Legal Tech 2026: What Firms Need to Know with Joshua Lenon

Joshua Lenon (00:01.208)
Hi, I’m Joshua Lennon, the lawyer in residence at Clio. I’m an attorney admitted into New York. And for over a decade, I have been helping legal technology companies research the intersection of tech and the practice of law, translating the needs of lawyers and law firms to a technology company. And in great conversations like these, translating technology back to lawyers and law firms.

Karin Conroy (00:23.477)
That is the perfect intro for this episode, Joshua. Thank you so much for being here and taking the time today. I know this is a crazy moment with you and Cleo and everything, so I really appreciate it. So thank you for being here to begin with.

Joshua Lenon (00:38.365)
thank you, Karen. We’re really happy to be here.

Karin Conroy (00:40.277)
Thank you. So the title for today’s show goes perfectly with what you just were saying about your position and what you’re doing there. The title for today’s show is Legal Tech 2026, What Firms Need to Know. So I want to start first with the Legal Trends Report. So I know you’ve been around and had this front seat to legal technology for years and years. So let’s start. What are you seeing right now? Where is the legal industry?

in the whole evolution of tech.

Joshua Lenon (01:12.216)
Thanks. Yeah, I’ve been around with Clio since 2012. And so, yeah, a long time. And we have seen an evolution in how law firms are embracing technology. For a long time, law firms really tried to minimize the amount of tech that they used. And it was, if I could get by with a typewriter, I would, but instead I’m going to use this desktop computer because it has my email on it.

Karin Conroy (01:17.197)
wow. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (01:30.205)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (01:36.383)
Yeah. Yes. Right.

Joshua Lenon (01:41.58)
We’ve seen just an incredible advancement in adoption for technology and all the different things that it can do as a part of the practice of law. So in 2012, we were still honestly arguing with lawyers on whether or not you could store your information on a cloud service, right? And up until about 2020, there was still, I would argue, the majority of law firms.

Karin Conroy (02:00.871)
Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Joshua Lenon (02:10.562)
keeping their files local on a dusty old desktop computer that was plugged into a closet somewhere.

Karin Conroy (02:18.795)
filing cabinet where there’s like a key still dangling in the corner. Like it’s right there. Yeah, right.

Joshua Lenon (02:21.832)
Exactly, yeah. And telling me that that’s more secure than a modern data center with 24-hour employee supervision and on-call tech and barbed wire fences and redundant power supplies and all these things. They’re like, no, my filing cabinet is more secure.

Karin Conroy (02:29.717)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (02:40.642)
Yeah. Right. I’ll never forget. I started writing for Lawyerist in 2010 and I’ll never forget Sam Glover talking about this and him having to embed this idea of the cleaning people and how, you know, and people would think, well, that sounds kind of ridiculous. And it’s like, no, that’s the level of security we’re talking about. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s low risk, but it’s still risk. And, you know, these cleaning people,

Joshua Lenon (02:48.43)
Mmm.

Joshua Lenon (03:07.502)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (03:09.707)
have access to piles of paper that are sitting on your desk, as opposed to it being behind a secure computer in the cloud. we were, yeah, exactly. And we were having those arguments for years. just the, would be at these events and have a booth and the number of people, especially at like bar association, smaller events, people would come up and the question I got all the time,

Joshua Lenon (03:20.854)
with logging and encryption and yeah.

Karin Conroy (03:38.219)
especially for like the first five, seven years was, I really need a website? I mean, that was, come on. It’s like asking if you need a phone number. Like if you’re asking that question, let’s move on. Let’s try to advance. Right. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (03:45.036)
Yeah!

Joshua Lenon (03:52.224)
Yeah, you are losing business. And 2020 saw a big shift, right? We really saw law firms of all sizes turn to technology for redundancy, to be perfectly honest, right? They realized that they were not set up in a way that could handle disruption. That their clients were starting to see other services in other professions.

Karin Conroy (03:58.549)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (04:06.015)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (04:19.31)
really embrace technology and make themselves have a good client centric experience. And they’re like, if I can book a dentist appointment online, why can’t I book a phone call with my lawyer? Right? Why can’t we use zoom? Why do I have to fact you a signed document? Yeah. and so

Karin Conroy (04:25.193)
Yeah. Well, and it even at the right.

Right.

Karin Conroy (04:37.235)
Right. Yeah. I still have some firms that are using fax numbers on their websites. like, come on! But even at the beginning of the

Joshua Lenon (04:43.112)
yeah. Look, it’s a legitimate bit of technology. I’m not knocking facts, especially because unfortunately courts still rely upon them in many areas. Yeah. And so a fact is a good backup, but it should be your backup. It shouldn’t be your primary channel, right? Yeah.

Karin Conroy (04:48.98)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (04:55.253)
Sure. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (04:59.049)
Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, right, yeah. But even at the beginning of COVID, I saw a big difference in the kind of skepticism of Zoom versus six to 12 months in where I feel like there’s a lot of FOMO or the grass is greener or looking at what your colleague is doing and then being okay with it.

Joshua Lenon (05:06.701)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (05:26.333)
as opposed to other industries where people are a little more willing to take risks and try things. So I want to get into a little bit in that legal tech report where you talk about this gap of firms that are adopting technology and that there’s this big gap between some firms who are willing and some firms who are skeptic. Can you talk a little bit about what that report said?

Joshua Lenon (05:42.414)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (05:47.522)
You got it.

Yes. So Clio’s legal trends report is something that we publish annually. We’ve been publishing it since 2016. So this is our 10th edition. We’re really proud of that. And it’s, it’s free for everybody. They can swing by clio.com forward slash L T R and just download a copy. Actually all, all, all the historical ones as well. And yeah, what makes it different than any other report out there is our source data.

Karin Conroy (05:55.349)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (05:59.539)
Wow, that’s amazing.

Karin Conroy (06:13.523)
Yeah, we’ll link to that too in the show notes. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (06:21.622)
So right now, something like 400,000 legal professionals are using Clio services. Yeah, and because we are cloud-based, everybody’s using the same software. And so because of contractual and technical constraints, we cannot see the confidential information that these lawyers are accessing or generating, the communications that they’re having.

Karin Conroy (06:29.428)
Wow.

