcript that gives you a summary.”
That choice reflects an important adoption principle. In legal, workflow matters. Trust matters. Reducing friction matters. Innovation does not always require asking lawyers to change everything at once. Sometimes, the smarter strategy is to meet lawyers where they already are.
Quality Control Is Not Optional
Of course, AI summaries raise the obvious concern of accuracy. Nishat did not gloss over that risk. He described one approach that could become a baseline expectation in legal AI adoption: using multiple models, comparing outputs, and requiring follow-up analysis when the answers diverge.
That kind of process discipline is exactly what law firm leaders should be looking for, whether they are evaluating an internal tool, a client-facing workflow, or a third-party vendor. AI adoption in law cannot be separated from quality control. A tool is not valuable simply because it produces an output quickly. It is valuable when the firm can trust, verify, and explain how that output was produced.
Deconstructing the Workflow
This is where Nishat’s background in computer science becomes relevant. Early in our conversation, he described the way computer scientists are trained to think. “You take a complex problem, you break it down into smaller, less complex pieces, you perfect each of those pieces, and you put them all back together.”
That mindset is especially useful in litigation. Law firms do not need to “AI-enable” everything at once. They need to deconstruct their workflows.
- Where is work repetitive?
- Where is review necessary but not judgment-intensive?
- Where are lawyers spending time on tasks that could be structured, summarized, triaged, or accelerated?
- Where does the risk profile require a human expert at the center?
For law firm leaders, the real opportunity exists in redesigning the delivery model so that judgment is applied where it matters most.
Why This Wave Is Different
One reason this moment feels different from prior legal tech cycles is that generative AI works on text. As Nishat put it, “Prior to this, most of technology focused on numbers, but this is an industry that is entirely built around text.”
That observation is central to why this wave of technology may have a broader impact than previous ones. Legal tech has changed pieces of the legal ecosystem. But generative AI’s ability to process, summarize, compare, draft, and interrogate text goes straight to the core raw material of legal work.
“This is the right technology for this industry to take full advantage of,” Nishat said. “I think it is why you’re seeing the explosion of legal tech companies at this moment in time versus the last generation or two generations ago of tech innovation.”
The Client Pressure Is Real
The pressure is also coming from a different place. In prior waves, many law firms could wait and watch. Today, clients are asking harder questions. Companies are adopting AI internally and increasingly expect their vendors, including outside counsel, to demonstrate similar efficiency and sophistication.
“I think the pressure on companies to adopt artificial intelligence is creating the pressure for them to place on all of their vendors, including the law firms that they work with,” Nishat said. “For maybe the first time since COVID… clients are the ones forcing law firms to move in this direction.”
That should be a wake-up call. As I’ve noted in previous articles, AI is a client service issue, a pricing issue, a talent issue and a competitive positioning issue.
The Litigation Volume Problem
And it may soon become a litigation volume issue.
One of Nishat’s predictions was that AI could lead to “an explosion of pro se filings.” He explained that tools like ChatGPT make it easier for individuals to draft documents and pursue claims on their own. On one hand, that could lower barriers to access to justice. On the other, it could create significant strain on courts, firms, and opposing parties.
“I worry that the ease with which you can begin to file cases, the ability for ‘non-lawyers’ to represent themselves is going to result in a massive explosion of cases being filed,” he said. “There is a very real possibility that it goes too far and you have a bunch of junk that gets filed.”
For law firms, this means that if case volume increases, they will need better ways to evaluate, triage, and prioritize matters. Nishat described the need to understand “when there is value to a case,” how much value there is, and whether to move forward, settle, or respond differently.
That is where he sees a product mindset becoming especially valuable. “The pace and the scale starts to exceed the ability for attorneys to spend as much time evaluating a case as they used to,” he said. “You start to need some help. And that help can’t be in the form of paralegals. You’ll have a shortage there as well. You need to start thinking about how technology can actually help take on some of the evaluation or triage of the cases that come.”
This is not a distant issue. Firms that handle litigation at scale should already be asking how they will evaluate more matters with the same or fewer resources. Firms that represent corporate clients should be thinking about how AI-driven filings could affect litigation exposure. Plaintiffs’ firms should be thinking about intake, screening, and case valuation. Defense firms should be thinking about early assessment and response strategy.
The Billable Hour: A Long Transition, Not a Slow One
Then there is the billable hour.
AI’s ability to compress time creates obvious tension with a model built around time spent. But Nishat does not believe the billable hour will disappear overnight. “I don’t expect the billable hour to go away next year,” he said. Discussions about a quick shift to outcome-based pricing may be directionally right, but he sees a much longer transition. “I think it might be a 10-to-50-year transition for the industry.”
That may sound like a reprieve, but it is not. A long transition still requires preparation.
Redefining the Value of Legal Advice
Nishat offered a provocative vision of what outside counsel delivery could become: a set of reviewed documents, a summary memo, and then an AI interface that allows clients to ask follow-up questions without necessarily going back to the lawyer each time. “A chat bot that allows you to ask questions that come to mind to get additional questions answered that don’t require me actually asking my outside counsel,” he said.
That kind of model raises important questions.
- What is the value of legal advice when some answers can be delivered through an AI layer? How should firms price that access?
- How should risk be allocated?
- What must be reviewed by lawyers?
- What becomes part of the work product?
- What becomes part of the client experience?
These questions do not have simple answers. But firms that start experimenting thoughtfully will be better positioned than firms that wait for the market to answer for them.
Access to Justice as the True Measure of Success
When I asked Nishat what success should look like for the profession, he went back to first principles: access to justice. “At the end of the day, what success looks like and has always looked like for this industry is greater and greater access to justice on all parties, plaintiff and defense,” he said.
That framing matters because AI conversations can become too internally focused. Firms ask how AI affects leverage, margins, hours, staffing, and pricing. Those questions are important. But the broader purpose of the legal system is not simply to preserve existing economics. It is to deliver justice more effectively.
Nishat sees success as a combination of better triage, easier filing where appropriate, and lawyers spending more time on the hard questions. “The ability to leverage AI to make attorneys more and more focused on the hard questions and leave the easy questions to some form of technology,” he said, “so that we can focus the specialists on the things that they need to be specialists on and let the generalist capabilities be handled by technology.”
That may be the most important strategic takeaway for law firm leaders. AI should not make lawyers less central. Used well, it should make their judgment more central by clearing away work that does not require the same level of expertise.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Nishat what surprised him most when he came into the legal industry. His answer was not about technology. It was about lawyers.
“The focus of this industry on doing what’s right for their client, I think, is the part that folks outside the industry don’t always see,” he said. “There is a perception from outside the industry that the billable hour model creates an incentive for lawyers to run up a bill. And that is not what I’ve seen.”
Instead, he described “an eagerness to figure out how you get through this case, do what’s right for your client, and move on to the next one.”
For all the criticism the legal industry receives, that point should not be lost. The same professional responsibility that has made lawyers cautious about technology may also be what helps the industry adopt AI in a more thoughtful way than others.
What Responsible Leadership Looks Like
The challenge now is for law firm leaders to move with both urgency and care.
Responsible adoption cannot mean indefinite delay. Innovation cannot mean unmanaged risk. The firms that lead in this next era will be the ones that understand both sides of that equation.
They will break complex problems into smaller parts. They will test carefully. They will choose use cases that solve real client problems. They will demand accountability from vendors. They will rethink pricing before clients force the issue. They will train lawyers not just to use AI tools, but to supervise them. And they will keep legal judgment, client service, and access to justice at the center of the strategy.