Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Tony Muljadi, the general manager of large law at LexisNexis.
They discussed how law firms are shifting their AI strategy from novelty to expectation, why integrating authoritative legal content and trust into existing workflows matters more as AI capabilities converge, and how a genuine strategic technology partnership can fuel a law firm’s success.
Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and your role at LexisNexis.
Tony Muljadi: I grew up in Colorado, but now I’m a New Yorker. I started my career in management consulting and then in internal strategy roles before coming to Lexis about six years ago. I started in our corporate strategy group and then moved into our news and business division, where I led strategy and customer success. Then I moved to the legal side of the house, which is the core business of LexisNexis Legal & Professional, and it’s great to be here. I lead our large law segment. We define large law as any firm with 50 attorneys or more in the U.S. I oversee all of go-to-market, so that’s sales, marketing and customer success, and I also inform our product strategy.
Ari Kaplan: How are law firms evolving their AI strategy from experimentation to expectation?
Tony Muljadi: It’s been an incredibly fast transformation. Just a year ago, there was a lot of talk about whether to use AI and which AI to use. Now, all firms have adopted one or more tools, so it’s really about which ones I’m going to adopt more and for which use cases. Where should I use different AI tools across the firm? And which firms are giving me the most value in terms of both product and the service I’m receiving from them? How am I integrating my content and know-how into AI workflows, and what does that look like for my attorneys as they deliver client work?
Ari Kaplan: With access to different models no longer a factor, what is the differentiator in using these tools?
Tony Muljadi: The real differentiation comes down to a couple of things. First is the context, second is the harness, and third is how you operationalize AI within your firm. When we talk about the context, that’s what goes into the model or the AI system. Obviously, it’s the firm’s documents, but it also could be proprietary content that a legal tech provider has, such as caselaw, secondary content and even legal news, as well as the firm’s knowledge, ways of working and how they build that into the AI system. The second is what I call the harness. This is the engineering around the model that helps it orchestrate, ground the answers and optimize the output. It’s in the way lawyers like to talk, the formats, even the font and how it’s set on the page. Those little things matter, and this is where many legal tech vendors play a role: honing and tuning the model and selecting models for the best answer and output for the attorney. The third part is operationalization, which is really about how well the firm enables its attorneys to use AI, including making it easy to upload documents. This is where firms with strong KM groups and strong CIOs really thrive.
Ari Kaplan: As these AI capabilities begin to converge, why do trust in authoritative legal content and its integration into those existing workflows matter?
Tony Muljadi: The model is just one layer of the cake. You need a full end product, multiple layers and the filling in between. At LexisNexis, we believe that content and trust are absolutely essential for attorneys, and that’s because legal work has really asymmetric risk. You can’t just be a little bit correct. [The] 80-20 [rule] doesn’t work in legal. When I was a management consultant, we always talked about 80-20, and that’s not the case in legal. There are sanctions. Many high-risk, bet-the-farm-type transactions are happening, so lawyers need to be confident the answer is correct, and that there’s authority behind it. That trust also carries over into adoption. If an attorney doesn’t trust the output a tool consistently produces, they won’t use it, and that is a major gap, as well. And then lastly, the more you can integrate the AI into the actual workflow of how the attorney may have done it before or the best practice, so that it doesn’t feel like it’s moving away from that process, that’s where you see AI really be a multiplier versus feeling like it’s something completely different that needs to be relearned.
Ari Kaplan: Given the importance of collaboration, what does a genuine strategic technology partnership look like today?
Tony Muljadi: It’s been a change. It’s no longer this vendor-customer relationship where you come in with a sales team, sell a subscription, and then see them again in three years. It’s changed quite a bit. And admittedly, my business has had to change how we operate and how we staff engagements, so it’s really shared problem-solving. It’s when the firm comes forward with a real problem they’re trying to solve, maybe the partner doesn’t have an off-the-shelf solution, and you need to come together and work it out. That might look like a different account team than a salesperson and a customer success person. It might include those people, but it will more likely also include somebody with a legal background. We call those people legal engineers. It might also include software engineers, including front-end developers. That’s a much more holistic account team serving the client than you would have seen in the past. That matters because it helps build trust between the two. Both sides are bringing a lot of resources to bear. This takes a lot of time and energy from the firm, as well, and you might be pulling billable people off other work to invest in the future. That’s a real strategic partnership when both sides put skin in the game, and there’s a feedback loop where each side learns from the process and benefits. That’s what I would say a true partnership looks like these days.
Ari Kaplan: How do you define the role of a legal engineer, and why is it becoming so important within law firms today?
