Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Nik Reed, the chief executive officer of Knowable and vice president of AI product at LexisNexis, and Roland Vogl, the executive director and co-founder of CodeX at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, about their participation in the 2026 LexisNexis AI Symposium at the Harvard Club.
The event was titled “The Legal AI Inflection Point: Designing the Future of Legal Practice.” Reed moderated the panel “Lawyering in the Age of AI: Preparing the Next Generation for Practice,”and Vogl moderated “Redesigning Legal Practice for the Client-Centric Agentic AI Era.”
Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and your biggest takeaway from the panel you moderated.
Nik Reed: I came into legal tech completely by accident. I was in law school in 2009 and 2010, and a classmate of mine, Daniel, poked me on the shoulder and asked: “Doesn’t it seem weird that the technology we’re being taught to use as lawyers feels like it’s 10 or 15 years old, and there’s all this cool stuff happening in tech today?” That got us thinking about what we could do if we used the latest and greatest to build something. We worked on it nights and weekends, and two years later, we started a company called Ravel Law out of Stanford Law School. It was born of the Big Data era, using data visualization, early AI, machine learning and natural language processing. Fast-forward 15 years, and we’ve got ChatGPT, Claude, Protégé, CoCounsel, Harvey and Legora. The world is abounding in amazing AI technology for attorneys, and our panel was really about how to prepare this generation to use these tools. Is it exciting? Is it scary? What are law schools doing? What are law firms doing? And what are third-party companies like Factor that offer training programs to help teams at companies and law firms learn to use this awesome technology? We had panelists representing the spectrum of those who are teaching young associates, soon-to-be attorneys and in-house lawyers how to use AI. It was fascinating.
Nik Reed is the chief executive officer of Knowable and vice president of AI product at LexisNexis, and Roland Vogl is the executive director and co-founder of CodeX at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
Roland Vogl: I’m originally from Austria. I went to Stanford as a student over 20 years ago, then had a short stint in private practice as an IP lawyer handling trademark and copyright law for a tech law firm in Silicon Valley. I pursued an opportunity to serve as a teaching fellow in law, science and technology and connected with peers in the computer science department. We started to vibe with the idea of viewing the legal system through a computer scientist’s lens to solve information and transaction-cost problems. We started CodeX as a center focused on the intersection of law and computer science. We are still a relatively small research center between the computer science department and the law school, with a mission to bring information technology to the legal community, making it more efficient for everyone. Although it was never part of our plan, we were fortunate to have people like Nik and others with amazing ideas coming through the center, using CodeX as a sounding board and a place to exchange ideas with like-minded people. So we started building this community around the center, in addition to the research and teaching. Bringing together thought leaders and innovators is something we’re really excited about and value because we’re learning a lot from everything folks are trying to do in the marketplace, which is enriching what we do. Lexis kindly invited me to moderate “Redesigning Legal Practice” in this era of agentic AI, where AI can handle complex tasks, chain them together and do amazing things that go beyond just answering questions. This was one of several panels.
We had an amazing keynote by Jeff Bleich, GC of Anthropic, and panels focused on legal practice, everything going on with AI and agentic AI, the business of law and client needs. And then the panel that Nik ran on the future of legal education, one of the most pressing issues, too. I always feel that, as a moderator, I get to introduce people and then get out of the way of the talent. We had some amazing thought leaders who are doing interesting things in the marketplace. Danielle Benecke, founder and global head of the machine learning practice at Baker McKenzie; Ilona Logvinova, chief AI officer at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer; and Kurt Chauviere, senior managing director at Blackstone. They gave us so many exciting dimensions of what they’re trying to do, and it was very insightful. One of the points that came out is that much of the work and thinking need to go into restructuring the processes around AI. The panel posed the question of whether we’re retrofitting, just changing little things around the edges, while the basic structures of the firm stay in place, like the pyramid structure and the billable hour, and we sprinkle AI over it to just streamline the old ways of doing things versus a rebuild where we think about how legal services can be made available in an AI-centric, client-centric way. But that’s really hard to do when you come from a traditional law firm, so a lot of them are still in a retrofitting era. The folks on the panel gave us a really good sense of what rebuilding means through some examples. That’s been going on for a long time. We’re just doing it better and more efficiently, maybe at lower cost, and we can make this available to more clients now because we can scale our talent in different ways. But the panelists also hinted at new legal products that legal professionals can now offer, which weren’t available to us in the past.
