Filevine Unveils “Lois” to Orchestrate Legal AI (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Please welcome to the stage, Filevine CEO, Ryan Anderson. Let's go.

[00:00:17] Speaker 2: This is going to be so much fun. Round of applause for the marketing team. It is gorgeous in here. Oh, my word. Good night. I cannot believe how beautiful it is. I am so excited to be here with all of you. It is such a fun time. Lex is one of my favorite times of the year. It's a little stressful, but it is going to be a great week. Team, we have Alex Spiro here. He is Elon's lawyer. I think the guy's got some stories. He's Alec Baldwin's lawyer. He's also got some stories. This is going to be a ton of fun. We have Vanessa Van Edwards who's coming on right after me. And we have Better Call Saul. That is right. Saul Goodman is actually here. He's going to be in the room. He's going to be interviewed by Nathan Morris. Those are two interesting characters in the same room together. I've got to be honest, like, I'm pretty excited to see how this turns out. Bob Odenkirk is going to be so fun. So, over the next two days, we will walk you through everything we have been up to. It's been a momentous year at Filevine. But, of course, I've got to tell you, one of my very favorite bands is here. We're going to talk a little bit about them in just a minute. But, my word, the Turnpike Troubadours are going to be so fun on Wednesday night. Just an incredible group. All right, you guys. You have been waiting for some features from us for a long time. And it gives me no greater pleasure than to come here and tell you that some of those, not all, not every feature on your wish list is coming today, but some really, really good ones. I can't wait to show them to you. Now, I think most of you, or a lot of you at least, know, because I talk about this a lot, I have six children. And we are exhausted all the time. And by we, I mean mostly my wife, who's sitting up here in front. And somehow, every year, she gets us out to take a family picture. And there's got to be a theme, right? The family picture must have a theme. And by total coincidence, this is our family picture this year. This is my wife and kids. And as you can tell, guys, I've got some teens. I've got some teenagers. And these teenagers, they're snarky, and they do not think I'm cool. But I kind of think they're pretty cool. And they have taught me some words. Let's cook. We're cooking. No cap. I've learned all these amazing words. But I think I've got one that applies for all of us here today. As my daughter would say, we are AuraMaxing at this conference. It is going to be an absolute blast. A Lex for the ages. All right. This is the best customer base in legal tech. It is my true joy to spend time with all of you. Some of you I've known for years. I saw Jason Burris walk in last night. Jason Burris has been a customer, I think, for seven, eight years. It is so fun to see all of you come here and to reunite and talk about what we do best, which is represent people and companies and people in trouble and citizens who need us. I often find myself awed by the work all of you do. We say that very seriously. You have no idea how often we'll get out of a client meeting, whether it's a current customer or a new customer. And somebody will tell us, did you just hear what that law firm did? Did you hear what that lawyer did? Did you hear about that verdict? Did you hear about that defense? Did you hear how they won that trial? Did you hear how they helped that person in need? It is so inspiring to us to watch you pursue justice. Filevine, maybe more than anyone else, knows that lawyers and the important work you do make this country great. We love lawyers. I am fond of telling anybody who will listen, the United States of America has a GDP of $30 trillion. The best economy in the world by far. It's not even close. And yet, we are among the most litigious. Well, how can that be? It's because our system, our litigiousness, isn't a bug. It's a feature. It is America's commitment to accountability that drives innovation. Our commitment to the rule of law means that when you invest in an American business, you can be sure you have redress. You can be sure that the courts will do the right thing almost always. And when they don't, you can appeal. And their verdicts are read out loud. Their reasoning is clear and understood and public and transparent. We might disagree, but we know the rules and we know how the system works. And it makes America great. So we are not successful in spite of our legal system. We