Innovating from within

When Kyle Poe first started out as a junior associate, he had an experience that’s familiar to many young lawyers today: “I graduated from law school, arrived at a major firm, and realized just how antiquated legal practice is,” he says. The technology wasn’t keeping up. Processes were fragmented, inefficient, and slow.

Kyle began his career in the mass tort and product liability practice at Morgan Lewis, which managed a national docket of 15,000 cases. Case information was scattered across different systems, spreadsheets, and paper files. The result was inefficiency, slow client reporting, and barriers to scaling the practice.

Instead of waiting for change, Kyle partnered with the firm’s IT team and designed a centralized platform to consolidate case data and documents in one place. More importantly, he saw beyond immediate pain points to the strategic possibilities unlocked by a unified data system, such as using resolution data to guide litigation strategy, or predicting costs to enable intelligent pricing on alternative fee bases.

After successfully innovating his own practice, Kyle went on to build and lead a cross-disciplinary team, deploying the platform across nine practice areas, including employment disputes, medical device liability, vehicle warranty claims, and foreclosure litigation.

When Kyle joined the mass tort group, the docket was 15,000 cases. By the time he left, the practice was successfully managing over 65,000 cases, a scale that would have been impossible without the new system.

By enabling lawyers to analyze outcomes, model costs, and craft creative fee structures, the platform became a firmwide differentiator. It showed that technology wasn’t just about efficiency, it was about reimagining the business model of law.

The turning point

Despite his reputation as an innovator, Kyle resisted moving into legal tech full-time. “The technology itself wasn’t cool,” he says. “What was cool was how it could be applied to practice problems.”

That all changed in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT and the mainstream emergence of generative AI. Unlike legacy legal tech, which had narrow applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) promised flexibility across a wide range of legal tasks.

To test the potential, Kyle designed a proof of concept on an active matter, using AI to analyze thousands of plaintiff fact sheets in a major litigation. What typically took human teams a month was completed by AI in three days, with better quality results.

“That was the moment,” Kyle recalls, “that I realized AI wasn’t just incremental. It was transformational. It was clear to me that this was going to re-wire the legal profession. Despite the rise of e-discovery, electronic research, email, even smartphones, the core workflows of law have barely changed in 100 years. Generative AI is the first force with the potential to truly disrupt that.”

He adds, “With LLMs, computers have finally learned how to manipulate natural language. Virtually everything that lawyers do is rooted in review or drafting in natural language.”

Why Legora?

Kyle’s first encounter with Legora came when he saw a demo of its now-signature feature, Tabular Review. “Lawyers often work at scale and need to do so consistently. The creation of Tabular Review allows lawyers to pose structured questions across hundreds or thousands of documents and get consistent, reliable outputs.”

It was clear Legora understood that lawyers need different ways of engaging with AI depending on the task. “This was proof that Legora was building solutions grounded in the real workflows of legal practice,” Kyle recalls. Conversations with CEO Max Junestrand soon followed where Max convinced Kyle that Legora was the right place to make an impact.

As tech platforms in legal AI have taken shape, Legora is aiming high, with an ambition to be in the hands of every elite lawyer across the globe – an aspiration Kyle shares wholeheartedly. “Max’s vision matches my own eagerness and excitement to help make that happen. And it’s an ambition at Legora that’s backed up by talent and product quality, with a proven track record of delivering.”

At Legora, Kyle’s role centers on two priorities: helping firms use AI to innovate both the practice and business of law; and guiding the evolution of the platform itself.

In keeping with Legora’s partnership approach, Kyle is working closely with firms not just to adopt Legora, but to adapt their practices. “Emerging AI capabilities mean firms need to rethink how they deliver legal services to clients, and how they design more data-driven, creative pricing and build new business models,” he says.

Generational reordering

Perhaps the most compelling theme in Kyle’s vision is that AI represents a generational reordering event for the legal industry. “Most of the time the overall hierarchy of firms remains relatively stable from year to year,” he explains. “But history shows that short windows of opportunity appear when the market is ripe for large-scale reshuffling. The last major reordering was in the 1980s, when hostile takeovers and the poison pill created a new field of work, propelling select firms to new prominence. AI is the next such catalyst,” Kyle argues.

“The real winners won’t be the first to buy access to a platform and hand out logins,” he warns, “success will come from rethinking workflows, how matters are staffed, how knowledge is shared, how pricing is structured, and how training is done. AI has to be operationalized, not just licensed.”

“For top firms, it’s a defensive move: adopt with urgency or risk losing ground. For challengers, it’s a chance to leapfrog. Once the window closes, rankings will settle back into place. But right now, firms have a once-in-a-generation moment to get ahead.”

Unlocking creativity

Lawyers don’t always have the best reputation when it comes to innovation, but Kyle thinks that’s not due to a lack of creativity. “Throughout my career, I’ve spoken with many associates and partners who have incredible ideas for how to work more efficiently and more effectively. The problem is that they were never in the position to be able to do much about it. Now, with AI, they finally are.”

With Legora, lawyers are empowered to move those ideas from theory to practice. “We don’t just provide software,” Kyle says, “we partner with firms to integrate AI into how they actually work and compete. You’re not just buying a product, you’re betting on a partner who can help you unlock new ways of practicing, pricing, and delivering. I’m really excited to see what the firms we’re working with will be able to do when they’ve had Legora as part of their culture for two or three years. It’s going to be remarkable.”