Karin Conroy (06:36.245)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (06:51.234)
we can see how they’re using the software itself at a very high level, right? What features are being heavily used? What settings are being created? And the example I always give is hourly rates. You can set a default hourly rate per user in Clio. And so while I cannot tell you any individual customer’s hourly rate, I can see a bell curve of those rates.

Karin Conroy (06:56.266)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (07:07.327)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (07:17.998)
So that we can make sure we’re supporting the smallest rate being charged and the largest rate being charged I just read earlier this week that Neil Katyal Who was a famous Supreme Court? Litigator is actually charging over $3,000 an hour now Yeah, right and so Yeah, right and and when you’re tracking your time and generating your bills and Clio and figuring out your accounting

Karin Conroy (07:24.831)
Nice.

Karin Conroy (07:34.953)
Wow. I mean, if he can get it.

Joshua Lenon (07:46.222)
We need to know that range of numbers so we can help you with that. So that’s the degree of insight we get. It’s a super high level. But across 400,000 practicing lawyers and law firms, that adds up to a lot of data. And so the Legal Trends Report has been able to use this very unique data set, nobody has it, to publish insights into average hourly rates.

Karin Conroy (08:03.571)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (08:14.382)
productivity amongst law firms? How much revenue are we seeing per responsible lawyer in a law firm? And we supplement this data with a lot of additional research, surveys into lawyers and consumers of legal services. So clients and people who want to be clients. We’ve done secret shopping exercises where we reach out to 500 to a thousand law firms.

acting as prospective clients. And these are like really targeted like requests like, hi, family law lawyer. I have a family in your state. I’m looking to get a divorce. I have a couple of questions. Please help me. And then we’ve measured those results. And so in our 2025 Legal Trends Report, what we’ve done is a longitudinal study, taking a look at

Karin Conroy (08:47.584)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (09:10.296)
five years worth of practice data, what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. And what we have seen in that study is there are three kind of groups or cohorts of law firms out there. There are growing law firms who see their revenue increase at least 20 % over a five-year period. There are stable law firms who are just kind of, as the name implies, not seeing their revenue grow.

And then there are shrinking law firms who do see their revenue decrease over a five year period by at least 20%. And what we tried to figure out in our data is what’s the difference between all of these different cohorts? What makes a growing law firm a growing law firm? And what we found is there’s a key performance indicator called utilization rate. And it really just tracks how much of your day is spent on billable work versus admin.

Karin Conroy (09:49.257)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (10:03.374)
And right now, the average law firm spends about 38 % of their day on billable work. Yeah, so that’s good. When we first started measuring this in 2016, it was 28%. So a 10 % increase over a decade is actually really strong growth. But it still means that most lawyers are only really getting paid once you factor in realization rates, which is how much of that billed time.

time actually ends up on the invoice and collection rates, how much of that invoice is actually paid, they’re still only really getting paid for about two and a half hours of a work day. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (10:42.315)
Right, so to flip it upside down, 62 % of their day is spent with the administrative. Non-billable stuff. Right, yeah, so.

Joshua Lenon (10:47.486)
Exactly. Yeah. Which is all crucial stuff to running a law firm. I’m not knocking it, but is it the best use of your time as a billable agent?

Karin Conroy (10:52.817)
Yeah. No.

Yeah. Right. I used to have a boss that would walk into the room and just say, highest and best use highest and best use. like, we’re supposed to sort of like be some sort of military people and make sure that whatever we were doing at that moment was the highest and best use of our time. That phrase has of course stayed in my brain, but it is, I think this goes like slides right into this conversation about AI and this adoption of technology and

Joshua Lenon (11:06.382)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (11:22.605)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (11:26.131)
where you can take that 62 % number and either decrease that or increase the other side, either way where you are making more money. I mean, that’s the end of the day, right? Okay.

Joshua Lenon (11:35.338)
Absolutely. Yeah. Over a five-year period, those growing law firms increased their utilization rate by 11 percentage points. And it more than doubled their revenue.

Karin Conroy (11:42.451)
Wow, okay, so that’s the difference.

Karin Conroy (11:46.931)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that just seems obvious, but I think there is this, hesitation and I think people like you and I see this as obvious, but I’m not a lawyer. You are a lawyer, but I am like the kind of early adopter. am always like jumping in with both feet and then checking to see if there’s any sharp objects underneath and then, you know, that kind of thing. so, but.

Joshua Lenon (11:50.702)
Mm.

Joshua Lenon (12:12.75)
Yeah?

Karin Conroy (12:16.701)
I know my clients and a typical lawyer does not have, for the most part, they are more risk averse. So where are you seeing, I can see that you are talking in the report about this gap between the adoption and the utilization and trying to kind of make these things efficient, but why are these firms that aren’t kind of improving, what’s going on there?

Joshua Lenon (12:23.405)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (12:35.214)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (12:42.678)
Mm-hmm. So I think there’s a little bit of a disconnect in the type of technology they’re looking at. So the primary evaluation metric that most law firms are telling us they have when they look at technology is, does it save me time? And while that’s a good metric to measure, right, they’re not as likely to also be measuring client satisfaction with new technology.

and employee satisfaction with new technology. What we see in growing law firms is they value those metrics much more highly than we see stable and shrinking law firms. And so the client experience becomes a really strong part of growing your law firm. And we know most lawyers rely upon referrals and word of mouth as their primary marketing channel, right? And so if you’re not creating an experience, a positive experience,

Karin Conroy (13:36.799)
Right, right.

Joshua Lenon (13:42.424)
for your clients or your prospective clients, what we’re gonna see is they’re not gonna go out and recommend you. And we’ve seen really strong tech indicators over a number of years, how a good client experience leads to a better business for lawyers. For example, in our 2020 Ford Legal Trends Survey, we did that secret shopper, went out to 500 law firms, 78 % of our secret shoppers actually would not recommend the law firm.

Karin Conroy (13:48.149)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (13:59.605)
Right.

Joshua Lenon (14:11.224)
that they were tasked with approaching, which was really shocking. The only, yeah, go ahead.

Karin Conroy (14:13.085)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk. Sorry. I want to kind of tie in this idea of the cognitive load that you would talk about because in the legal trends report, you do this cool neurological thing. I’m picturing like some sort of a helmet. Is where there like wires and a helmet involved? Like what? That is so cool.