Tony Muljadi: It’s the intersection of strong legal domain expertise and a more technical, product-oriented mindset, helping translate what the attorney is doing from a pure workflow perspective and then turn it into a technical process that may or may not involve AI-enabled steps. It’s usually someone with a JD background who can empathize with what the attorney is doing, and who also has a passion for AI, an understanding of technology, and the ability to break that into steps for the firm. The third part is enabling that, knowing many of these people come from large law firms, so they understand barriers to adoption and how to convince skeptical attorneys that this solution could really enhance their work.
Ari Kaplan: Where can legal engineers add the most value?
Tony Muljadi: These are really high-volume, high-friction workflows. For example, imagine having to analyze hundreds, maybe even thousands, of contracts to compare them all. What would’ve taken several hours, and what a human might miss in a tabular view, could be done in less than an hour using AI. So that’s a great example where an off-the-shelf AI capability, which we call skills at LexisNexis, can really accelerate a process. I think the second area is where you’re configuring something that’s a little bit generic. Maybe it’s a generic skill, but you’re configuring it specifically for the firm or for the person, so that it fits their way of doing things, their voice and their precedent documents. That would be a second area. And I think the third thing is back to general customer success and scaling what works. So finding the seeds that are working and cultivating them, so they grow into repeatable workflows that can be scaled across the firm. That’s where the legal engineer can add value. They come at it from a third-party perspective and can see across practice areas beyond what an individual attorney or a KM team might see.
Ari Kaplan: What are the most important questions a law firm should ask a legal tech partner?
Tony Muljadi: Definitely, what is your operating model? How will you support us going into this initiative, and how will you support us after? Understanding the full life cycle of what this engagement could look like is immensely important. Having a mutual understanding of metrics and what success looks like at the end of this project or during the project and which metrics will tell us that we’re being successful is essential. I also think it’s important to understand the technology components, products and people involved in the project. You want to have trust that this partner has access to the latest models, the right content, and the right people and experts to get the job done.
Ari Kaplan: What are the most important metrics a team should evaluate when determining whether they’re succeeding with AI?
Tony Muljadi: I like to stay away from time saved because it’s really an input, not an output. Firms are still billing by the hour, so it’s important to be aware of it, but faster isn’t always better in legal. You always want correctness and client satisfaction. I like to focus on the end product and client satisfaction. That’s a little harder to measure, but responsiveness, the ability to get back to clients, and the depth of the relationships you’re building matter. These are a little bit soft, but if I had to put more concrete metrics, I would look at the ability to take time out and whether that means fewer hours written off. Are we doing higher-value work? Are we getting more customers through the door? Are they more satisfied? Are we handling more matters than we did before?
Ari Kaplan: Where do you expect the biggest gap to emerge between AI leaders and lagging firms?
Tony Muljadi: It’s definitely not going to be just about the technology they’re using. These models are now available to anybody willing to pay, so it’s really about their organizational capability. Are they built to take on change? Are they built to drive adoption, rethink their old ways of doing things, and redesign their workflows? Firms that are reticent to take that change on will fall behind. A second area is their ability to integrate their firm’s knowledge and processes. If every firm uses the same technology but doesn’t put its unique thumbprint on its way of doing things or its knowledge base, then you lose differentiation completely. Firms that integrate that with AI will create a gap because that institutional knowledge will still show up and create value for the firm, even though technology has become an equalizer. I think the third thing would be, and this probably is a couple of years down the line, the firms that actually change their business model. So maybe they change how they staff their projects. Maybe they can hire more rainmakers because the actual legal work is more efficient. Maybe they can price differently. Maybe they use value-based pricing instead of hourly billing. Perhaps they respond faster. They can take on more of a corporate legal department’s full breadth of services. These are the things that will really create a gap between firms that are adopting AI and those that are much slower.
Ari Kaplan: How do you see strong technology partnerships empowering law firms in the future?
Tony Muljadi: The strongest partnerships will show they can continuously drive value for the firm and even for the legal tech providers. The legal tech provider’s learning may also scale to other firms. They’re continuously reinventing workflows, rather than implementing them and then never looking at them again, using that feedback to improve together. Both sides share in that mutually beneficial learning. The technology partner gets more, can scale what they’re doing for others, and can improve how they operate for their customer. But the firms also gain a lot from the partner because the partner knows them. They don’t have to reteach a new partner every time how their firm operates or how to scale technology.
Listen to the complete interview at Reinventing Professionals.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change and introduce new technology at his blog and on Apple Podcasts.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.