The Last Ten Percent
At Aparti's SF Tech Week panel, the speakers broadly agreed that software will handle most legal paperwork and lawyers will be paid for their judgment.
By Aparti Editorial Team
On Monday, October 5, Aparti hosted LegalTech Beyond Drafting: AI, Automation & Billable Hours as part of SF Tech Week. With more than 350 people signed up, the room at Antler in San Francisco was full of family-law attorneys, legal-tech founders and investors. Antler was the partner and FlyTech the sponsor.
The panel, moderated by Aparti, brought together four perspectives: Igor Sheremet, CEO and co-founder of Aparti; Andrew Folsom, senior director at CBIZ Forensic Consulting Group; Dean Shapero, founder and CEO of FlyTech; and Jonny Blitstein, general partner at Am Tech VC.
Five Takeaways
Solo practitioners get leverage. Clients arrive less prepared, and firms now have to market themselves to win them. The upside, Igor Sheremet said, is that a solo lawyer with the right tools can handle work that once needed a staff.
The bottom tier disappears. Andrew Folsom has worked with lawyers who were still sending typewritten letters within the last decade. He expects roughly 30% of law firms, the ones that bill without getting results, to disappear within five years, while top lawyers gain capacity.
Private equity takes the back office. Dean Shapero pointed to a fast-growing trend: management companies backed by private equity take over billing, intake and document collection, increasingly with AI. Lawyers keep their brand, their legal work and their clients.
Regulators push back, then give way. Jonny Blitstein compared the moment to the streaming wars. Bar associations may resist at first, he said, but the rules on who can own a law firm are likely to shift.
Judgment is the product. Folsom estimated that 90% of legal work could run on a local PC. The last 10%, professional judgment, is what clients will keep paying experts for.
The professional judgment hasn't been replaced. All the math to get to the professional judgment is happening a lot faster.
Andrew Folsom, CBIZ
From the Floor
Audience questions came from Thomson Reuters Ventures, the Linux Foundation and a legal-tech founder from Latin America, among others. Asked how startups should sell to lawyers who bill in six-minute increments, Sheremet's advice was to skip the "we're an AI company" pitch, show up at the events where lawyers are, and build relationships.
On courts, he said simplicity matters most. When Aparti showed its software to a presiding judge in one of California's largest counties, the judge said they had never seen anything like it.
The Firm of 2031
Asked what a law firm will look like in five years, the panel described fewer, smaller and more tech-enabled firms, more consolidation, and more people able to get legal help.
About Aparti. Aparti is the AI-powered financial engine for divorce and beyond. In plain terms: court-grade math, a clean split and a fresh start. Everyone on a case, whether that's the lawyer, the person going through the divorce, the wealth advisor or the court, works from the same single source of truth. Learn more at aparti.ai.
Quotes lightly edited for clarity. Aparti is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.