Joshua Lenon (14:30.158)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (14:36.631)
there absolutely is, yeah.

Karin Conroy (14:38.961)
So tell me about what you were doing to like you were trying to measure brain energy and kind of all of that. And then it ties into this idea of cognitive load. And I’m just going to kind of load that up and then let you talk about it because it was such a cool, this was different. Have you ever done anything like this before? Okay. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (14:49.784)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (14:58.702)
No, no, I don’t think quite frankly anybody has in the practice of law, which was really exciting. So yeah, we try to do new and different research every year, part of Legal Trends Report. And one of the things that’s been raised with firms taking on AI is that it’s supposed to kind of get rid of the grunt work, right? The simple things that can be automated, yeah. And then that leaves then,

Karin Conroy (15:17.629)
Right, right. Low level, yeah. Administrative, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (15:26.958)
quite frankly, the billable work, things that require like strong professional independent judgment and an application of expertise, which honestly can be exhausting. So we wanted to take a look at if a law firm was using modern legal technology, did they end up at the end of the day better or worse off than if they were not?

Karin Conroy (15:40.041)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (15:54.582)
And so what we did was we brought in over 60 legal professionals from private practice. We partnered with a company called Neuro Insights, which has proprietary technology that measures electrical activity in the brain and can, yeah, and measure a lot of different responses. We looked at four different responses. And then we divided that group in half, the 60 plus lawyers, and we gave half of them exercises using Excel to complete.

Karin Conroy (16:07.583)
This is so cool.

Joshua Lenon (16:24.622)
And the other half we used Clio technology, including artificial intelligence. And then we measured their brain activity against each other, right? Was it easier on a person’s brain to use something like Excel or was it easier on a person’s brain to use modern technology?

Karin Conroy (16:44.479)
And by easy, do you mean like how much activity is going on or is there stress involved or what are they measuring there? Okay.

Joshua Lenon (16:49.006)
Hmm?

There absolutely is stress involved. So we measured four key areas. Visual impact, which is how much am I having to keep track of things across a bunch of different places? And so am I having to flip back and forth between screens or pages? Active focus, how much do I really have to concentrate to get a task done? Then memory demand, how much of this do I need to hold in my memory?

Karin Conroy (17:03.104)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (17:19.498)
and then as I’m working and then emotional intensity. Am I feeling strong emotions as I do this work? And are those emotions positive or negative? Yeah.

Karin Conroy (17:27.189)
Yeah, do I open Excel and yes, I open any Microsoft product and I’m instantly like, yes. yeah, well, I use all Apple products partly just for my own mental health. Like even if I’m in a spreadsheet, I don’t wanna see Microsoft anything, because I’ve just got too many years of bad feelings about it.

Joshua Lenon (17:36.982)
Right? Yeah. I’m gonna show my age, but I still hate the ribbon at the top. Right? Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (17:47.63)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (17:52.632)
So we did four exercises. Do a client intake off of an email. Open a new matter off of gathered information. Then create a work in progress report to kind of tally your time across a couple different matters. And the last one was I went and I pulled an actual six page will that had been litigated and asked

Karin Conroy (18:01.717)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (18:05.214)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (18:22.51)
specific questions from that will that needed to be answered as a part of that litigation, right? And what we found at the end of all these experiments is the groups that were using Clio technology. So Clio Grow for client intake, Clio Manage for the opening a new matter and creating a work in progress report, and Clio’s own AI tool, which we now call Clio Work, or Manage AI, sorry.

Karin Conroy (18:25.567)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (18:52.472)
to ask and summarize points of the six page will. And at the end of all those experiments, what NeuroInsights found is that lawyers that were using Clio technology rather than Excel, or in some cases, lawyers even asked for like pen and paper because they couldn’t do the calculations in Excel. Lawyers that were using Clio technology.

Karin Conroy (19:15.081)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (19:18.454)
actually ended up with a 25 % reduction in the strain of performing these four tasks. In some instances, it was actually a huge reduction per individual thing. We saw a 16 % decrease in emotional intensity when it came to client intake. You were just like, OK, I need to put this information here, and I’m going through. And all the emotions that were being felt were positive.

Karin Conroy (19:38.389)
Wow.

Yep.

Karin Conroy (19:46.357)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (19:46.402)
which was interesting. It was not the case with Excel. We saw a 75 % reduction in active focus in creating a work in progress report, just tallying up your time. And honestly, it’s because you just click the report button in Clio and it does the work for you. Whereas in Excel, you had to go to each line and grab the number and multiply it by your hourly rate and create a sum.

Karin Conroy (20:11.635)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (20:12.812)
Yeah, and then jump to the next matter. Right, so that’s an active focus problem. And then when we did the will, something really interesting happened there. We did see like an 11 % decrease in memory demand. You just didn’t have to keep as much in your head. But then in addition to that, we saw a threefold increase in accuracy.

Karin Conroy (20:27.001)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (20:37.902)
So like 150 % increase in accuracy and they were twice as productive. They were able to answer more questions about the will and in the allotted time. so AI was giving these lawyers the ability to be productive, accurate, but also speedy and fast and relaxed at the end of all these exercises. It was really surprising outcome. Like we hoped for some like some good numbers, not gonna lie there, but,

Karin Conroy (20:37.991)
cool.

Karin Conroy (20:45.225)
Right. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (20:57.279)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (21:04.799)
Yeah, right.

Joshua Lenon (21:07.096)
how great a difference there was, was just something that neuroinsights is like, we’ve never seen anything like this.

Karin Conroy (21:14.197)
That’s amazing. Was there anything else you found super surprising, like in the entire process of the Legal Trends Report? I mean, this whole experiment with, I’m picturing almost like those 60s, like metal helmets that almost look like a scuba diver thing, like with the wires. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (21:31.566)
So it was a lot more comfortable than that. It’s more like a stocking cap, yeah, than that. Or, I don’t know, do you ever see like the old football helmets where there were just like basically like leather pads on their heads? Yeah, there we go, like a rugby helmet. It’s almost exactly like that, yeah. And so the other thing that NeuroInsights was really excited about is…

Karin Conroy (21:45.451)
Like rugby helmets, Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (21:59.618)
They had never had so many people participate in a study like this before. Yeah. We had 63. Yeah. And the other interesting thing from our point of view was over 70 % of them had never used Clio before. Yeah. And so they were, it was.