Ari Kaplan: What should law schools, law departments and law firms do regarding training programs, and how should they adapt them to prepare lawyers for an emerging AI-native practice?
Nik Reed: Our panel included Stefanie Lindquist, dean of the WashU School of Law. She’s been incredibly transformative over the past two years, thinking about how we bring AI into the curriculum, not just making tools available to law students but making them part of the teaching. Similarly, Hugh Carlson, the CEO and managing partner at Three Crowns, one of the world’s largest international arbitration law firms. He has been thinking about how we use AI to teach our young attorneys and gave us some really cool examples of practicing cross-examining witnesses with AI. In their firm, they developed an AI bot. The young attorneys, before they go into court, practice with AI, which I thought was really cool. And then Alex, the third panelist, is the head of AI innovation at Factor, a managed services company. They’ve created Sensemaker Academy and brought it to law firms and companies to teach attorneys how to use AI. He remarked that everyone accepts this is part of what you’re going to be doing, but people don’t know what that means. Beyond spell-checking your email or reformatting a document, we’re at this fascinating moment because everyone knows it’s about to do a lot more, and it’s going to happen really quickly, and they’re puzzling together what that is. The common thing we heard, whether at law school, at the firm or in-house, was that we’re at the tipping point. People are like, “OK, we’ve been dabbling, and now we’re going all in. Let’s launch experiments and see what works because no one quite knows what the thing that’s going to hold is going to be.”
Ari Kaplan: In my panel discussion, I was lucky to speak with Lorie Almon, chairman and managing partner of Seyfarth Shaw; Lacey Bundy, executive vice president and general counsel at PetSmart; and Anton Levchik, chief financial officer at Seward & Kissel. They all talked about this idea of trying to find the answer. Whether we’re talking about pricing, the billable hour or law firm economics in general, corporations want the same things law firms do, and they’re trying to figure out how to get there collaboratively. From an educational and future practice standpoint, there were many similarities on that theme.
Roland Vogl: Lorie said we need to be radically transparent with our clients to collaboratively figure out the value firms bring to the legal department. How do we charge for this value we’re creating, since the billable hour doesn’t seem to be the right currency anymore? But it’s all pretty fluid. There are no specific best practices yet. There’s ideation and potential paths forming, but nothing’s been settled. We’re in this phase of experimentation. At one point, I’m not sure I can completely repeat it the way he said it because he was so eloquent. Jeff Bleich and you moderated an amazing fireside chat with him, where he said he tells his junior lawyers you never get dinged for making a mistake. You get dinged when you’re not taking on complex enough problems that let you make a mistake. There were challenges that arose from my panel, too, around how we integrate human expertise with AI.
Ari Kaplan: The discussion with Jeff was so inspiring because he emphasized the profession’s humanity and the importance of preserving it while supplementing it with technology, rather than letting technology lead. What skills stood out as essential as we approach this next generation of legal?
Nik Reed: Part of the conversation was that this graduating class is the first GPT era of graduates. So we’re going to have AI-native graduates entering law schools and eventually filtering into law firms and in-house roles. There was a lot of discussion about what it takes, as a lawyer and as a user, to use and understand these tools. Jeff said creativity and a little appetite for risk, since we don’t know exactly how this will help you. We’re at the point where the inevitability of all of us using AI in our day-to-day lives has become apparent. It’s accepted. I remember in 2014, when Daniel and I first presented Ravel at a law firm and explained what we were doing, there was a partner in the back of the room who laughed and said, “Guys, there’s no room for the letters A and I in the law.” That was 2014. More than 10 years later, that’s all there is room for. We’ve come a long way, and it’s pretty exciting.
