AI Reshapes Legal Practice: ClioCon 2025 Delivers a Wake-Up Call

Jeff Lewis reports from the 2025 Clio Cloud Conference in Boston. Day 1 was encouraging, but Jeff reports feeling Day 2 as a “gut punch”: within about 5-10 years, many fundamentals of legal practice will be unrecognizable.

Here are a few ways legal industry leaders suggest you can skate to where the puck is going—rather than finding yourself behind by skating to where it is now.

• The $5 Billion Opportunity: Clio CEO Jack Newton says there are billions in untapped legal services—and AI tools can help lawyers tap it.
• 74% of Billable Tasks Automatable: Clio's research suggests nearly three-quarters of current billable work could be automated. The game: find the redundancy, or else be the redundancy.
• AI Becoming Standard: 79% of legal professionals are now using AI tools (up from just 19% two years ago).
• Time-Tracking Revolution: Before AI replaces your billables, let it enhance them: AI-powered tools like Point One and Tempello automatically capture and enter your time—you might be surprised how much money you’re leaving on the table.
• Context-Aware Legal Research: Clio's new "Vincent" platform combines practice management data with comprehensive legal research to produce AI responses grounded in both case facts and applicable law, reducing hallucinations and providing verifiable citations.
• The Neurosurgeon Analogy: Susskind's provocative comparison suggests that just as AI might make brain surgery obsolete through prevention and precision, traditional legal services may be replaced by more efficient, AI-driven alternatives that clients prefer.

True, there are shiny objects out there, and as Tim says many will get “Sherlocked”—become obsolete as the underlying AI tech improves. But getting in the game is key—the sidelines are going to be a very unhappy place very soon.