Karin Conroy (22:02.219)
how many did you say you had?

Okay, so that’s a good.

Karin Conroy (22:14.259)
interesting. they were having these pos- it was all new and they were having these positive reactions even though it was like not something they were using on a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (22:23.042)
familiar with, they were learning on the fly. And so, yeah, the fact that we were able to find lawyers who were eager to kind of learn this about themselves, as well as the positive outcomes, because honestly, it seemed like we had everything stacked against us in this study.

Karin Conroy (22:32.553)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (22:40.787)
Right. Okay, so to be skeptical and kind of bring in the skepticism because when we talk about AI, I can see certain people’s eyes glaze over and like when I’m having these conversations with clients and talking about how to integrate it, there is so much hesitation and worry. I even see in a lot of my colleagues lately, I’ve seen a lot of…

hesitation about using it in any way in marketing where they’re really concerned about the ethics and where the data is coming from and all of this stuff. But I saw Bob Ambrogy’s article about Jack’s keynote at ClioCon and this reaction. And I was, was floored just reading the article. I can imagine what it was like being in the room. He was describing that you could hear a pin drop and that it was this moment where

Joshua Lenon (23:19.407)
my gosh. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:33.309)
You could almost feel this is this another one of these moments that I feel like we’ve kind of all lived through. lived through the moment where websites used to be HTML and then they went to WordPress and then, or, you know, open source. And then we had like a recession moment and then we’ve had COVID and we’ve had these moments where things change. And then this AI is another moment. But in this keynote, he was describing that

Joshua Lenon (23:52.588)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:59.699)
that itself was kind of this moment, kind of announcing the moment. So can you talk about, because I was also while I was reading, was wondering if the pause and the silence was also some worry in the audience. Can you talk about the skepticism and the worry and all of these things people are saying about AI when it comes to this stuff? Because I’m excited about it. I’m integrating it. I’m using it and talking about it.

Joshua Lenon (24:03.991)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (24:29.607)
I was on your summer AI, what was it? Bootcamp? I had a whole, yes, and I had a whole session there and I was excited talking about marketing, but that’s me. I realize I’m different.

Joshua Lenon (24:33.518)
Bootcamp? Yeah. We had our AI summer camp,

Joshua Lenon (24:44.046)
Actually, I’ve been a bit skeptical about AI as well, because it’s still in its infancy. In terms of popular awareness of it, it was only late 2022 when chat GPT was announced and made available to the public. And so there’s still a lot of learning to happen with this.

Karin Conroy (24:48.192)
right.

Karin Conroy (24:52.618)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (25:05.557)
Right.

Joshua Lenon (25:10.318)
But what our own legal trends report shows is that these growing law firms, firms that are growing over the last five years, are three times more likely to use artificial intelligence. Firms that are using artificial intelligence, over 30 % are saying they see positive financial impact by using these tools. One out of 10 is saying they say significant financial, positive financial impact from using artificial intelligence.

Karin Conroy (25:22.313)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (25:38.85)
with most of it happening in their operations. They’re not using it in legal work. They’re using it as part of getting that website up and running, of drafting newsletters, of creating the right type of emails.

Karin Conroy (25:41.386)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (25:47.891)
Yeah. Yep.

Emails, yeah, yeah. And when you’re talking about this group that you’re describing, are you kind of referencing back to those three groups? You’ve got the growing, the stagnant, and the, what was the third, the kind of declining, shrinking, yeah, okay. So you’re talking about the growing group. Okay, all right, so they are using it more in operations. They’re not using it for the legal work. Everything I’m,

Joshua Lenon (26:04.235)
The growing stable and shrinking. Mm-hmm. The growing group. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (26:13.87)
Yep. Well, they are. But the large, when we asked, like, are using, like, generic AI tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot or legal specific tools, what this year’s report told us is about 60 % are using kind of the generic and then 40 % are using legal as well. But generic is still the one out there and they’re

they’re most often reporting using it for operations type work.

Karin Conroy (26:45.227)
Yeah, yeah, I feel like there’s a difference also in the people who are just kind of using it where I see a lot is just kind of content creation, blog posts, things like that. And they just see it as that sort of very baseline automation versus people who are really getting into like the GPTs and like creating the bots and getting, and I don’t see, I see that more in the marketing.

Joshua Lenon (26:56.206)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (27:06.254)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:12.307)
world and my marketing colleagues as opposed to the legal world. And maybe you see a little bit of that, but I wanted to segue into this huge news from Clio and this acquisition of Vlex and talk about where do you see that kind of the whole adoption heading? Where does Clio come into that? And is there a gap, a second gap there between people who are just using basic sort of

Joshua Lenon (27:13.23)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (27:25.048)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:41.671)
intro level AI stuff like content and writing an email versus the more complex side of it.

Joshua Lenon (27:48.32)
Yeah, absolutely. So we actually just announced on Monday the finalization of acquiring Vlex. And for most of your listeners in the US, they probably know it by the product of Fastcase, which they acquired back in 2021. But Vlex is the largest legal publisher in the world outside of Thomson Reuters Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Karin Conroy (27:56.693)
That’s amazing.

Karin Conroy (28:03.966)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (28:17.631)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (28:17.806)
They actually have a reference over a billion documents. have all the US case law. They have all the US black letter law, as well as a global library on top of that. what this… There we go. Yeah. So for a long time, legal technology focused on either the business of law or the practice of law. And…

Karin Conroy (28:31.645)
Amazing. So what does this have to do with Clio? Like how does that work together?

Joshua Lenon (28:47.148)
With the rise of artificial technology being accessible and understandable and able to handle just this huge quantity of data that we’re seeing it possible to do, I think that’s become an artificial distinction. The business of law and the practice of law are both part of providing legal services. And so what we think we can do is marry Clio’s technology, which focuses on things like client intake, time and billing.

Karin Conroy (29:00.127)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (29:17.262)
Firm accounting, document automation, yeah. With this vast library of case law and regulations and treaties and journals and create a marriage of where the practice of law and the business of law equally support each other. And so you talked about, yeah, you talked about Jack’s keynote, right? We talked about examples of this happening where a client emails your firm.

