Legal tech has gone from “let’s run a few pilots” to “we need to scale this across the whole firm” - and Peter Duffy says that shift is now well underway in the UK’s top law firms firms. Peter is the founder of Titans, a boutique legal tech and AI consultancy advising large law firms, and he joins the podcast to take the temperature of the market and explain why things feel like they’ve accelerated so sharply in the past year.
We dig into how firms are buying right now: a strategic bet on a general-purpose legal AI platform - with Harvey and Legora emerging as the leading contenders at the top end - and then a layer of point solutions where the platform workflows still leave gaps. Peter also explains why many in-house tools made sense early on, but why firms are increasingly hitting a ceiling trying to compete with well-funded vendors shipping at startup speed.
Peter weighs in on the recent chaos around Anthropic’s legal tools and why he thinks the market reaction was knee-jerk. “If I was to run an RFP… that would absolutely not be in the top 10,” he says, arguing the product is still nowhere near what specialist vendors can do today - even if the direction of travel is obvious.
Finally, we talk moats and where legal tech competition is heading next: why Peter doesn’t think bespoke LLMs are the differentiator right now, why workflow-fit and enterprise readiness matter more than people think, and why the smartest move for law firm leaders is simple: make sure the whole workforce is AI fluent - while avoiding the temptation to burn money trying to outbuild the vendors.
The Non-Billable Podcast is sponsored by Legora, the legal AI platform used by leading law firms and in-house teams.
Chapters
00:01 Introduction
01:41 Taking the temperature of the legal AI market
04:02 From pilots to platforms: how firms are buying AI
06:32 What the leading legal AI platforms actually offer
09:56 How much law firms are investing in AI
10:53 Copilot, in-house tools and the limits of DIY AI
13:08 The platform power law: Harvey, Legora and the funding gap
25:10 Anthropic, incumbents and the battle for legal infrastructure
33:55 The smartest AI decision law firm leaders can make
