Everything you thought you knew as a lawyer is about to change.
For in-house lawyers, this is one of the profession’s current complications, as widespread testing of artificial intelligence tools moves toward implementation in finance-driven legal departments and outside law firms.
This shift is being led by companies like ContractPodAi, a legal tech provider that sells contract lifecycle management tools and GenAI-powered legal assistants.
The London-based company announced last month that it hired Tanja Podinic as senior vice president of AI programs. Podinik, an Australian and former litigator, spent her career in the courts working as an in-house lawyer and technology advisor for law firms before transitioning into a role as an AI evangelist.
After working as a solicitor in Sydney, Mr Podinnick worked for Dentons in London as an assistant general counsel and then as a technology specialist for the firm and its clients. She continued her GenAI legal practice at global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers before moving to ContractPodAi.
Legal Dive covers financial risks to attorney billing models and how to force general counsel and chief legal officers to consider how to use the time that AI is expected to free up for attorneys. We spoke to Podynik about the transformative nature of AI. You can influence your team when you no longer have to do administrative tasks or low-level work.
Editor’s note: The conversation between Legal Dive and Podinic has been edited for clarity and length.
LEGAL DIVE: How did you become an executive at a legal AI company?
TANJA PODINIC: I looked at the product, I looked at the people, and I thought, this is easy. If I was going to jump to a vendor to work on the product, it would be at this point. I truly believe that 10 years from now, we will look back on this period as a seminal moment that completely changed who we are as lawyers. We stopped doing a lot of the administrative work that lawyers do and really moved into more strategic thinking.
Have you considered other generative AI legal products to work with when making this transition?
I was primarily involved with the ContractPodAi team because ContractPodAi is a lawyer company and we were thinking, “How can we build a product that lawyers use?” How can we build something that can be close to lawyers and integrate seamlessly into their daily lives?” And we felt that the modules they came up with and the way they developed them were very intuitive. While I was practicing, I thought to myself, I’m going to love this.
Ten years from now, this will likely be seen as the early stages of GenAI’s legal work. Can you unpack that from a strategic initiative perspective? My understanding is that a lot of the tedious work is at the junior associate level, and partners don’t actually do much of the work, it’s done by software. Or you might not care if it’s completed by a 23-year-old associate. How do lawyers define the role of an associate or junior associate?
I started out as a litigation lawyer. Fifteen years ago, part of my job was to literally sit in my office and go through boxes of pages and separate the relevant information into one pile. Then came electronic discovery. It’s no wonder that if e-discovery comes along and all of this is automated and we can make sense of the information we have very quickly and easily, there will be fewer trial lawyers. In the future? But in reality, there are many more litigation lawyers. But what we’ve done is we’ve adapted to technology and lawyers are doing different jobs. So I think we’re now at a point in the last 10 years where we’ve accelerated that process. When it comes to the law, I don’t really know how generative AI will end up, so I don’t think anyone knows where this is going to go.
I think right now, lawyers are almost having to turn inward and say, what do I do or what can’t I do with the technology that’s available today? And making that distinction requires two main things. You need to understand what the technology does and how it works, and you need to be fully aware of what you’re doing to achieve that distinction and differentiation. There are many things that lawyers are good at that machines cannot do. It’s about understanding where our strengths are relative to the strengths of technology and understanding how to combine them. What matters is how you solve your client’s problem. That’s the crux. What skill sets can we bring to the table, and what skill sets can technology bring to the table, to deliver the most effective solutions?
If these AI tools are classified and do their jobs in a reliable way, could AI replace overworked lawyers? Do we expect the number of lawyers to decline, or will overworked lawyers become more common? Will it just be less than it is now?
This goes back to the way lawyers think. I feel like we have a cultural connection where working hard means being a good lawyer and working long hours is worn as a badge of honor.
I think it’s more of a human issue than a technology issue. How would our thinking change if we knew that some of the work that lawyers do can be delegated to technology? It depends on the expectations of the team. If there is an expectation that they will be able to do more work now, the working environment may never change, and lawyers will probably continue to be overworked. But in reality, it may be more difficult. Because they now have to spend seven and a half hours a day doing strategic, high-level work, rather than mixing high-level strategic work with their day-to-day administrative duties.
