Artificial intelligence has reached an inflection point in legal practice. The conversation is no longer about shaving minutes off a task but about rearchitecting how entire transactions move from kickoff to close. For AI Reporter America, Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera, steps past the hype to unpack how agentic AI, embedded directly into everyday workflows, is reorganising who does what in a deal, where value is created, and how firms stay competitive. He explains why integration matters more than standalone tools, which firms are realising measurable ROI, how client expectations are shifting, and where the true limits of legal AI still lie.

Beyond the hype, what does "AI-driven legal work" actually mean in practice? Can you walk through a concrete example of how AI is fundamentally restructuring a deal workflow—not just incrementally speeding up tasks?

When we talk about AI-driven legal work, we mean fundamentally restructuring how an entire workflow operates from the moment a deal lands to the moment it closes.

At Litera, we’ve lived this evolution for more than a decade. Kira, the company’s AI-powered contract review tool, now combined with AI Legal Agent, Lito, and GenAI capabilities that power agentic workflows, moved beyond “AI makes this faster” to “AI anticipates what needs to happen next.”

Imagine a typical deal workflow where a partner receives a diligence request list. In the traditional model, this sets off a chain of emails, document hunts, junior associate assignments, manual tracking, and context-switching between half a dozen systems.

In an AI-driven workflow, the experience is unified and proactive:

• AI immediately classifies what’s needed and retrieves relevant precedent, clauses, and prior deal summaries, without the lawyer asking.

• Inside Word and Outlook, where lawyers already work, AI drafts the initial workplan, identifies missing materials, and assigns tasks with the right context.

As documents arrive, agentic AI reviews them continuously, flags anomalies, updates the checklist, and drafts issue summaries in real time.

By the time the team sits down for a status meeting, AI has already surfaced risks, recommended next steps, and prepared a client-ready update.

This isn’t only about speed. It’s a structural shift, from lawyers driving the process manually to AI orchestrating the workflow and the humans focusing on judgment, strategy, and negotiation.

Why does embedding Kira directly into Transact matter more than standalone AI tools? From your customer data, what's the ROI difference between integrated solutions versus point tools?

Firms don’t just want smarter tools—they want connected workflows that eliminate friction, context-switching, and manual effort. They need workflow-first platforms that unify drafting, review, and client collaboration inside the tools lawyers already live in, especially Microsoft Word and Outlook. That’s why embedding Kira directly into Transact matters!

Litera already covers a large portion of the deal lifecycle, and our roadmap continues to bring these capabilities together so the experience feels less like “12 products” and more like one seamless environment where the work simply happens. An environment where lawyers can be faster, more effective, and more proactive.

The ROI difference is clear.

Customer feedback on the Transact–Kira integration has been overwhelmingly positive. Many have called it the “holy grail” they’ve been waiting for. Removing the need to jump between systems, copy information, and rebuild workstreams directly cuts into one of the biggest hidden costs in legal work: context-switching. Studies show lawyers lose up to 60% of their day shifting between fragmented tools, and early usage patterns suggest that embedding Kira into Transact recaptures a meaningful portion of that time.

The result is less friction, more focus, and a measurable lift in speed and profitability that standalone pure AI tools simply can’t deliver.

Who's actually adopting and seeing real returns? Are there specific firm sizes, practice areas, or deal volumes where AI is delivering a measurable impact, while others see only marginal benefit?

Firms adopting and seeing the strongest returns from AI use solutions that fit into their existing workflows. That’s the approach Litera has taken. We don’t position GenAI as “another tool to learn.” Our strategy is to make AI seamlessly embedded in lawyers’ daily workflow that it simply enhances what they’re already doing—adding speed, automation, and proactive insights directly in the windows where they work.

We’re seeing this approach pay off across all firm sizes and segments:

• Rapid Litera One adoption in the first few months since launch, with strong momentum from firms that want connected, workflow-first experiences rather than standalone tools.

• Dozens of “boomerang” firms returning to re-install Kira, after testing other AI tools. They see that Kira’s foundational capabilities of Generative AI added to predictive AI still delivers the strongest value—and that our added innovations with Lito and the Kira–Transact integration help with immediate ease of use and seamless adoption.

• Consistent impact across practices with heavier deal volume, where eliminating context switching and manual coordination creates immediate, measurable time savings.

The pattern is clear. Firms relying on point tools see marginal gains. Firms using integrated, workflow-first platforms, especially those that unify drafting, review, and deal management, are the ones seeing real, repeatable ROI.

How is AI changing what clients expect from law firms? Are clients now demanding firms use AI in certain workflows, and is this reshaping competitive dynamics?

Clients aren’t always explicitly asking for AI, but they are demanding the results that AI makes possible—greater efficiency, faster turnaround, and more responsive service. Those expectations are quickly becoming table stakes.

Clients want firms that can anticipate their needs, flag upcoming matters, and surface risks or opportunities before they ask. AI is what enables that level of insight and preparedness. This shift created the need to develop our Proactive Relationship Management (PRM) solution.

This is reshaping competitive dynamics. Firms that use AI to deliver both speed and proactive guidance are winning more business, while those relying on traditional workflows are increasingly at a disadvantage.

What happens to legal professionals in this shift? How are roles and skills evolving across associates, contract reviewers, and transaction managers? Are firms retraining staff or hiring different skill sets?

We’re seeing significant retraining efforts across firms of all sizes as AI reshapes how legal work gets done. Many firms are putting practice managers and central operational teams in charge of adoption and training, and they’re becoming much more strategic. Knowledge and Innovation Officers, as well as Practice Managers in particular, are now leading major transformation initiatives as deploying new technology, especially in large firms, has high stakes and requires careful coordination.

This shift is also impacting hiring patterns. Firms are slowing the intake of entry-level associates, paralegals, and contract reviewers as more of that repetitive work transitions to AI. The market hasn’t fully settled yet, but the direction is clear: existing professionals are being upskilled, while lower-level manual work is increasingly automated.

As a long-established tech provider, our focus is on minimizing the need for large-scale retraining. We’re evolving our products by embedding AI directly into the workflows lawyers already use, so adoption is intuitive rather than disruptive. We closely track usage and customer behavior in real time, allowing us to refine the experience continuously and reduce the burden on firms’ training teams.

Where is AI hitting its limits in real legal work? What problems haven't been solved by AI—or have been made more complicated—across your 15,000 customer base?

Across our customer base, the biggest “limit” we see isn’t a technology gap. It’s that much of the market hasn’t caught up to the idea of Proactive Relationship Management (PRM). The firms that are early adopters of PRM, and who treat their martech stack as a true growth tech stack, are already responding faster, winning matters sooner, and gaining a competitive edge. We expect this to create rapid FOMO across the industry as others see those results and follow quickly.

Beyond that, we’re not seeing major barriers to adoption within Litera’s own tools. The more noticeable limits are appearing around some of the larger, standalone legal AI vendors. Firms are beginning to push back when the promises of broad, generalized AI don’t match the reality of day-to-day legal work. This mismatch is creating skepticism in places where expectations were overinflated.

In other words, the limits aren’t in the value of AI itself. They’re in market readiness for PRM and in the gap between hype and execution from some vendors.