In partnership with
This week on SHIFT
Here's a strange math problem: 77% of people with a legal problem never get a lawyer's help, while 80% of lawyers say the thing their firm needs most is more clients. This week we look at why that equation is so badly out of sync, and how AI agents might finally close what's known as the access-to-justice gap.
In the latest installment of our oral history project, Jennifer sits down with Jack Newton, founder and CEO of Clio - the "operating system" behind more than 400,000 legal professionals. They dig into what agents are already doing inside law firms, Clio's $1 billion vLex acquisition, and why this moment feels a lot like the cloud fight he picked in 2008.
Advertisement
Your employees are connecting AI to everything. Now what?
ChatGPT and Claude don't just answer questions anymore. Employees are connecting them directly to Notion, Linear, Jira, and the rest of your stack. The AI can read, write, and take actions on company data. Most IT and security teams have no visibility into any of it.
Harmonic Security Connectors changes that. It sits inline with every AI-to-app connection, so you see each call, control what data moves, and block destructive actions before they happen. Employees notice nothing different.
See what's actually running across your business in a live demo.
Three things to listen for
1. Law's trillion-dollar mismatch
The 23% of legal demand that gets met is already a $1 trillion-a-year market. Newton calls the unmet 77% a "latent legal market" potentially worth trillions, locked away by friction: people can't tell what a lawyer costs, or what they'd get for that money.
2. What agents already do at law firms
Not science fiction: agents that research an incoming case's merits, profile the court and the judge, and hand the lawyer an odds distribution of outcomes — plus review time entries and produce the bills.
3. 2008 all over again
When Clio launched cloud software for lawyers, critics called it "essentially malpractice." Eighteen years on, cloud is best practice and Newton says AI is the same arc, an order of magnitude more powerful, capped by the $1B vLex deal that closed in November.
"AI will not replace lawyers, but lawyers that leverage AI will displace lawyers that don't."
Listen now
SHIFT publishes every week. If someone forwarded this to you and you'd like to get it directly, subscribe at shiftshow.ai. And if you have a question, a guest suggestion, or a story we should cover, reply to this email. Jennifer reads them all.