Rather, I think it’s a question of how we view the future of the legal profession and what we want lawyers to do. This is very interesting. Because if we’re just working too much, here are some efficiency tools that can help. Are we then going to stop and say, “Okay, now we can work more efficiently. My lawyer works 9 to 5.” Or do you mean, “Okay, now I can do what I used to do more efficiently, so let’s get more work done”?
We’ve heard that AI implementation may take longer than some expect because lawyers are reluctant to try new technology. Do you think this is true, or do economic imperatives lead lawyers to follow orders from the GC or firm?
Partners, management, and lawyers cannot act the same way they did 15 or 20 years ago. We’ve seen such a cultural shift and I don’t think we’re going to go back. The idea that lawyers don’t like technology or are slow to adopt it [will no longer hold]. There are several factors involved. One of the key issues is that the benefits of technology are not understood. Having used technology and so many different legal technology products, I found myself getting frustrated. I just went through this process. I tested the tool. It doesn’t do what it says it does, or it’s actually not very helpful. And some lawyers have a negative association with legal tech. Because they’ve tried it and tested it and it hasn’t worked and they don’t have a lot of patience for things that don’t work. They have a lot of other work to do and time to be billed. When it doesn’t work, they retreat or leave, but I’m not going to test it again. What we’re trying to do with Contractpod is create a product that sits seamlessly alongside lawyers, becoming part of their work, just like the iPhone is an extension of 99.9% of us. It is to do. I couldn’t imagine life without my iPhone. But 10, 15 years ago, that didn’t exist. Still, we got along perfectly fine. I think that’s where the legal industry should go.
Where does the industry currently stand in terms of the AI investments that everyone is confident is coming? Is it still in its infancy for most people, or is it already budgeted and executed? Is it true?
For law firms, it depends on their client base and competitive advantage. If your law firm is doing mid-to-lower level work and that’s where they’re based, you’re under pressure from general counsel and clients and you have no choice but to adapt. If it’s a highly strategic job and there are only a few lawyers capable of doing it, it’s not going to go away. Maybe they don’t spend as much money, time, and effort, not just because the technology isn’t there, but because the fear of competition isn’t as great.
But I keep reading about law firms testing this or that tool. I think they have to do something because this technology is so democratized. Because if they don’t do anything, a client will soon come knocking on the door and say, “Hey, what are you doing? You can no longer charge three or four hours for a summary. ”
Is AI cost-sensitive for most lawyers?
It not only costs money, but also hurts your business. If you could charge £1,000 or £10,000 for a research exercise, summary or report, and it was two days worth of work, with this tool you can get it done within hours. So, what does my practice look like?
If a particular area of law is built on routines, then those routines will face the greatest disruption. If I take this now, and my whole premise is a lease agreement, and I’m drafting it from scratch, and now a product comes along that does that, the reality is that I won’t be able to charge much. It will be. already. If you can’t charge that much anymore, how are you going to meet the criteria for budgeting for the year? And how are you going to preserve your company’s profits and revenue? The emergence of new products that allow companies to quickly edit the first pass of a client’s contract will reduce costs. So, what should we do now to close that gap? What else can they offer their customers? They operate on this partnership model and primarily charge by the hour. If you’re no longer going to bill by the hour, how do you bill? How do you make a profit?
Are you having these discussions as part of your role in introducing legal AI technology?
I get asked these questions all the time. It’s not just about what specific technology tools do. I think the way we can help our clients is by going back to their problems. And while they may think their problem is one thing, in reality, when you dig deeper, the problem seems to be with resources. Let’s talk about it.
If you’re a general counsel, this technology can help with your budget. An external law firm will quickly detect risks and the impact on your billing model. Are you talking to businesses about the commercial risks of AI to them?
Law firms are under intense pressure from their clients to do something different, which is why we’re seeing law firms adopting this. There is probably a greater risk of disruption than an in-house legal department. In-house legal departments, which are most often overworked and under-resourced, stand to benefit from this technology more than they lose from it. So if you can find a way to manage that workload, whether it’s replaced by something else or not, you’re not really losing out. It’s not often that you say, “Hey, we’re going to adopt this technology tool so the changes are so small that we can fire five people.”
