All the talk and money in AI seems to be about big law, not small law.
When my last company, Prairielaw, was bought by LexisNexis’ Martindale Hubbell, we were charge with part of the buildout of lawyers.com. Build a publishing and community foundation to attract consumers and small business people.
With Martindale Hubbell doing over $100M from large law, we were told the company needs to serve small law as 75% of law firms had 3 or less lawyers. May not be exact, but it was close enough to make the point. The crew at Westlaw’s Findlaw was told the same.
The International Legal Technology Association released, today, a study providing a breakdown of the AI products lawyers were using. By virtue of the breakdown it appears the vast majority of those surveyed were in larger law. Nothing wrong with that, just breaks down like that in the survey.
Looking at the products, they have to be ones that are not widely used by small law except for Microsoft 365 CoPilot and Claude.
Piqued my interest as I thought of the amount of publishing by legal professionals in small and medium law firms that was not in The Library at LexBlog. An area to ignore at our peril if we’re truly looking to serve both legal professionals and the public.
There also can be a latent market in small law. 😊