The legal industry is 20 years behind the curve when it comes to tech adoption, according to venture capitalist Dave Yuan.

But law firms and in-house teams can no longer ignore the software tools that other sectors have been buying to boost efficiency, he says.

Exhibit A: the investment industry. Two decades ago, he says, venture capital firms started to reduce their emphasis on friends and acquaintances to find deals in favor of software and data, and they hired scientists to sift through it all.

• “It’s easy to recognize in law, because we saw this in our own industry,” Yuan said.

Yuan’s firm, Tidemark Capital, last week led a $23 million fundraising round for legal tech startup Nexl, which makes software for Big Law firms to manage their client relationships.

Tidemark is also an investor in the legal business software startup Clio and in Toast, the software you use to tip your baristas and waiters. It has invested in operating software for accounting, trade contracting and agriculture.

Tech, he says, is now primed to revolutionize law.

“It’s a massive end market, but candidly a little bit of a tech laggard,” he said.

Also Read:

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Can artificial intelligence replace law professors at office hours? A team of researchers from a handful of law schools set out to answer that question by testing Google’s NotebookLM, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The models were tasked with digesting a patent law casebook and answering some of the most common questions professors have gotten from students over the years. Earlier this year the team published its findings, and in a segment on Under Review—a newly launched podcast from Stanford Law School and the Practicing Law Institute—Stanford Law professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette discusses what the team discovered and how the models performed.

Brandon Johnson, mayor of Chicago, during a news conference in Chicago, Ill. on Sept. 2, 2025.

Photographer: Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg

The result: There were big performance differences among the three models, Ouellette said. But even the best left much to be desired, with “a large number of answers that were unacceptable and in the sense that we thought harmful for students who are trying to learn patent law from them.”

Other segments in the episode include a deep dive into recent changes in Delaware corporate law and a chat with Lyft’s former legal chief-turned-president about career growth and why being a GC isn’t for everyone. Listen Here

Monica Zent wears multiple hats as the founder of alternative legal services provider ZentLaw and as an investor who’s also launched legal tech companies. She chatted with Evan Ochsner about legal operations and AI’s impact on the future of the industry. Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: How much power does legal ops have to drive tech change and how much are they at the whims of their GC?
Legal ops definitely can have a lot of say, and legal ops can absolutely have a significant amount of influence over the adoption of AI, the adoption of legal tech, even the adoption of additional legal services solutions like ALSPs. Legal ops often were representing the legal team on AI cross-functional committees. They were advocating for these tools, and they were the ones sort of on the front lines evaluating what tools to bring on board, as far as AI goes.

Q: How does the legal ops role change once a company has adopted AI?
They are very involved in the data around ROI, what that needs to look like, how to measure that. Legal ops, traditionally, is often involved in making the case for technology in a legal department, and that case becomes even more critical now with AI, given the top-down pressure. Not only the C-suite, but even corporate boards, are now asking for ROI. Legal ops is uniquely positioned, but also traditionally positioned, to produce that kind of output.

Q: Does AI itself have the potential to disrupt some legal ops jobs?
Might there be some elimination of some legal ops or ops facing roles? There might be, absolutely. But might there be also an emergence of a different type of legal ops role? I believe there will be. While there may be some kind of base level work that gets displaced by AI on the ops front, there’s now going to be maybe a heightened degree of work, or different type of work, that’s more AI focused.

We probably will see some migration of some ops functions that are displaced by what can be accomplished through legal tech with AI. But then we’re also going to see the emergence of some roles.

Q: How can legal expand its AI influence throughout the company?
The general counsels have a significant level of influence, and in some cases, perhaps a more critical level of influence, because they are receiving that pressure to adopt AI firsthand from the C-suite and the board. So they have to answer to the C-suite and the board on this. The GCs, combined with heads of legal ops both driving that AI adoption strategy and pushing that forward: That’s where the magic happens. That’s where these departments can really accelerate.

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