Ari Kaplan: Your mission for your discussion was to figure out where agentic AI fits in, and so what did you take away as the most likely practical use case for agentic AI in the next 12 months?
Roland Vogl: Some of the conversation focused on the tension between traditional firms and AI-native law firms. It sounded like some of the clients of these AI-native firms initially focused on lower-level contract review. NDAs came up several times. But it’s pretty clear that this is only trending upward in terms of the complexity of legal tasks these players will take on. We also talked about how some of those AI-native firms are hiring people who previously worked at very high-profile law firms, including managing partners, to signal to the market that they can take on very complex legal tasks. We got some examples of how agentic AI can help create a global compliance road map, pulling data from different countries and allowing a client to navigate work that may have been extremely expensive for human lawyers to manage before. We got examples of cyber breach compliance tools where agentic AI plays a role. The sky is the limit for the specific workflows and legal skills that agentic AI will handle. Greg Dickason, chief technology officer at LexisNexis, gave an overview of some of these concepts that are still pretty new. He covered legal skills that AI can handle now, which are part of the offerings of legal AI platforms, such as LexisNexis and Anthropic. And then how does that relate to workflows? How does it relate to harnesses? It was very interesting to learn how leading legal AI platform providers are thinking about releasing these new skills and making them available to the market. And it’s not only the skills they make available; they also provide the technology that allows law firm customers to create their own skills. That’s part of the transformation that we’ll see or the learning that we’ll have to do in firms as to understanding what it is we’re doing here and then thinking about how to leverage AI and agentic AI to replicate some of those workflows. Think about the human oversight layer coming in and how to evaluate the outputs. That’s a big role for human lawyers to figure out. One of the takeaways from my panel was that AI is amazing in its capabilities and the outputs it can generate, but the bottleneck is human cognition. It will become clearer in the very near future how to integrate humans; how to achieve a level of comfort with AI outputs; and the frameworks and environments in which, as a human lawyer, you can rely on the outputs that agentic AI generates.
Ari Kaplan: One of my favorite aspects of your panel was that the panelists started asking each other questions. They’re such gifted members of the community, and they were curious about what each other thought, so they could bring that back. How do you suggest that law firm and law department leaders balance the promise and pitfalls of implementing AI at this stage?
Nik Reed: There was a point in our conversation where responsibility came up. Hugh Carlson has been a litigator for a long time, and the managing partner of a law firm spoke about our responsibility as lawyers to understand AI and what it can and can’t do, and, as Roland said, to verify its output. Obviously, the recent news has included many examples of attorneys who apparently have not verified the output, so there are two sides to the equation. On the one hand, it’s understanding the products you’re using. If you’re generating a motion or a brief and you’re citing caselaw, much as we used LexisNexis to do it in law school, use Protégé to do it today because the citator is built into the product. I think it’s incumbent on us to understand what each product does and where it can benefit us. When can you use Claude? When can you use Protégé? How can they complement each other? What are the trade-offs? And take that idea of responsibility as seriously with the use of AI as we do with every other part of being a good lawyer. That was really interesting to me. That was the cautionary side, but I think the overarching positive was that we are going to be able to do so many things that have been time-consuming and stressful, making the practice of law not the most attractive industry for everyone, much faster. Is this the moment when a lot of attorneys get to spend more of their time doing the things higher up the value chain? It’s been a recurring theme in legal tech for 15 years, but the sentiment today is that we might be there again. Less rote activity, less painful discovery and document review, more time thinking, negotiating and doing the higher-value activities that is why you went to law school in the first place.
Ari Kaplan: In the fireside chat keynote, Jeff emphasized the importance of having the tools work in concert, so that you can trust and verify simultaneously.
Nik Reed: I thought it was fascinating how he wove together his experience as a very young attorney Shepardizing for the first time, and the attorneys at the law firm thinking he was a magician because they had no idea LexisNexis existed on a computer yet. They were still writing with pens. Fast-forward, it’s the same paradigm again. It’s let’s wow partners with how fast we can turn things around, but with the same rigor that a good Shepardizing session would’ve brought back in the day.
