We Were Both Wrong About Legal AI. Here’s What Changed Our Minds.

One of us (Daniel) spent the better part of a decade running Lexoo, an alternative legal service provider built around high-volume contract review and negotiation. He tried the AI tools that existed at the time. He timed his lawyers with literal stopwatches. He watched the technology underdeliver, repeatedly, and eventually said so publicly, in posts that are still sitting on his LinkedIn profile. He’ll be the first to tell you.

The other (CJ) watched the same movie from the other side of the aisle, deploying machine-learning (ML) tools inside Axiom’s contract intelligence operation. His teams were reviewing tens of thousands of documents, trying to get efficiency gains from a technology that kept producing more complexity than it resolved. By the end, the best thing the ML could do was scroll a lawyer to the right page. That was real progress. It also barely moved the needle.