By Vincent Venturella, Associate Director of Technology Product Management, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions
I recently had the pleasure of hosting our first AI- oriented client focus group as part of a new quarterly series. In this series, we explore how AI is transforming legal operations and how ELM Solutions empowers our clients to lead the way.
The pace of change in AI is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Technologies like ChatGPT have gone from novelty to necessity in record time. To put it in perspective: while it took years for the telephone, television, and internet to achieve adoption in 50% of households, generative AI hit that milestone in mere months.
Understanding the landscape
We kicked off the session by grounding ourselves in the current AI ecosystem. Several companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and X, are leading the charge. Each offers models with unique strengths, from enterprise-friendly Claude to coding-savvy Gemini.
But it’s not just about who’s building the tools. It’s about what those tools can do. Reasoning models, for example, don’t just answer questions. They evaluate their own responses, refine them, and deliver deeper, more thoughtful insights. This capability is already transforming how we approach research and analysis.
AI’s expanding role
One of the most exciting developments is the rise of agentic AI systems, which can perform complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human input. Think of it as hiring an infinite number of junior associates who never sleep. These agents can already assist with coding, QA, and some administrative tasks, and their capabilities are growing fast.
We also explored “vibe coding,” a term we use to describe building applications without writing a single line of code. Just describe what you want in natural language, and the AI builds it for you. It’s a game-changer for rapid prototyping and business enablement.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the idea of AI that can perform virtually any human task—is no longer science fiction. Industry leaders believe we’re just a few years away. But with great power comes great responsibility. One of our clients asked a critical question: “At what point do we stop asking ‘Can we?’ and start asking ‘Should we?’”
It’s a question we take seriously. At Wolters Kluwer, we’ve built a robust safety framework around our AI initiatives, which includes principles of fairness, governance and accountability, privacy and security, transparency and explainability, and human focus. We also monitor industry practices like “red teaming,” where developers intentionally push AI to behave badly in controlled environments to identify and correct risks before public release.
Building the future of legal ops
At ELM Solutions, we’re not just watching the AI revolution; we’re building it. We are already developing AI agents to handle many administrative and repetitive tasks that users execute on our platforms. Some of these will remain human-assisted for security reasons, but others are ripe for end-to-end automation. Our goal is simple: delete the boring work so our users can focus on the valuable tasks that matter most.
Many of these innovations will be on display at our upcoming ELM Amplify 2025 user conference. We will be demonstrating prototypes and gathering your valuable insights to shape the next generation of legal operations tools. If you're a client curious about what's ahead or eager to influence its development, I encourage you to join us!
This focus group was just the beginning. I’ll be hosting sessions like this quarterly, diving deeper into specific use cases and spotlighting client success stories. Watch this space for more posts from me on where legal ops is heading in an AI-driven world.
To hear more, listen to the most recent episode of our Legal Leaders Exchange podcast in which I delved deeper into agentic AI and how it will help legal professionals to focus on the aspects of their roles that they are most interested in. The episode is called “From bananas to breakthroughs: Empowering legal ops with agentic AI.”