are successful because of it. And you all are the protagonists in that system. We elevate you. We support you. We love working with you. And you are zealous advocates, but you also know that that zealousness has a time and a place to be set aside. You know when professionalism, civility begin and end. And you know when community starts. This is your Filevine community. Your legal tech community. When lawyers are at their best, justice is at its best. Our aim is the exact same as yours. To bend the arc of history towards justice. I am personally so proud of this community and all the work you do. And I often say to my team, you just have no idea how cool our customers are. And we have a lot of new employees at Filevine. And so a lot of them are here today for the first time. Some of them have traveled here from around the world to meet you. Spend time with them. They have no idea how cool you are yet. And once they get to meet you, it will inspire them to do even better things. So this is a very fun time for us. And I say with joy, warmth and gratitude, welcome. To my hometown, the gorgeous Salt Lake City. This is my home and our headquarters. But it is not our only home. Filevine has grown quite a bit over the past few years. Of course we have an office in Salt Lake City. We also have an office in downtown Chicago on Wacker Drive. We have an office in the Flatiron District in New York City. We have offices in Prague, Czech Republic. And in Bratislava, Slovakia. Filevine is building world-class products with a team from around the world. We are so bullish on the future of legal and AI. You have no idea. I spend all my free time thinking about this. I have become somebody who is very unfun at parties. Because I basically have one thing I want to talk about all the time. We love AI and how it applies to the law. But not everyone shares my view. Many AI leaders are predicting a very tumultuous time for lawyers. In fact, they paint a picture that is pretty dark. Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner's fund. You might remember that last name. He runs a fund that invested in open AI early. And somebody who works for his fund is a guy named Philip. Philip recently said, We are not investing in AI companies who serve lawyers. We are only investing in companies that want to replace them. His view is widely held. It is not just one AI leader. It is everywhere. Across the spectrum. Some of the people who hold themselves out to be the smartest folks in Silicon Valley are telling you that you are going to be replaced. Elon, who has never exaggerated about anything ever, said, AI will soon beat doctors and lawyers by a large margin. Let's talk about this guy. This poor soul. He has no idea that I am talking about him today. Jared Friedman is a managing director for a group called Y Combinator. How many have heard of Y Combinator in this room? A lot. We have smart folks. Y Combinator is an incubator. It is kind of a funny word. But it is basically a place that very early companies go to learn how to be a great company. Getting into Y Combinator, getting into this group is extremely challenging. It is harder to get into Y Combinator than it is to get into Harvard or Yale. It is very prestigious and very influential. And Jared Friedman is a managing director. He is a leader. His voice matters. Now, you might think Jared Friedman is super smart and he has done all sorts of incredible things and that is why he can be a leader at this group. To be honest, I have no idea why that is the case. He founded a company called Scribe that went absolutely nowhere. And I think he is kind of a dork. And I think he is kind of wrong about a lot of stuff. But when he talks, people listen. Especially young founders. And here is what he just told young founders who want to get into Y Combinator.

[00:10:15] Speaker 3: At YC, we would like to fund more founders working on full stack AI companies. What is a full stack AI company, you ask? Let me explain. Suppose you believe that LLMs are now able to automate a lot of legal work. There are two things you might do with that insight. You could build an AI agent and sell it to law firms. That is what most people do. Or you could start your own law firm, staff it with AI agents, and compete with the existing law firms. And that, my friends, is going full stack. You could do this for any industry, especially one dominated by slow-moving incumbents. Instead of selling to the dinosaurs, you could simply beat them. If you are ambitious enough to work on an idea like this, we would love to work with you.

