More iPhone, Less IKEA: Why Legal Tech Should Lighten the Load, Not Add to It

In the past month alone, I’ve received no fewer than 15 LinkedIn messages offering to train me and my “team” on how to use AI in our legal practice.

Setting aside the fact that two clicks will show you that my legal practice does not have a “team” and how tone-deaf those messages usually are (my resume doesn’t exactly exude “tech neophyte”), they are missing a much bigger point:

Lawyers don’t want more training.

It’s not that legal teams don’t want to learn – we thrive on growth. You can’t survive in this field without a relentless curiosity, appetite for knowledge, and commitment to continuing and continuous education. But we’re exhausted by the expectation that all these new tools, trends, platforms, software, etc. will make our lives so much easier … once we master yet another app or technology on top of everything else we already need to know to practice law and competently advise our clients.

“Trained On” ≠ Learned

Having spent nearly three decades in and around tech companies, I’ve been “trained on” more systems than I care to count. No matter my role – technical, legal, or operational – there was always some new tool I had to master. Not because it made my life easier, but because someone else needed it to make their life easier. OK, that may be a little unfair. Some of these solutions eventually made my life easier, but only after I spent months (sometimes longer) doing nothing but learning them, working with them, training others on them, and paying outside consultants a ton of money to help make them functional. I would have much rather spent that time involved in providing legal advice and strategy or even learning more about other areas of the business, like finance and risk.

Let me be clear: I love learning. But being trained on a tool and training others on a tool isn’t the same as learning. These sessions weren’t about acquiring wisdom; they were about checking boxes.  Demonstrating that the legal team was using the latest tools that were supposed to help them be more productive and engaged with the clients. Yet they did just the opposite – they took time away from productive legal work and client engagement.

The Service Mindset Tax

The challenge with legal, though? It is fundamentally a service industry. More necessary than a growth mindset is a service mindset. People pleasers and ex-bartenders make responsive and engaged lawyers laser-focused on client satisfaction (ask me how I know).  When I launched my boutique firm, the demand for tool usage increased. Not only did I need to choose the right tools for the firm, but clients wanted me to use the tools they had chosen. Their invoicing systems, their payment processors, their preferred communication channels. Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord… and a few I’d never heard of.

Did I comply? Mostly. (The payment processor stayed.) Not because I’m dedicated to learning, though, but because I’m dedicated to client satisfaction. I’ve been in the service business since I was slinging drinks in college. People-pleasing has been baked in since childhood (therapy helped). But the truth is, my flexibility made things easier for them, not for me.

Enter AI and the Training Industrial Complex

Everyone agrees AI is a powerful tool. And there is heavy pressure for legal services providers to use it as a means of reducing the cost of this high-priced service sector. An entire legal tech industry is forming around that pressure to get lawyers to use AI, complete with its own sub-industry focused on, yes, training:

• Training lawyers to prompt

• Training lawyers to use AI tools

• Training the actual AI

• Training legal ops how to continue training AI

At V4 Final, We're Done with Training

If you don’t need 40 hours of training to use your iPhone, you shouldn’t need it your legal tech. AI needs to be more than powerful in its raw form, it should be easy.  Beyond easy. Intuitive. But not “IKEA intuitive,” where you stare at cartoon instructions for an hour before deciding between “just wing it” and “search YouTube” to find that darn training video.

Truly intuitive. Click and done.

Technology Should Lighten the Load, Not Add to It

You shouldn’t need hours of training sessions to use software that’s supposed to reduce your mental load.

That’s the bar. That’s our promise.

We believe in building tools that help you get the job done with less friction, not more. No perfect prompts required. No blaming the user when it doesn’t work right the first time. Just smart, secure, AI-powered insights delivered in a way that works for you—not the other way around.

The goal isn't to turn lawyers into engineers.

It’s to free up their time so that they can be lawyers.

If your tools aren’t helping with that, they’re just more noise.

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