Cutting Through the Legal AI Hype: A Conversation with Avantia’s CTO

Cutting Through the Legal AI Hype: A Conversation with Avantia’s CTO

When the first wave of legal AI companies emerged, the promise sounded almost too good to be true: platforms that would replace lawyers and paralegals altogether. Fast-forward to today, and the reality looks very different. As our CTO Paul Gaskell explained in the latest episode of Compliance by Design, the market is already shifting from lofty “all-in-one” platforms to narrower point solutions — tools that can extract a clause here, summarize a compliance document there. Useful, yes. But not the wholesale transformation many expected.

The problem isn’t just ambition. It’s integration. Most legal and compliance teams already juggle 10–15 software applications alongside Outlook and Word, which remain the immovable center of gravity in daily work. Adding another SaaS tool into that mix risks piling on cognitive load rather than easing it. Paul’s advice was blunt: don’t buy tools, think in workflows. Look at the end-to-end business processes — the five to ten tasks that make up a deal closing or a KYC review — and ask whether new technology genuinely helps lawyers complete that chain more seamlessly.

That’s why Avantia took a different path with Ava. Instead of bolting on more software, we built directly into the tools lawyers already live in. Ava runs inside Word and Outlook, with the intelligence to automate everything from document markup to compliance tracking, while removing fragmented SaaS apps that never quite joined up. The principle is simple: meet lawyers where they are, and replace what can be replaced — not by layering complexity, but by streamlining it away.

Security is another area where pragmatism matters more than hype. Paul broke down the risks of outsourcing data to third-party AI providers: data leakage between customers, loss of data sovereignty, and unclear implications for attorney–client privilege. His checklist for any GC or CCO evaluating legal tech is disarmingly simple:

1. Is my data being used to train models across other customers?

2. Where exactly is my data stored — and will I be notified if that changes?

3. If data is sent to a third party, what does that mean for privilege risk?

In a market where AI conversations often get lost in abstraction, these questions ground the conversation where it belongs: in real-world client risk.

So what’s next? Paul sees the hype cycle cooling: less talk of AI replacing lawyers, more focus on AI that makes lawyers’ work better. The future, as he put it with an image hard to forget, is about moving from AI that can mimic, to systems that genuinely understand what they’re doing. That breakthrough may be years away. But in the meantime, the firms who thrive will be the ones building tools that add real value to the people using them.