ILTACON is legal tech’s annual celebration of the industry and a platform for all the key talking points to bubble to the surface and set the agenda for the weeks, months, and quarters ahead. As with any event, the days are long, hard, and fun. It is as energizing as it is tiring, and the same can be said about the AI conversation itself. It's exciting, but there is fatigue.
Let’s see if we can wade through the weariness and come out the other side refreshed.
The problem: AI fatigue in legal tech
Legal professionals are beginning to ask: Is this helping us, or just hyping us?
- AI is everywhere, but not always relevant.
- Tools promise transformation but often deliver disruption. And a little disruption is ok — if there is clearly an end goal and reward for people to buy into.
- Lawyers — naturally skeptical and autonomy-driven — struggle to trust outputs they can’t trace or defend.
The result? A sector saturated with AI talk but starved of AI trust.
The solution: Building AI Confidence™
To move beyond fatigue, legal teams need more than features — they need confidence. It’s not something you buy. It’s something you build.
Here are five principles that make AI meaningful:
- Security that meets the highest standards
AI must be built on legal-grade governance, with Zero Trust architecture and full control over data access. - Trust through transparency
Outputs must be traceable to firm documents, not hallucinated from generic models. Defensibility is non-negotiable. - Purpose-built tools that respect workflows
AI should integrate into your day-to-day applications — enhancing productivity without adding friction. - Knowledge capture that fuels collective intelligence
AI should help surface, reuse, and enrich institutional knowledge — not just automate tasks. - Partners, not just products
Confidence grows when vendors understand your world and evolve with your needs — not just sell you the latest buzzword.
Why overcoming AI fatigue in legal tech matters
Law firms aren’t looking for magic, they’re looking for meaningful change. That starts with treating documents not just as static files but as structured, searchable, and secure data. This shift — from precedent as archive to precedent as asset — is already underway and is reshaping how firms think about knowledge.
But AI doesn’t work in isolation. ILTA speakers repeatedly stressed that strong search and clean inputs are essential. Without a solid foundation, AI risks amplifying noise rather than insight. Firms need tools that support this foundation: tools that centralize content, enforce governance, and integrate with the workflows lawyers already trust.
Security remains paramount. As AI adoption grows, so does the risk landscape. Firms are demanding document-level governance and compliance — not only to protect data, but to preserve client trust.
And then there’s adoption. Lawyer resistance is real, and it’s rational. Change must be frictionless. Embedding new capabilities into familiar environments without forcing behavior change is key to unlocking value.
Ultimately, firms want measurable impact: time saved, risk reduced, knowledge reused. That’s the ROI story that resonates with lawyers and clients.
AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a shift in how legal teams work, share knowledge, and make decisions. But without trust, clarity, and control, that shift risks becoming noise.
AI is not the DMS outright: it must work with the DMS
It is critical not to lose sight of the DMS. To reap the benefits of AI, firms need to think about their knowledge backbone and ensure their knowledge house is in order. Then they can surface insights and information and fulfill the promise to reduce the mundane and increase the meaningful. That is how to work with AI Confidence.
By cultivating AI Confidence, firms can move from reactive to predictive, from fragmented to synergistic, and from hype to real, measurable impact.
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About the author
James Ainsworth