A Practical Guide for Lawyers When Choosing the Right Legal Tech

Live at the ABA TECHSHOW, host Terrell interviews Jay McAllister of Paragon Tech about how law firms should evaluate legal technology, especially AI, with a skeptical, results-driven approach. Jay explains that marketing hype often overstates capabilities, using software “integrations” as an example, where firms must check whether syncing is unidirectional or bidirectional. He ties vendor due diligence to lawyers’ duty of competence, urging firms to understand the benefits and risks of new tech and to ask what large language model powers a tool and, more importantly, what primary legal data sources it uses to reduce hallucinations. Jay describes Paragon’s “Leverage AI” framework, starting with identifying a firm’s limiting operational constraint, and shares a case where a custom GPT cut discovery chronology work from over an hour to five minutes with human verification.

00:00 Live From TECHSHOW
00:20 Meet Jay And Paragon
00:58 Why Stay Skeptical
01:24 Integration Claims Explained
02:57 Vendor Due Diligence
03:35 Ai Model Hype Check
05:59 Ask About Data Sources
08:45 Leverage AI Framework
09:14 Case Study Discovery Timeline
10:49 Human In The Loop
11:51 Pick The Right Tool
12:50 Show Floor Wrap Up
13:36 Closing Thanks