Legal Dive: The Future of Law with James Sutton

What does the future hold for Avantia and Law Firms in general? James Sutton, CEO of Avantia, sat down with Legal Dive to discuss…

Read the full interview on the Legal Dive.

LEGAL DIVE: Many in-house GCs view legal AI software as a budget salve, automation to drive sizable efficiencies in their departments relatively quickly. Is that too simplistic?

JAMES SUTTON: The feedback I get from general counsel is two-fold. No. 1, it’s almost never doing what it was sold to do on the demo. And No. 2, you have to work a lot harder than you realize to get it to add value. So the AI companies are almost pushing a lot of that adoption stuff over to the GC, and saying, now go and figure out how to use this technology. That’s part of the reason why we think our business model is interesting, because we in-house all that stuff. We figure all that stuff out for you. I suspect, based on conversations we’ve had, that a lot of the efficiency gaining is over reasonably low-level stuff. Like proofreading or checking the definitions in a contract before it goes out, doing a piece of legal research, or checking the content of a piece of legal research or tidying up the language. I think that’s probably where you’re seeing most of the biggest wins. I don’t think you’re seeing significant cost efficiency and savings yet in the stuff that really is where in-house legal teams’ budget goes.

Over time do you think we’ll see the large corporate firms stop doing NDAs and other lower-level work?

If you take the premise that AI will start to add significant efficiencies, then we should begin to take more of the routine layers that traditional law firms do themselves. And that pushes that high-value partner model up into strategic advice. It pushes them more into that complex legal work layer, versus trying to fight with businesses like ours at the routine layer. We’re beginning to see that. We now have some work streams where our client is taking work away from one of the Top 50 law firms that work for them and bringing it over to us.

What keeps you awake at night?

You’ve got ChatGPT 5 landing in December, and the future rounds of large language models, do they sort of catch up with what we’ve been able to do on a much more specific basis with contracts? It very quickly upskills a law firm that has not invested any money in technology at all to level play with us straightaway. That’s like the big existential question that we have to be comfortable with. We’ve got lots of reasons why we don’t think that happens, and we’ll continue to stay ahead of that wave.

Read the full interview on the Legal Dive.