[00:10:56] Speaker 2: Instead of selling to the dinosaurs, you can simply beat them. And that is going full stack, ladies and gentlemen. Lest you think he is bluffing, this is already started. Legal AI startup Udia opens an office under the Arizona Supreme Court program. The founder, the CFO and founder, said the following just a few weeks ago. Udia increasingly sees traditional law firms as competitors. You are the traditional law firms. If you have any guess as to what that is. This sentiment that professional work will go away is widely held in Silicon Valley. Here is what is crazy. They don't have better technology than us. In fact, some of these companies, many of them actually, have reached out to us to try to buy Filevine to run these AI law firms. They just think they are going to use the technology better than you can. But they don't know our customers. They don't get how smart you are. Dario Amadei. Now this guy is nothing like Philip Clark. Dario Amadei is an incredible AI leader in Silicon Valley. If you don't know who he is, you should. He is a very influential man. He is very smart and he runs a very good company. We love Anthropic at Filevine. We are huge fans. We are customers of Anthropic. If you have used, chat with your case. You have used Anthropic. So, a very good model. Maybe the world's best foundational model. And its leader has a view that is pretty interesting. He and I, we don't think the same way about the future of work. Even though he is a defining leader for our era, we disagree very strongly. Just about a year ago, as AI was becoming a very important topic for professionals, Dario wrote an essay. And the point of the essay was to get everybody to calm down. AI is going to be fine. In fact, he titled his essay, They are Machines of Loving Grace. The essay is meant to make you feel really good about Anthropic's intentions. It's meant to make you think, Okay, everything is going to be fine. And Dario's inspiration is a poem written many years ago. But he selectively edited the title of that poem. The actual title is very different. The title is, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Don't worry. Your jobs will go away. What brings you meaning and fulfillment will be gone. But our machines will watch over you. They'll be loving and gracious. I, for one, am not interested in a world where AI is judge, jury, and prosecutor. Hard freaking pass, you guys. We are not doing that. We will build AI tools centered around you and your work. You are the hero in this story. You are the human with intention who can help your customers. We seek neither love nor grace from these machines. We seek their utility. For us, for humanity, for our clients, for justice. We want these models to do what great tools have always done. Amplify human intention. For the lawyer that stands up in a courtroom for his client, that is who we want this for. For the woman who says, I am going to fight because I know it is right, that is who we're building for. We care about you and the work you do. You wake up every single morning and you go into a job that is hard. And you represent and you advocate with intention. That's who inspires us. Every feature we build at FileVine, be it AI based or for FileVine Core, aims to do one thing and that is to make the legal professional better. As the client is the center of your work, you, the customer, are the center of ours. But building intelligence centered around the legal pro requires a different approach. Let me tell you why. Legal AI is challenged. Why does legal AI fail often? These products lacked context. Most legal AI tools are similar to a new law clerk. This is a law clerk who isn't up to speed on your cases, doesn't know the local rules, doesn't have access to your firm's documents and data, and everything you taught him one day, he forgets the next. Maybe you've worked with some people who are already like this, but your AI should be much better. There is a way to fix this though. And there are great companies. Cognition Labs builds a product called Devin AI and they have figured out how to handle context. Here's what they say. Walden Yan, the co-founder, says prompt engineering was coined as a term for the effort needing to write your task in a way an LLM can understand. Context engineering is the next level and it takes more nuance and is effectively the number one job of engineers building AI agents. Walden goes on to say that there are five pillars for context engineering and they are as follows. RAG, we'll talk about that in a second. Retrieval Augmented Generation. I'm not going to get too techy here, but a little. Prompt engineering, state and history, memory, and structured outputs. Those are the five things you need to have to build a great AI tool that actually gets the job done. So here are the five pillars written out. Prompt engineering. Let's talk about prompt engineering first. Almost every AI product you have will use some version of prompt engineering. If it's a simple AI product, you put a prompt in front of it. Sometimes the prompt can be complex, sometimes it can be simple, and it should give you something like a legal output. Almost every product does this by now. RAG. RAG is a little different. Retrieval Augmented Generation is when you're trying to find something, usually semantically, which