Karin Conroy (29:18.431)
systems. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (29:35.551)
my gosh, that is so cool. like, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (29:46.254)
potential clients. Like, I’m looking to hire a law firm, right? And you have an AI agent that evaluates that client, right? And says, you know what? Yeah, they have certain characteristics that make them kind of our ideal client, right? Like, they’re asking about the type of law we do. They’re located in the places that we’re licensed and we help with, right?

Karin Conroy (30:01.973)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Karin Conroy (30:10.387)
Yeah, they’ve said the following things that align with our practice areas. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (30:13.864)
Exactly, right? And so then you can be like, OK, AI, send out right now the detailed intake form and let’s schedule a consultation where we meet face to face or over Zoom and learn a little bit more about each other. Right. And the AI does that. But it might come back and say, hey, here’s a red flag. Right. We’ve seen that this this name is a part of a bunch of vectitious lawsuits that have happened the last number of years or

Karin Conroy (30:22.197)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (30:28.554)
Right.

Karin Conroy (30:33.696)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (30:40.502)
interesting. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (30:43.246)
The dates that they’re talking about with this issue are kind of outside the statute of limitations within your jurisdiction. And here’s the law that you can go and double check this against what the AI is telling you, right? And then once you meet with the client, you could actually have detailed processes like, look, if we go to court, we’ll probably end up with this judge. This is how he historically rules on these types of cases.

Karin Conroy (30:49.002)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (30:56.415)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (31:11.438)
And so here’s a strategy and a timeline and a cost that I’m able to give you based on both my practice data and this legal research data that AI is bringing together for me. Is that a good fit for you? Let’s e-sign on this document right now and I’ll take an advanced fee deposit to your trust account using my tap to pay on the mobile phone and let’s go. Yeah. And it’s really…

Karin Conroy (31:34.729)
Yeah. So when you’re just, sorry.

Joshua Lenon (31:37.742)
pulling all sides of it together so that you can create that great client experience from the very first contact.

Karin Conroy (31:46.729)
Right. Okay. So when you’re describing this, I’m, sorry. Is that better?

Joshua Lenon (31:49.197)
care i can’t hear you

Yeah, I can hear you now. Am I coming through clear?

Karin Conroy (31:55.037)
Okay, okay, let me, yeah, but I was getting an echo for a second. Let me just see if maybe it popped over to the wrong, I can edit this part out. Yeah, it looks like it’s going to your, there it goes. Did it go back to your thing? now I can’t hear you. there we go. Now I.

Joshua Lenon (32:05.36)
You’re coming out of a different speaker now, so let me see if I’ve…

Joshua Lenon (32:13.6)
It went back and I’m trying to make sure I’m on the right mic as well. Okay.

Karin Conroy (32:18.055)
Yeah, I can see it like went to a MacBook and now it’s back to the other one. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (32:22.668)
Headphones, yeah, you went mute and then it went speaker and now it’s, I manually moved it back to headphones. Sorry, I don’t know why. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (32:25.897)
Yeah, sorry about that. It’s, yeah, I think it just got lost a connection for a moment, but I’ll chop that part up. When you were describing that whole process, I was picturing the efficiency of that client being able to go through that intake. And let’s say it’s two in the morning and they have some urgent question and you’re not awake. so you’re, but your AI is responding. Their ability to respond is

instant, which I know in past Legal Trends report, just the response rate was just something we talked about for years and years, just even replying to phone calls. But then at some point during this intake process, it flips from the AI to the human. And that’s either in that Zoom or it’s in an in-person meeting or a phone call or something. So where do you draw the line around the things that you would never let AI handle?

Joshua Lenon (33:01.699)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (33:22.185)
and that are critical for the human to just do. And the things that you’re gonna easily hand over to AI, like here’s my calendar, here’s my phone number, like things that are simple and urgent and that people need.

Joshua Lenon (33:38.114)
So that’s a great question. And honestly, it’s one of those areas where we’re all going to experiment for the next number of years. I’m looking at it from an ethical perspective. And so this model you’re talking about is called human in the loop, where human has oversight and overview of everything that the AI is doing. We think that’s a critical part of any type of legal AI tool, is having human in the loop.

Karin Conroy (33:53.417)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (33:59.946)
Yep.

Karin Conroy (34:05.609)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (34:07.746)
And so I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have humans in the loop, but I do think we’re going to discover functions where it’s fine to let the AI go to the next step. And that might be.

Karin Conroy (34:18.025)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Here’s, they’re asking for your phone number. The AI has it. I had a, yes. Here’s your calendar. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (34:24.686)
Yeah, yeah, like I want to schedule a meeting, right? Oh, OK, here. Here’s the link to our scheduling tool, right? And pay that. if you have, oh, sorry, I was going to raise another one.

Karin Conroy (34:32.53)
Yeah. I had a guest on a few, so I was going to, I was just going to add an analogy. had a guest on a few episodes ago and he was talking about the difference between the Terminator versus Iron Man. Have you heard this analogy? So Terminator is just full robot, right? And it’s, you know, not a very positive picture. It’s not going very well, right? Iron Man, you’ve got Tony Stark in there.

Joshua Lenon (34:46.338)
Ooh, no I haven’t.

Okay.

Karin Conroy (35:00.115)
And then there’s the robot over him, but Tony Stark is controlling it. he, yes, but he wouldn’t be as fast or effective or strong or whatever without that layer of the robot over him. And I keep coming back to this because I feel like it’s really important to not lose that Tony Stark piece and like go to full Terminator because that’s where…

Joshua Lenon (35:05.536)
He’s the pilot, you know.

Joshua Lenon (35:12.91)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (35:25.759)
That’s where I see the fear and that’s where I see the hesitation and the pullback is that people are kind of immediately going in their brains full terminator and they’re assuming that these law firms are gonna be like you walk in, we were recently in Japan and there was like robots serving our drinks. It’s amazing because it’s just a drink, glass of water. But that’s where they’re picturing.

Joshua Lenon (35:35.373)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (35:45.718)
Yeah!

Karin Conroy (35:52.459)
their law firm going, like, you know, there’s no humans at all. So I keep coming back to this kind of where’s the line between the overlay of Tony Stark and then the Tony Stark piece.