Ari Kaplan: What was the consensus on your panel about what it really means, from a practical standpoint, to redesign legal practice?
Roland Vogl: Redesign means doing everything that’s already going on faster and at radically lower cost, as came out of your panel. It seems some of those outside players are promising significantly reduced rates for certain tasks. There’s also excitement that law firms and legal professionals can now take on tasks previously not considered part of what a law firm does, like predicting certain risks and alerting clients to specific risks, rather than just being reactive when a lawsuit has been filed and gearing up for that. But I want to go back to Nik’s point. Throughout the event, there was excitement about what it means to be a lawyer, and many people said it is one of the most exciting times to be a lawyer. People go to a lawyer when they face really complex questions and being able to help clients with those while having the drudgery handled by AI or AI supporting us. But how do we train the next generation of lawyers? We talked about simulation tools. Some of my colleagues at Stanford are doing exciting work on that. We talked about digital twins, trying to capture human expertise and an organization’s entire institutional knowledge. There’s all this excitement and new opportunities that agentic AI brings. But Hugh threw in this little wrinkle, which was that something might be lost. Nobody enjoyed being in a warehouse, going through due diligence and doing work that is part of the apprenticeship model for becoming a lawyer. We could have spent that time better, but now that we don’t have to do this anymore, we’re losing something. There are questions about how we train the next generation, and maybe it’s about how we’re training, which came from what we learned from the law school dean.
Nik Reed: Personally, I don’t espouse the view that just because we had to do it, the next generation has to do it. I thought Stefanie made a great point when she said they’re not teaching people to write in cursive anymore, and it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be a good lawyer.
Ari Kaplan: I asked Jeff, “Is 2026 a good year to become a lawyer?” He said yes and was very encouraging. Then someone on your panel said, “This is the best time in legal; it’s just a wonderfully exciting time.” I loved how all the sessions built on each other. Jeff really set the tone. It was inspiring and informative. Then your panel, Roland, started us off with a great discussion of innovation and transforming the profession. I was lucky to interview a group of people who talked about what the model looks like, how we are going to finance it, what pricing looks like, and what outcome-based and value-driven pricing looks like. And then you, Nik, really capped it off by talking about how we shape the generation. So what advice would you give a new associate, a law firm leader or a corporate department leader?
Nik Reed: Be curious, but do so carefully. Take risks, but do so responsibly. Ten years from now, when we look back, it will have changed the practice of law. I don’t know that I believe the billable hour is going away. I don’t know that AI robot lawyers will be serving people tomorrow or anytime soon. But what a lawyer looks like 10 years from now will be very different. Much as it has changed. It’s going to change a lot faster, and that’s really exciting. For this new generation of young attorneys right now, you’re there in that moment, and you’re defining it, and that is super exciting to be at that moment where it’s going to change. The No. 1 takeaway is that you should be excited. It’s cool, and you’re part of what it means to make that change. In an early Sam Altman podcast interview, he mentioned that when Garry Kasparov lost to AI in chess, everyone said it was the death of chess, and it turns out that 10 years later, chess has never been so popular because no one wants to see an AI robot play an AI robot in chess. We want to see people playing chess. There’s an analogy for the law there. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but we want people to represent us in court. We don’t want AI to represent us in court. We want what Jeff spoke about. That human side of the law is quintessentially part of the law, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It’s going to be enhanced, modified and changed. But it’s there.
Ari Kaplan: One of my favorite takeaways from your discussion was that we don’t know what we don’t know. We may not even be able to anticipate, plan for or even imagine what’s possible. At the end of my panel, Lacey Bundy, the general counsel at PetSmart, talked about an even more collaborative and empowered profession, and I feel like that’s the goal; it was a real theme of our session. Roland Vogl, Nik Reed, it’s really been a privilege. Thank you both so much.
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.
