There's a scene in Fifty First Dates where Drew Barrymore wakes up every morning with no memory of the day before. Her family has built a whole system around it: same newspaper, same breakfast, same routines. Every single morning, Adam Sandler has to win her over from scratch.

That's AI right now. Except nobody's trying to protect you from it.

I’m going to start with a pretty simple observation: the legal AI market is noisy. Really noisy.

There are thousands of tools, constant pressure to “do something with AI”, and a lot of budget getting deployed quickly. A natural reaction is to look sideways “what are firms like us buying?” and follow that path because, well, FOMO really. That might get you moving, but it doesn’t really solve the underlying problem. At the end of the day, if the AI isn’t grounded in the right firm knowledge, you haven’t built intelligence, you’ve just built a very convincing guessing engine.

With 2025 ushering in a new era of AI-powered legal operations, forward thinking legal teams are discovering the strategic implementation of AI isn’t just incrementally improving efficiency - it is fundamentally transforming how legal professionals spend their time, reducing routine workloads and allowing lawyers to focus on high-value, strategic work that truly drives client success.

McKinsey estimates that 22% of a lawyer's job and 35% of a law clerk's job can be automated using current AI technologies.

Even the most advanced legal technology tool will fall short if your team doesn’t fully embrace it. No matter how powerful or efficient a system may be, if lawyers and staff aren’t on board with the change or don’t understand how to use it, the implementation will face significant hurdles. Without proper buy-in, the new technology may go underutilised, leaving the firm with a costly investment that doesn’t yield the expected benefits. Ensuring that everyone is aligned, trained, and confident in using the tool is crucial to making sure it enhances operations rather than becoming a burden.

The legal industry has experienced a seismic shift in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, reshaping how law firms and legal departments operate. One of the most significant changes is the increased reliance on technology, particularly Practice Management Systems (PMS) and Document Management Systems (DMS). These systems form the backbone of a law firm's day-to-day operations, streamlining tasks such as case management, billing, time tracking, and document storage.

If you’d like to talk about the current state of cloud applications in tech and your options going forward, please get in contact.

Verlata Consulting has been awarded NetDocuments APAC partner of the year for the third year in a row

NetDocuments recently announced the finalists and winners of its inaugural Hackathon. The Hackathon focused on combining the power of NetDocuments and Microsoft Power Automate to create new legal solutions on the NetDocuments platform.

NetDocuments has been awarded NetDocuments APAC partner of the year for the second year in a row