What I've heard (but many years ago) is that the legal profession in general is extremely tech-hostile (some is just cultural, but some is that it gets in the way of billable hours).
I don't know how much of that has changed now, especially with younger lawyers growing up with tech, getting in and wanting to do things a certain way.
I'm (somewhat) qualified to comment, having presented to an audience of lawyers in SF literally hours ago, and having been discussing/testing the market for most of this year.
I think there's roughly three groups - the old guard (senior partners at big firms), the younger ones who have gone out on their own, and the in-house counsel.
In my opinion, the old guard aren't tech-hostile, just disinterested. They haven't ever really needed to compete, and most have retirement on the horizon, so there's little incentive to invest money for a pay-off in five years' time.
Corporate counsel are still pretty unsophisticated when it comes to new tooling/platforms, except when it comes to cost management (where there's an enormous amount of interest).
The most tech-savvy are the smaller (3-30) firms who have broken off and are looking for ways to compete with their former employers.
That being said, it's still a very hands-on, enterprise-y market to sell to. I've been told that LawGeex, for reference, start at the (multiple) six-figure range to begin with.
We (https://lexico.io) didn't really want to go down that path, so we pivoted from automating legal drafting and review inside Word, to a broader paperwork automation assistant.
That has not been my experience. The industry is highly competitive. Each matter might be pitched to half a dozen firms. If tech does shave costs, that can be a huge differentiating factor.
For the most part though it doesn’t. There are many clients who won’t pay for first year associates. For those clients, firms don’t roll out legal tech. They do the work and write it off. Even at top wall street firms realization is 80-90% hours billed. Nor do firms trot out legal tech when it comes to contigency or fixed-fee cases, where there are no billable hours. Some major clients these days demand arrangements where they pay a fixed. monthly price. There is no legal tech leveraged in those cases.
For the most part I’ve found software in general these days to be underwhelming. It took me years to find software that I trust enough to keep track of highlighted points in court opinions. (Shout out to the folks who make Citavi.) I remember writing about predictive coding in law school almost ten years ago. I have never used it on a case. Ironically, the only cases where there were enough documents (millions) for predictive coding to make sense also involved so much at stake the client wanted to spare no expense.
The highest value legal tech has been review platforms like Relativity, but they are also crap. Like, loads documents slower than you can read them crap. It’s like technology to help programmers. You still just use Emacs because all this visual IDE shit doesn’t really help.
This is one of the things where the market will decide. All it takes is one firm to drastically reduce costs while maintaining standards (or possibly improving them?) and the rest will be forced follow suit.
It’s worse: the legal industry is efficiency-hostile because it relies heavily on reinventing the wheel on an hourly basis with the moat of a guild system to keep competition under control. And worse yet: most clients aren’t interested in anything less than the most expensive, white-glove service because they equate paying more to buying more peace of mind. In reality, most clients pay law firms gobs of money to read stuff that they can’t be bothered to read themselves. And law firms can’t even be held accountable for giving bad advice. It’s a pretty bleak landscape for problem-solvers.
I don't know how much of that has changed now, especially with younger lawyers growing up with tech, getting in and wanting to do things a certain way.