The Challenge: The legal industry has long been cautious about adopting new technology. That's old news. However, let's not forget that, for years, legal tech was built for a very specific crowd: BigLaw giants, Magic Circle firms, and Fortune 500s. Everyone else? Mostly left out of the party. So while the flashy demos were happening in some New York skyscraper boardrooms, the rest of the legal market was watching from the sidelines, wondering why everything was either overkill or wildly overpriced.

Costly Toys, Tiny Reach: The old model of legal tech was... well, not exactly built for the masses. The upfront costs were steep from the get-go: implementation fees, licensing fees, training, onboarding, integration headaches. And even after all that, the ROI was usually some vague promise on a PowerPoint slide. Vendors kept basically selling complexity like it was a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, solo practitioners, mid-sized firms, and entire regions outside the US were basically told, “This isn’t for you.” Even as the rest of the tech world moved faster, smarter, and cheaper.

Internal Barriers: Well, let's not pretend it was just external forces that brought us here. We as legal professionals have to own a piece of this too. For a long time, we told ourselves we were immune to disruption. "We work with language. Language is nuanced. Computers can't handle nuance." That was the party line. Well, plot twist: GenAI happened. Now it’s no longer about if tech can keep up. It’s about how fast it’s changing the game by drafting, redlining, formatting, proofreading, summarizing, negotiating.

Our Approach: At AutoDox, we figured it was time to build something that legal teams actually want to use: fast, affordable, and doesn’t take six months and a PhD to roll out. We saw the need for a solution that can deliver real results from day one. Our new Word add-in, Sonar Legal, brings serious AI power to the game. No puff. No red tape. No nonsense. Just tech that actually works.