Joshua Lenon (35:54.466)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (36:07.054)
it’s going to be very task dependent. And I’m a lawyer. Every lawyer starts an answer with two words. It depends, right? But unfortunately, that’s the case. And so there are certain things where, yeah, I think there are certain things where we do need to draw some really hard lines. One of the things we asked as part of this Legal Trends report is have you ever, consumers, have you ever asked a legal question to a chat bot?

Karin Conroy (36:14.667)
Exactly. Yeah. Marketers do this too.

Joshua Lenon (36:36.526)
14 % said they did. And of that, 12 % received a response that they don’t have a legal problem. And I think that is like a huge red flag, right? 28 % were told to go contact a lawyer. I’m fine with that. But I would never, ever let my chatbot be like, you don’t have a case. Because that’s that independent judgment.

Karin Conroy (36:38.485)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (36:47.593)
Yeah, I wonder.

Yeah.

Karin Conroy (36:56.339)
Yeah. wonder how much… Right. And I wonder how different that question would be is if you asked, have you ever asked Google a legal question? Because I bet the number is way higher. Cause they don’t, you know, there’s a big, yeah, exactly. And it’s, it’s the same idea. Like, you know, you’re going to get that AI overview now. And so you’re, know, when you’re throwing stuff into Google, you’re essentially asking an AI chatbot, whatever you’re asking. Right. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (37:06.508)
Yeah, I bet they skyrocket.

Joshua Lenon (37:12.718)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (37:21.634)
Yeah, for potentially legal advice. So yeah, it’s going to be test dependent. But I think there’s a lot of that administrative work that we can trust a proven tool with. And it’s just a question of what works for you as a lawyer and what works for your clients. Another interesting fact we found is while clients are really happy to talk to a chat bot on a law firm website, right?

what they want out of it is kind of an escalation pathway to contact a lawyer, right? Once they find out like, this is a law firm that handles my type of question, right? And so they’re like something like 50 % of consumers are fine with chat bots on a law firm website, but it has to have that path. And then in this year’s, what we found is there is some hesitation from clients.

Karin Conroy (37:53.811)
Yeah. Right.

Karin Conroy (38:00.469)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (38:09.034)
Right.

Joshua Lenon (38:17.742)
if they think an AI is responding to them when they think they’re talking to a lawyer.

Karin Conroy (38:23.947)
if it’s unclear. Yeah, we’ve seen this for years in marketing, even just in stock photos. So this is just humans. And I keep coming back to this in marketing in general, these things we’re seeing in AI, this is just human psychology. So when people see stock photos and they like, if they go to a team page where it’s supposed to be the list of attorneys on in that firm,

Joshua Lenon (38:26.102)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (38:32.333)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (38:49.676)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (38:51.203)
And there’s like some stock photos at the top and there’s, you know, like maybe a picture of them sitting around a conference table and they can tell it’s stock photo, but the firm is trying to pass it off. Like it’s not a stock photo. They immediately lose trust and all of the branding and the trust building that you’re trying to use by passing off stock photos as real gets totally eroded. Same idea with AI.

Joshua Lenon (39:06.296)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (39:18.685)
introduce it and say, is an AI chatbot. And if you have questions, it may get to a point where we need to hand you over to a human and you’re totally transparent about it. There’s one feeling. If you are pretending that your AI chatbot is an actual human and then it trips up, your trust is gone. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (39:37.206)
You’ve lost them. You’ve lost them. Yeah. And what I think our stats are showing is that once people get to the point where they’re approaching law firms, it’s because they’re valuing the lawyers and the legal services that are being provided. And so that may be one of those dividing lines that we talk about is not can the AI do it, which it might be able to, but does the client value the AI doing it?

Karin Conroy (39:58.323)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (40:07.252)
Right, right.

Joshua Lenon (40:07.566)
And that might mean there some of those administrative tasks that should remain with the lawyer, even if there’s not that ethical requirement, because it’s just good business.

Karin Conroy (40:19.155)
Right. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is what’s on the horizon for 2026, but I wanted to tie in the book review because I feel like that goes hand in hand. I know which book you’re going to talk about. So if you haven’t checked out our library, we have a book review on every episode and we have a whole library on the website of all the books people have recommended. So take a look at the library if you haven’t before. But Joshua, what’s the book that you wanted to add to the library and recommend today?

Joshua Lenon (40:24.589)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (40:28.064)
Okay. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (40:47.23)
I continually go back to this book that was originally published in 2013, and it’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers by Richard Susskind. Richard Susskind is kind of the grandfather of legal technology. He wrote the book The End of Lawyers? He always adds to that bit, right? Where he talks about how lawyers are going to have to increasingly compete with technology. And we had him come and speak at

Karin Conroy (40:55.251)
cool.

Karin Conroy (41:02.611)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (41:11.317)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (41:14.83)
our second ClioCon, it’s an annual conference we do for lawyers in 2014. And then again, in just our most recent one in October in 2025. And it’s interesting to me in this book that he talks about how there’s going to be a need to build new skills with lawyers that come with evaluating, utilizing, and productizing.

Karin Conroy (41:35.381)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (41:43.214)
your legal services through technology. And that’s going to mean in many times not thinking like a lawyer, thinking like an engineer. Yeah. And a business person, that’s right. It’s going to be this huge shift in mindset. And so it’s not a long book, which is one of the other reasons I recommend it. But I think, yeah. But I think it lays out a really good argument on how

Karin Conroy (41:51.519)
Yeah. Yeah. And a business person. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (42:02.025)
Yeah. That gets an extra thumb up.

Joshua Lenon (42:13.378)
Yes, technology is going to be a competing factor between the different types of legal services. It’s inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t adopt and adapt technology as a part of our practice of law. And there are lots of new and emerging roles that are laid out within this book that honestly have guided my career to date. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (42:37.011)
Yeah. So looking forward, as you’re speaking about all of this, I’m picturing these old school firms with like the wood paneled, you know, conference rooms and the ones that back in the day when I first started, they all wanted like the Ralph Lauren colors, like the navy blue and the green branding. And they all stood in front of the law books for their photos. You know, they’re all kind of like deer in the headlights.

Joshua Lenon (42:45.614)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (42:49.526)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (42:59.478)
Mm-hmm. I love those photos. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (43:07.25)
Um, where, but they’re, you know, going back to the hesitation and the fear and all of those issues you were talking about before, um, there’s going to be firms that are going to be slow to adoption. And I feel like this industry in general is a little, it’s a little sticky. It’s hard for them to like get moving on these things. What’s, what’s 2026 going to look like for the firms that are open to, uh, AI and the technology as opposed to.

those traditional, slower moving firms.

