Daniel Hu: CTO & Co-Founder of Fileread. Software engineer (CS & Math). Tech visionary reimagining legaltech.
Walk into a major litigation department today and you’ll notice something odd—it’s quiet. No chaos. No associates buried under mountains of paper. Just attorneys at computers, occasionally huddling to discuss strategy instead of logistics.
This isn’t because there’s less work. It’s because the work has fundamentally changed.
The Power Tool Reality
Here’s the thing about legal tech that most people miss: It’s not about replacing lawyers. It’s about making them better at being lawyers.
Think construction workers and power tools. A skilled carpenter with a nail gun doesn’t become obsolete; they just build houses faster and with less back-breaking effort. The carpenter still needs to know where to place each nail, how to read blueprints and when something doesn’t look right. The tool just handles the repetitive mechanical work. The same principle applies here.
The result? Existing teams handle massive cases while actually having time to develop a strategy instead of drowning in paperwork.
What Actually Improves
Information Processing: Modern platforms don’t just sort documents—they learn. Each attorney’s decision teaches the system to get better at identifying what’s actually relevant versus what’s noise. This means senior attorneys spend time reviewing documents that actually matter rather than wading through thousands of irrelevant emails.
Work Quality: Here’s what used to happen. Every document got the same basic review treatment, whether it was a smoking gun email or a routine meeting invite. Now the software handles the obvious stuff automatically and kicks the interesting documents up to attorneys who know what to look for. It’s like having a really good paralegal who never sleeps and already knows which documents deserve your attention.
Competitive Edge: Clients are getting smarter about this. They’re asking pointed questions about why they should pay premium rates for work that could be automated. General counsels now routinely grill firms about their technology capabilities during pitch meetings, wanting to know exactly how you’ll handle their massive document productions without breaking their budgets.
Firms that have figured out the technology piece aren’t just working more efficiently, they’re also winning business from competitors who haven’t. Some report landing major matters specifically because they could commit to handling massive document productions without the astronomical costs that traditional methods would require. When you can tell a client you’ll complete their 5-million-document review in days instead of months, and at a fraction of the cost, that’s a pretty compelling pitch.
The Usual Objections
Hallucinations
A recent article in Technology Review examines AI hallucinations in court filings through three recent cases: a California firm fined $31,000 for citing fake articles from Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude generating an incorrect citation, and Israeli prosecutors citing nonexistent laws. Legal expert Maura Grossman warns these mistakes are accelerating despite known risks. The article argues companies oversell AI reliability while the standard advice—“don’t trust AI”—remains inadequate.
These cases prove the system works. Every hallucination was caught. The real story is successful quality control, not systematic failure.
Critically, not all AI tools hallucinate. The article conflates general chatbots with specialized legal AI. Tools like Fileread don’t hallucinate in the traditional sense. Each fact is backed directly to its source with citations provided every time. These retrieval-based systems ground responses in actual documents rather than generating content. Criticizing “AI in the courtroom” based on misused chatbots ignores purpose-built legal technology designed to solve this exact problem.
Human attorneys have always made citation errors. AI mistakes just make better headlines. The issue isn’t the technology; it’s lawyers failing to apply the same verification standards they’d use for junior associates’ work.
The benefits are transformative: faster research, improved access to justice, and leveled playing fields for smaller firms. The solution isn’t banning AI. It’s enforcing existing professional standards and choosing appropriate tools for legal work.
Too Complicated To Learn
Fair point, if your firm treats tech adoption like an afterthought. Too many places hand someone a login and expect miracles. The successful ones allocate actual time and resources for training, sometimes even giving billable credit for learning new systems. They recognize that asking a senior associate to master new software while maintaining their usual 2,000-hour target is a recipe for frustration and failure. The investment pays off in months, not years.
“Software can’t understand legal nuance.” True. But it also doesn’t get tired, bored or miss things because it’s reviewing documents at midnight. It doesn’t have off days or personal problems that affect its judgment. Use machines for what they’re good at: speed, consistency and pattern recognition. Use humans for what they’re good at: judgment, strategy and the kind of creative thinking that wins cases.
The Bottom Line
The market is delivering a clear message: Adapt or risk becoming irrelevant. This doesn’t mean becoming a computer scientist or abandoning everything you learned in law school. It means incorporating tools that let you spend time on the work that actually requires a law degree.
Firms seeing the biggest wins treat this as an ongoing transformation, not a one-time tech project. They’re creating tech-focused roles, updating promotion criteria to include technology proficiency, and building bridges between IT and legal departments. Some are even hiring “legal technologists,” who are team members who understand both the law and the tools that can make it more efficient.
The lawyers who embrace this shift aren’t becoming obsolete. They’re becoming more valuable. While their competitors are still buried in document review, they’re crafting strategies, developing arguments and building relationships with clients. They’re doing the work that drew them to law in the first place.
The result isn’t fewer attorneys. It’s attorneys doing work that actually matters, and doing it better than ever before.
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