basically is kind of like fuzzy search, right? It's actually going to find something related to what you want, even if you didn't ask in quite the right way. RAG is really good at this. Filevine is really good at this. We employ RAG. If you use chat with your case today, if you say, hey, show me the last time I talked to the client, it should pull that up correctly using Retrieval Augmented Generation. Again, this doesn't set Filevine apart. Most AI companies are doing some form of this. But the next three are much more challenging. If you follow the AI conversation at all, you know that memory is a problem for LLMs. They really can't remember very well what you've been doing the day before and certainly not five years of case history. But Filevine can. The more you have used Filevine, you have actually been investing. You didn't know this, but you have been investing for this day to come because your data is in there already. And so the memory systems that Filevine will build can reach back into your Filevine and pull data from any case at any point in time as far back as you need to go. State and history, meaning what is happening now and what happened before and what needs to happen. For the AI model to actually be productive, you must know state and history. Well, everyone in Filevine knows the case phase is exactly where the case sits, but also what was the last task, what was the status, all of that is sitting in Filevine today. The more you use it, the better your AI will be. And lastly, structured outputs. We think this is an area where we do particularly well. Instead of giving you some text from an LLM that might be something that can get you started, we want to provide court-ready filings. That is our aim, structured outputs. If you can do all of those, then you can build great AI products. But for this to work, you have to orchestrate against each one of these. So Turnpike Troubadours. I have been talking about this band for like three or four months ever since my EA Brenna introduced me to them. I'm a little obsessed. My poor family has had to listen to me describe in excruciating detail exactly why this band is so good. I got to tell you, they are not catching the vision. They are far less interested in this than I am. But they are still a very good analogy for orchestration. When they play, just like any other great band, they have multiple things happening at once. In the song you just listened to when I came out on stage, three guitarists, two people playing the fiddle, a drummer and a keyboardist. All doing the exact right thing at the exact right moment. If they didn't, the music wouldn't sound good. The same is true for AI. If you don't orchestrate your data and your agents in the right way at the right moment at the right time, it sounds wrong. So you have to orchestrate your data in order for it to work. Again, if you took any one of these instruments out or played it at the wrong time, you would get slop. Something that's uninteresting and not beautiful. But the good news is Filevine has always been a context system. If you are on Filevine, you are already much further ahead in your AI journey than most. In fact, the more adherent you are about putting notes in Filevine, dates, tasks, information, documents, everything using the client portal, the more you do that, the better your AI experience will be. You are literally investing in your firm's future at this point by putting data into Filevine. But it is now our job to orchestrate that context that you have spent years developing in your firm. Because no matter how good the underlying AI product is, without orchestrated context, you are lost. Now, context orchestration requires a new way of thinking. And we're going to talk a little bit about this. I'm not going to spend too much time, but we are developing something totally new. Both a new framework and a new set of products built on orchestration. To orchestrate, you have to have an operational system. Think about it like this. When you ask Sidebar a simple question, the most simple question, what's gone on in this case and what do I need to do next? That's a very simple AI question that you can ask in Filevine today. To answer that question though, you have to know so much. You have to know all the tasks that have happened in Filevine. You have to know the upcoming tasks. You have to know what the users have done and not done. You have to know the calendar. You have to know the deadlines. You have to know what the client wants out of their case. And you have to know what the partner's strategic direction is. All of that has to be held in your head at the same time if a human were to answer that. And it has to be orchestrated if an AI is going to answer that. Now I'm going to show you an image of sort of what that's going to look like in the very near future. I'm sorry to step on the toes of some of my product team who are going to show you this later. But we have data sources that we can now orchestrate all of this against to produce amazing results. And it's up to us to sequence it correctly. But again, the point is, if you don't put it all into Filevine, if you just have one data source, like Docs, like a lot of other products, you're going to get something with incomplete responses. Whereas with Filevine, you're going to get everything. If it