Joshua Lenon (43:39.746)
Honestly, quick moving firms are going to eat the lunch of slow moving firms. And I hate to say this, but that’s just what our data is telling us. Firms that are using online client intake, for example, and the ability for potential clients to schedule their own consultations are seeing 51 % more leads and 52 % more revenue than firms that aren’t using those tools. That’s just an example.

Karin Conroy (44:04.683)
That seems pretty basic, like the intake form. That seems like pretty basic. What’s a more advanced thing that you’re seeing with some of this technology and the AI integration and the things that Clio is looking for down the road? What are some of the cooler, besides just intakes and chatbots?

Joshua Lenon (44:18.691)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (44:24.3)
Yeah, I’m envisioning a day where we see a change in precedent or a change in regulation become an instant notification across the law firm to whom it applies, a list of your clients who need to be notified, right, or who could reopen. Yeah, yeah, and here’s the message that we think we should draft. Please edit and hit send, and we’ll get it out for you, right? And then…

Karin Conroy (44:33.64)
Karin Conroy (44:40.671)
and it just happens and it goes out. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (44:50.409)
Yep. That doesn’t seem that far away either.

Joshua Lenon (44:53.256)
No, and then we’re going to generate reports on how much new business did this one email bring to you, either directly or via referrals. And then we’re also going to take a look at your upcoming deadlines and point out that under the rules of civil procedure for this particular court, the document that you’re drafted is in the wrong font.

Karin Conroy (44:59.849)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (45:19.147)
That’s amazing! Yes.

Joshua Lenon (45:20.814)
And so I went ahead and changed the font because Judge Smith prefers Times New Roman over Courier for some reason, right? Yeah. And your word count is about 500 over, you know, what is the standing order for word counts on this type of motion. And so here are some edicts that I suggest, right? So that way, rather than you trying to file it and the clerk sending it back because wrong font or too many words or whatever,

Karin Conroy (45:26.677)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (45:39.189)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (45:50.732)
you don’t have to have that misstep. And instead, you’re better advancing your client’s interest, you’re looking more professional, because you’ve got that AI teammate that’s got your back.

Karin Conroy (46:03.977)
Yeah. I could not, I mean, we don’t have enough time to go into AI bots and you know, all of that. And we haven’t really dug super that detailed into like the marketing areas that this can apply to. But I, this is what you’re describing may sound really like a million years down the road, but what you’re describing in the things that I’ve been experimenting in, I can already picture how I would put that together.

And it’s not, it’s not weak. You could do that today. I feel like it’s not that. Yeah. Yeah. That is amazing. Are there any like long-term, more hypothetical ideas that, you’re kind of seeing that are not things you could necessarily do today, but you could potentially see down the road or some version of it.

Joshua Lenon (46:36.696)
Yeah, absolutely, we are doing it today at Clio.

Joshua Lenon (46:55.724)
think there’s a risk to the legal industry that we should be paying attention to. And that’s AI adjudication. we see there’s actually a really long-running, this is a bit political, so I apologize, but a long-running balance of power and checks and balance disputes across a lot of different governments. With the judiciary,

Karin Conroy (46:59.913)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (47:04.725)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (47:14.323)
Okay, that’s okay.

Joshua Lenon (47:25.634)
being in the headlines and the targets of certain types of government actors. And so my worry is we’re going to see subject matter jurisdiction being stripped from courts on particular types of issues and being handed over to really badly designed and badly supported websites and AI chatbots.

Karin Conroy (47:49.941)
Okay.

Joshua Lenon (47:53.396)
I don’t think we can prevent this shift. I do think there is a need for increased efficiency and access to justice. But I do think, especially as people who have pledged to protect the rule of law, we need to make sure that these tools are adequate and have appropriate tie-ins to the rest of the legal system such that we can…

support people who are using these tools, even if they aren’t going to court anymore, that they create a record that is enforceable outside of that, and that it leads to some type of pathway for help for when that one size fits all website doesn’t. And there’s a great example of doing it right up here in British Columbia. It’s called the Civil Resolution Tribunal.

Karin Conroy (48:41.641)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Joshua Lenon (48:51.31)
It handles like small claims, certain types of car accident insurance disputes, property disputes that are related to condos, which if know Vancouver real estate, that’s actually a pretty big deal, expense-wise. What’s interesting about it is it’s almost entirely online. It’s arbitration and mediation. Lawyers are not allowed to represent people directly unless there’s like a capacity issue.

Karin Conroy (49:00.895)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (49:17.476)
interesting. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (49:21.55)
We do see lots of lawyers now offering coaching and preparation services to help with that. That’s how they’re adopting their business. And the Civil Resolution Tribunal has been designed in such a way that you can kind of appeal out of it to the traditional court system. That’s doing it right. And so there’s been some worry amongst certain types of lawyers that they’re losing business.

Karin Conroy (49:28.218)
interesting. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (49:41.642)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (49:49.016)
But those who lean into it and have built the coaching and unbundled model are actually finding it a business opportunity and more people are getting helped. So what’s the risk? The risk is that we try to just circle the wagons and protect our current business model as opposed to building our next business model.

Karin Conroy (49:57.557)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (50:11.999)
Yeah, right. Okay, so that’s fascinating and we’ll link to the model that you were describing in case people are curious and want to take a look at that. Of course, along with the, no, but it’s interesting and I think it’s always good to have that sort of model for what you’re describing as like a place where they’re doing it well. So what should firms be doing now?

Joshua Lenon (50:22.484)
no thanks, yeah. Yeah, I’m not a part of that, I’m just a fan.

Joshua Lenon (50:34.904)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (50:38.971)
After they listen to this episode, what’s the first thing they should be thinking? as we think, we’ve been talking a lot, kind of macro ideas, AI and the world and like where and what the future is and all of that stuff. But let’s bring it back to today and what should affirm after they’ve listened to this whole episode and then given me a nice little thumbs up and all of that good stuff, what do they do today?

