EP30: Who Gets the Good Tech? Levelling Up Legal AI with TeareOne
Bridging the Legal Tech Pricing Gap
James explains a structural problem in legal tech: most AI-focused legal tech startups, operating with limited budgets and sales capacity, understandably target the largest law firms first, setting pricing and minimum volume requirements well beyond what smaller firms can justify. The result is an uneven playing field, where the biggest firms consistently get access to the best technology first. TeareOne's role is to work directly with providers to restructure pricing and shared minimum volumes, making that same technology genuinely accessible to lower-volume, smaller firms.
Where Legal Tech Innovation Is Moving Fastest
James points to document drafting automation, always paired with human lawyer oversight, as an area attracting significant investment and interest. However, he's candid about a persistent problem in the market: a lack of transparency around both real-world capability and actual cost, alongside products that lack a clearly identifiable use case — leaving law firms unable to easily judge whether a tool will genuinely save time, save money, and benefit clients within their existing workflow.
TeareOne's Three Levels of Support
TeareOne operates across a spectrum of involvement depending on a client's needs:
- Simple introductions — connecting a firm with a known solution for a specific workflow problem.
- Due diligence and supplier management — evaluating options and managing supplier relationships on a client's behalf.
- Piloting quick-adoption tools — particularly web and mobile apps requiring minimal integration, which James notes have a much lower adoption barrier than complex system integrations or replacements, which tend to meet the most resistance.
Why Lawyers Resist New Technology — and How to Overcome It
James is refreshingly honest that resistance to new legal tech, including from himself as a practising lawyer, often isn't really about risk aversion — it's about not understanding the risk. When risks can be clearly identified, explained, and shown to be properly mitigated, lawyers are, in his experience, generally willing adopters of technology with a clear advantage. Framing this as an education challenge, rather than an inherent cultural resistance to change, is central to how TeareOne approaches client engagement — including building a broader ecosystem of partners in areas like training, software escrow services, IT, and compliance and ISO accreditation support.
Data Risk Goes Far Beyond GDPR
One of the most valuable insights in the conversation is James's breakdown of how narrowly most lawyers define "data" risk — typically personal or confidential data, often visualised as not much more than a spreadsheet — when the real picture is far broader, encompassing audio, video, and other data types entirely. Due diligence at TeareOne goes well beyond server location and encryption standards, extending into ISO accreditation, EU AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act compliance, and operational resilience — particularly important given SRA requirements that a law firm's practice must continue uninterrupted, meaning the underlying technology's resilience is itself a compliance consideration, not just a technical one.
The UK's Legal Tech Advantage
James is notably positive about the UK's position in legal tech, citing strong early-stage innovation and support — including alumni of the National Cyber Security Centre's startup programmes — though he flags funding availability as a genuine constraint on scaling. He also highlights a distinct advantage UK-based legal tech providers have over international, particularly US-based, competitors: UK law firms strongly prefer providers who understand UK legal norms and offer contract terms suited to the local market, rather than a one-size-fits-all international approach. In James's experience, smaller UK-based providers are also often more genuinely passionate about, and better at clearly explaining, their specific use case than larger, more generic international vendors.
The Case for "Levelling Up" Smaller Law Firms
Looking ahead, James is most excited about niche, single-purpose tools — products that do one specific thing exceptionally well, such as summarising a particular document type in an interrogable way, or automating the client onboarding due diligence process. For the smaller, resource- and time-poor firms James primarily works with, the priority isn't sweeping digital transformation, but targeted tools that meaningfully save time and money with minimal integration effort.
He frames this within a broader concern about market competitiveness: with thousands of smaller law firms across the UK unable to match the technology budgets of the largest players, accessible AI tools aren't just about productivity — they're increasingly a matter of competitive survival for firms further down the market.