knows everything about your case, then it should give you the right answer. And the truth is, Filevine's product vision has remained the same for years. You've been hearing me say this at the last conference and years before that. A single pane of glass for legal. You can tell something is good if it remains stable across ages. The single pane of glass vision is stable. It worked before AI and it works after AI. But today that single pane of glass is driven by an operating system orchestrating all of your data behind the scenes. Now what is doing that? What technology is doing that? Well, we want to introduce you to Lois. Lois is the operational intelligence system sitting inside of your law firm. Now, Lois is your legal operating system, meaning every firm's legal intelligence operating system will be different. It's Lois for short, of course, but what is a Lois? What is your Lois? She's your orchestrator. She harmonizes your data sources, weaving them together to deliver great results for your firm. Importantly, the more you use her, the better she gets. Now, Lois is not a new Filevine product. Don't worry, I'm not trying to upsell you. I know we do that from time to time, but that's not happening here. If you are a Filevine AI customer, you will have Lois for free in November. But Lois is going to do some awesome things for you. I'm going to walk you through a little bit of how we do this. So, here's how Lois thinks about orchestration. There are sort of four main categories. Lois will orchestrate across agents that Filevine builds, context that you yourself have developed inside of Filevine, products that we build, and then you, the most important category by far, is the ingenuity of the legal pro. As I wrap up here, I get to do something in this speech that drives my team crazy. I get to talk about products that they haven't announced yet. They really like it when I do this. But they're going to announce most of these in just a couple days, or just today, today and tomorrow. So, we'll talk about a couple. We have Draft AI, a new drafting product that is chat-based. I can't wait to show you that. That product will be orchestrated via Lois. Chat with your case. Orchestrated via Lois, there will be big new upgrades to chat with your case. Big upgrades to Medcron. In fact, the team that built Medcron is actually here. They will speak to you. You'll get to meet them. They are so incredible. Depositions. There will be new depositions products that are so incredible. Again, these products will be orchestrated by Lois, and then we will take the data that comes out of those products to make other areas of Filevine better. Context. There are products that develop context in Filevine. We have DataBridge. Now, none of you have heard of DataBridge, but you should. We announced this, I believe, today or tomorrow. It is in the IT keynote. You should go to the IT keynote if you care about accessing a lot of data all at once inside of Filevine. We are so excited to announce DataBridge to you all. I have heard from so many of you for so long. Basically, we would say, okay, we can give you your data like once a day. Is that good enough? No, that's not good enough. How about every hour? Is that good enough? No, that's not good enough. How about every 30 minutes? Is that good enough? No, that's not good enough. We said, finally, screw it. Okay, fine. We're just going to give you all of your data all the time whenever you want it, which sounds like my five-year-old, you know. But we're going to give it to you exactly when you need it in your real time. That's DataBridge. Field-level audit. Now, to anyone who's not a Filevine customer, you might say, that seems like a pretty boring feature. But if you have called me on the phone, like so many of you have had to do and have said, Ryan, somebody left my firm, and I think they changed a field, and I don't know what it said, field-level audits for you. Field suggestions I'm not going to tell you about quite yet, but you'll be very excited to see it. And lastly, agents. We will be talking about agents that we have developed at Filevine. We have agentic flow, and we're going to tease some agentic things that will come out later in the year in Foundry. But again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it is the legal professional that drives all this. None of this makes any sense at all. It doesn't do any work at all. Until you, the creative, high-context, legal professional, with years of judgment, asks Filevine what to do. So, Lois reflects your firm's way of operating. She's not an AI assistant. She is a way of working. She makes you better, and you make her better. She evolves and adapts based on your needs and your objectives. And she represents the way you do business and your best practices. She's coming in November of 2025, available for every AI customer at no cost. So, let's meet Lois.

[00:27:53] Speaker 4: Modern legal practice is not simply managed with AI. It is orchestrated, where every system moves in one intelligent rhythm, brought together by Lois.

[00:28:07] Speaker 3: What are we working on today?

[00:28:22] Speaker 1: How about that new logo, everybody? I am so excited. Thank you. That is all I have for you today. We'll talk soon. Bye, everybody. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com www.microsoft.com