Joshua Lenon (50:46.998)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (50:59.31)
They should actually go out and pick a tool to experiment with. And honestly, there are a couple of great places to start. If you are a small business, take a look at ChatGPT. Get a paid plan. Make sure you’re turning off all the data sharing provisions, that it’s not using your data for training. Don’t upload.

Karin Conroy (51:04.831)
Yeah. Yep.

Karin Conroy (51:19.837)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Lenon (51:28.942)
client confidential information there anyway, just in case. But use it for drafting a newsletter. Use it for creating a plan of engagement for a new client that walks through the door. Use it for 20 different social media posts that you think, yeah, a content calendar. That would be great, right? And then once you get comfortable with that interface and how to have a prompt

Karin Conroy (51:46.943)
Yeah, a content calendar. Yeah. Yep.

Joshua Lenon (51:58.742)
and a response and an edit, which is the workflow, then start looking at where can you apply it elsewhere. If you’re an office that uses Microsoft 365, CoPilot’s a great tool that’s built in. If you’re an office that uses Google Apps for Business, they have Gemini, and it’s built in. And so all of these are tools that are already at your fingertips. So start trying to use them today. Yes, yeah, that’s very true.

Karin Conroy (52:00.191)
Yep. Yes.

Karin Conroy (52:22.505)
Yeah, and they’re very different. Yes, yeah, and they have different kinds of responses and they’re good at different things. So the experimentation is really important to figure out what you wanna do for, what you wanna use for different purposes. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (52:40.794)
If you want a good marketing tip today, go out and hire a service that answers your phone 24-7. Yeah, 100%.

Karin Conroy (52:44.063)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (52:48.243)
Yeah, 100%. I did that. I use Ruby and I started using Ruby more than a decade ago. mainly because I saw so many law firms using them and I would call a client and I would have this and this is not a paid ad or sponsorship of Ruby, but I would have this moment where I was like, that person is one of the nicest, happiest people I have ever spoken to in four seconds. And I was like, I need that for my business and I need it whenever I’m not going to answer. And so

Joshua Lenon (52:53.038)
Mm.

Joshua Lenon (53:12.728)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (53:18.195)
That just human interaction I think is really important. So I would add that yes, have a service that answers 24 seven. I have a client I work with right now that’s using an AI service and they enjoy that. But I personally think this is a moment where it’s oftentimes better to have a human.

Joshua Lenon (53:23.021)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (53:36.706)
Yeah, I think it’s another one of those make sure you have a human in the loop moments is where we’re going with this. Ruby is an integration partner with Clio. And so yeah, and so if your law firm is using both Ruby and Clio, they can like send you a message, they can schedule things in your calendar, right? They can create the new matter for you. But we also have other integration partners like Smith.ai, right? Who have that human in the loop answering.

Karin Conroy (53:41.235)
Yeah. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (53:46.773)
great!

Karin Conroy (53:52.693)
They got you. Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (54:02.922)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (54:06.274)
Right. And LawDroid, which does great chat bots for law firm websites is another integration partner. Right. I think from a marketing perspective, there’s a lot of potential in these tools that we should be seizing.

Karin Conroy (54:11.626)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (54:18.057)
Yep. And they cover you. So you are, your phone is covered. So there’s no reasonable answer for having your phone ring and ring. And I feel like this goes back to legal trends reports from years past where that was such a recurring theme that just the basic of…

answering your phone and responding to people’s inquiries is where, know, like that is like, if that’s the problem that, that solves all of your firm’s problems, like that’s pretty, that’s a pretty easy thing to solve.

Joshua Lenon (54:40.589)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (54:51.416)
That’s a pretty, the technology is just there now. It’s plug and play. so, yeah, so go and experiment with these, these AIs. Honestly, everybody already is 79 % of lawyers we survey say that they’re using AI, right? Yeah, it’s actually higher than other industries that are being surveyed. Yeah. sorry. You were about to ask.

Karin Conroy (54:54.261)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (54:59.999)
Yep. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (55:05.493)
interesting.

That is higher than I expected.

That’s awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Joshua Lennon, thank you so much for being here. I’m sorry. We could go on for another three hours. I have like all these things that we didn’t even have time to get to, but there’s only so much time in the day and we covered, I’d be happy to. I mean, this has changed. I love the difference in the…

Joshua Lenon (55:27.934)
Let’s schedule a return.

Karin Conroy (55:36.715)
difference between where Richard Suskin was in 2014 and now, and just looking at where technology has come. And I feel like it’s exponential at this point with AI. so, you another six months, another year, it’s gonna be fascinating to see where it goes and how things have different. And like, that’s why I kind of am curious to see what your thoughts are and then to see what happens and, you know, what we’re not even thinking about. So.

Joshua Lenon (55:52.366)
yeah.

Joshua Lenon (56:01.966)
I think there’s never been a better time to be a lawyer, right? One of the insights I brought to Clio was that we just expect lawyers to kind of fix everything about legal services. The judge can’t hold a hearing for three months. You go to your lawyer, what can we do, right? And the lawyer’s like, uh, let’s negotiate. And so it’s always been harder than it needs to be to practice law. I think we’re hitting that

Karin Conroy (56:04.147)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (56:14.057)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (56:22.003)
Yeah. Right.

Karin Conroy (56:29.972)
Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (56:31.502)
where we can finally start making it easier to practice law and be the type of lawyer you want to be through technology. That’s very exciting to me.

Karin Conroy (56:43.455)
Yeah, and without that 62 % of the administrative work getting in the way. So like take that 62 % of all of that work and find a way to reduce that down and relieve your mental load, the cognitive load, and be that better lawyer that you kind of imagined in law school where you’re actually doing stuff that you enjoy and it’s not kind of killing you slowly. Yeah.

Joshua Lenon (56:47.829)
Exactly.

Joshua Lenon (56:57.774)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Lenon (57:07.95)
Yeah, right? Like increasing that cognitive load. Like, why am I using Excel for this?

Karin Conroy (57:11.467)
Yes, exactly. Right, exactly. Awesome. Well, Joshua Lennon, thank you again for being here. I appreciate it so much. You are the lawyer in residence at Clio, as if everybody doesn’t already know that. But thank you again. I appreciate it. That was such a cool conversation. feel like.

Joshua Lenon (57:30.614)
I had a ton of fun and I would love to do it again. Thank you so much.

Karin Conroy (57:33.707)
Thank you.