Navigating AI Adoption & Strategy - Interview

At the LegalTechTalk conference held in London on June 26-27, Kriton Papastergiou, co-founder & CEO of casepal, had the pleasure of discussing the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in legal practice and the strategic challenges law firms and in-house legal teams are facing today. 

The conversation explores the practical realities of AI deployment for law firms and enterprises, addresses common misconceptions about technology adoption in the legal sector, and examines how the relationship between legal expertise and artificial intelligence will continue to evolve. 

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Can you tell us a bit about your company and what inspired its journey into the legal tech space?

At casepal, we build enterprise-grade AI tools for law firms and legal teams. We saw the impact that large language models have on legal text generation, and we thought of applying it in our work. Essentially, I was working in a litigation boutique. My co-founder Anna was working in big law. So different tasks, yet you could see immediately the value of even ChatGPT on these specific tasks. So what we did is that we tried to make them more tailored to our workflow, and quickly we found out the additional value that we could create. 

We also saw that legal teams did not yet have access or did not yet centrally deploy these systems, and we saw that gap, and we started from there. In September 2024, we started partnering with law firms across Europe, and we built our tools by working directly with our clients. 

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What challenge or turning point helped shape your company into what it is today in the legal tech space?

So it's very similar to what I said before. What we saw is that we could directly see the impact that the technology had on many legal tasks. But what we saw was the challenge of deploying this technology. We saw that some lawyers were not very keen on working with AI. We also saw that it's very difficult when you have a larger legal team to make everyone work with these tools. So from the very beginning, we saw that close cooperation with law firms focusing on deployment strategy, focusing on training, and focusing on tailoring our tools with the specific workflows of each legal team was a challenge that was also a competitive advantage for us. 

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How is your company helping legal teams navigate the complexities of today’s legal and regulatory environment?

So there are two parts. On one side, we have the Assistant, which helps with versatile assistance. So whether it's summarizations, whether it's drafting, whether it's risk assessment or reviews, you can quickly prompt and get legally relevant assistance. You can also leverage the library, which is essentially your knowledge base, your firm’s knowledge base, which you can synchronize with SharePoint or other document management systems via their APIs, directly leveraging your firm-specific data. 

From the other standpoint, we also have task-specific tools. So dedicated user interfaces that enhance user behavior in summarizations, new translations, simplifications, but also email drafting and other workflow tools. 

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What makes your approach or technology stand out in a rapidly evolving legal tech market?

There are two ways that we do it. First is by closely collaborating with the law firms. We aim to make casepal the best solution exactly for them. So what we do is that we make dedicated pilot programs that enable deployment and training of the personnel, but also tailor our suite of tools specifically for their workflows.

From the other standpoint is how easy it is to use casepal. Apart from more effective domain-specific tools, it's very easy for everyone across the team to leverage our tools. And one thing that's very important in this competitive market is that every time we get a new customer across Europe means that we win over highly effective competition like Harvey and Legora, but also cheaper solutions like Gemini and ChatGPT, which means that we are very successful in making casepal the best solution for each specific client.

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Legaltech adoption has surged, but many still face barriers - what do you think is the biggest misconception legal professionals have about technology?

Maybe I will rephrase: the misconception specifically about AI. So what happens is that security and privacy are central when it comes to leveraging AI, and this is a big commitment of casepal as well. But what we see regularly is that, law firms not having centralized adoption, they still have lawyers using Google Translate that they putting sensitive information in a cloud-based environment that is not centrally accepted by the law firm. We also see many lawyers work directly with ChatGPT or other general-purpose AI models that are not centrally adopted by the law firm.

So what we see is that the misconception of taking some more time to decide whether we want to proceed with new technology actually creates additional risks. 

What we advise and what we see working best is having a centralized strategy and working with a centralized provider across the law firm. 

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How do you see the relationship between legal expertise and technology evolving over the next few years?

Hand in hand. I think the relationship should be very collaborative. What we also do is that we make artificial intelligence specifically for lawyers. So you need to have domain expertise in order to ask the right questions in order to work effectively with the tools. I think the more effective the technology becomes, the higher the value it will bring, specifically for the people who are trained to leverage these technologies. 

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In five years’ time, what will be the biggest shift we’ll see in how legal services are delivered or supported?

 I think in five years we will see the following trend being even more enhanced, that legal teams and also clients we put more emphasis on efficiency, higher value outcomes being done more quickly. The same will also be done in legal teams. You would expect in-house legal teams to move at the pace of business. On the other hand, though, what we will also see the human element of legal services becoming even more important. So essentially, advocacy, judgment, client relationships, stuff that they were always very important for law firms, they're going to be more central in how you differentiate among other colleagues and other law firms. 

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What would you say to organisations that are looking to adopt AI?

So organizations that are looking to adopt AI should strive to have certain preconditions in place. First of all, you need to have a centralized AI strategy. A centralized AI strategy can be something simple. It might be that for example, we want to adopt domain-specific AI and we want to have a close relationship with a specific vendor. That might be enough. You also especially for bigger organizations you need to create focus groups or champions that are going to take a bit more time with internally testing which tools work best for your team. But I think the most important aspect lies in finding the correct vendor for what you need. Essentially, you need to have very close collaboration because what needs to be done is that you will tailor the AI tools to your specific workflows, but you also need to have trust in matters related to privacy and security, where your data goes, where your client data goes, and everything related.

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