By Thomas Pfennig, Transforming.Legal.
For the past 18 months, I’ve had the privilege of acting squarely within the global legal tech and AI transformation space from a front-row seat. From my years helping drive digital transformation in the corporate world to founding Transforming.Legal, I’ve seen the full spectrum: the ambition, the innovation, and the inertia.
What’s been becoming increasingly clear, however, especially across Europe and the United States, is this: there is a glaring disconnect between what the legal tech industry is producing and what legal professionals actually need or use.
In many corners of legal tech, we’re obsessed over shaving milliseconds off response times, boosting model accuracy by 2% or building ‘Agentic AI assistants’ that take largely over the human part in some areas, while in-house counsel are still manually processing contract requests, digging through emails to find documents, and navigating non-integrated systems that eat up hours and hours of their work week.
According to recent research by DiliTrust, nearly 90% of legal professionals are burdened by administrative tasks, and only 12% say they can focus primarily on high-level legal work!
Let that sink in.
For many users, legal tech tools are either too complex, poorly integrated, or simply don’t solve the real problems.
We’re building Ferraris in a world where most legal teams are still learning to drive. Why? Because the users and the developers are speaking different languages.
Legal tech vendors chase theoretical gains in algorithmic performance, while in-house counsel just want relief from the relentless drag of inefficiency.
The Definely 2025 report is also telling: despite the proliferation of tools, fewer than 30% of in-house lawyers feel their department is even ‘good’ at reducing administrative burden .
Meanwhile, tools billed as revolutionary are met with scepticism or outright apathy.
Many are ill-fitting, poorly integrated, and insufficiently supported. In fact, integration and change management challenges remain two of the most cited barriers to adoption – especially for in-house teams. That’s what we at Transforming.Legal see all over the world.
Without tailored legal tech onboarding and process alignment to daily workflows, tools become shelfware, not solutions.
And let’s be blunt on another front as well: it’s time for Chief Legal Officers (CLOs), General Counsel (GCs), and even CFOs to abandon outdated models of legal service delivery.
Often times, legal departments cannot measure quality, efficiency, or client satisfaction because they lack the data infrastructure to even establish a baseline.
We’re pushing AI into contract analysis without first understanding what ‘better’ means in this context. How can we improve what we don’t measure?
The legacy framework – staffing teams with ever-more associates or outsourcing to costly law firms – is not only unsustainable, it’s unnecessary.
The future demands a smaller, smarter workforce empowered by meaningful technology.
And the future is closer than we think.
McKinsey reports that AI will automate 23% of legal tasks and reduce the need for human capacity in some legal functions by up to 44%. In contract review, Agentic AI could make up to 70% of contract lawyer roles redundant. However, that’s not doom – it’s a door.
Freed-up capacity isn’t about job losses; it’s about value creation. Why spend millions on external hires or law firm fees when AI can instantly scale internal capacity without increasing headcount?
Leaders should see this not as a reason to fear, but an opportunity to reclaim time, budget, and strategy space – both for their teams as well as for themselves.
To bridge the gap, legal tech must pivot from innovation for its own or investors ́ sake to innovation that matters to lawyers in all sorts of environments – including sole practitioners.
That means:
Metrics before mechanics: Ask users to define internal baselines for efficiency, accuracy, and satisfaction. Without data, no tech investment is subsequently defensible.
Users over engineers: Design for real-world, everyday users in the middle of a chaotic workday filled with emails, contract requests, and regulatory updates – not only IT-savvy law firms, tech industry legal departments or innovation labs of Big Consultancies.
Outcomes over outputs: Tools should not just do something faster – they must do it better and free up capacity for strategic thinking. AI must save time, reduce errors, or cut costs.
In my conversations with legal and compliance teams across industries and geographies, the message is consistent:
“We know AI is here, but we don’t know how and what to do with it yet.”
Legal professionals aren’t resistant to change – they’re just busy. And they need leaders that drive simplification and change as well as tools that deliver value from day one.
Legal tech’s promise is real. Right now, however, it’s racing ahead of the people it’s supposed to help.
The future for the legal profession will be leaner, smarter, and more technology-enabled, leading to practical, measurable change.
In the end, it’s not about having the fastest car on the market. It’s about whether the people who need a ride can even get in, start the engine, and reach their destination.
We shouldn’t be building faster Ferraris. We should be getting more people licensed to drive.
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About the Author: Thomas Pfennig is Founder & CEO of Transforming.Legal and leads the GOLT legal tech directory.
[ This is an educational think piece by Thomas that expresses his personal views. ]
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