It’s An ALSP World And We’re All Just Living In It

At one point, early in the generative AI era, I wondered if developing this technology to essentially take over first-pass review and hand senior lawyers who view computers much like the Supreme Court views voting rights access to interrogate discovery materials might deal a devastating blow to the alternative legal service provider sector. ALSPs long thrived on managing brute force tasks and nuanced eDiscovery issues that generative AI was poised — or at least being promised — to replace. With enough AI power, the technology could go beyond ALSPs and even supplant outside counsel in whole areas of practice, providing in-house legal departments the juice to handle more matters in-house. Everyone’s answer was always no, but I couldn’t figure out at the time what room vendors expected to leave for ALSPs if all their AI projections came to pass.

As it turns out, a lot.

Part of it is that AI didn’t end up delivering everything the tech world promised. But it did successfully replace a lot. And the ALSPs now seem more important than ever. They’ve got the revenue to prove it.

These providers are thriving precisely because AI isn’t magic as much as a mess. A powerful, wonderful, efficiency-driving mess of constantly evolving technology that requires full-time professionals just to keep up with the best tools for the jobs at hand.

AI can save time—so long as someone knows how to implement and supervise it. That someone is usually not a law firm partner who’s also handling litigation strategy, client management, and wondering if their 2020 home office deduction is finally coming back to haunt them.

“A typical call with a chief legal officer is… ‘I’ve got more and more to do, more regulatory pressures, more litigation pressures, and while that’s going on the CFO is saying please spend less next year,'” Roger Pilc, president and general manager of the global legal solutions business at Epiq told me. “Then the CLO has got this plethora of tech vendors.”

While firms marveled at the shiny new buttons, ALSPs were out there pressure-testing LLMs, running side-by-side model evaluations, and actually understanding what happens to your data when it gets fed into a vendor’s “proprietary” tool. They’ve become the guides through the AI wilderness — equal parts translator, pilot, and compliance officer.

That generalized expertise in technology transcends eDiscovery. Renee Meisel, CEO of UnitedLex, told me that the company has worked to figure out “how to use its muscles across the entire department.” From contract review to incident response ALSPs deliver “tech experience for clients,” a task they’re suited to provide because they’re “more nimble.”

Why bring in outside support when the senior associate can now talk to their documents like it’s “Her”? But the truth is, having the tools isn’t the same as knowing how to use them. ALSPs have become the go-to resource for making sense of AI’s capabilities, risks, and implementations in a world where the stakes (and the fines) keep going up.

“We see many folks, both enterprise and law firms, say ‘you’ve got to find a way to use this correctly,’ rather than ‘oh there’s a risk, there’s exposure… it might hallucinate,” Subroto Mukerji, CEO of Integron, told me. “We’re hearing much less of that and much more of ‘how do we use this?'”

As the adage goes, put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket. Especially these days.

Outside consultants are uniquely capable of watching that tech basket.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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