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P E E R T O P E E R M A G A Z I N E · S P R I N G 2 0 2 6 47 Legal AI matures not when firms deploy chatbots quickly, but when they consolidate capabilities into a unified assistant grounded in trusted internal data and governed for reliability over time. As Andrew Medeiros, Managing Director of Innovation, explains: "Athena didn't start as a single launch or a pilot with a small group. Once we were confident in the security and infrastructure, we made the decision to give it to everyone and let the firm decide how it would be used. From the beginning, this has been a firmwide effort shaped by real usage, collaboration across teams, and a willingness to keep iterating based on what people actually need." By 2024, the legal technology market was crowded with AI tools. Microsoft Copilot rolled out broadly, and vendors across the ecosystem introduced generative AI features. While firms moved from policy writing to implementation, the proliferation of tools created fragmented experiences and growing user confusion. In that environment, progress depended less on adding capabilities and more on consolidation. Experiments with curated internal data clarified what would scale and what would not, laying the groundwork for Experience Connect and firmwide resource capabilities. By 2025, industry enthusiasm cooled as tools failed to integrate meaningfully into daily practice. Analysts began to note a widening gap between expectations and realized value, with Gartner highlighting the need for greater focus on performance, robustness, and reliability. Client expectations, however, intensified, shifting from restriction to demands for demonstrable value. Building on strong adoption, Athena evolved from a collection of discrete skills into an orchestrated platform. The introduction of an agentic layer, enabling routing, multistep workflows, and action, marked the transition from a standalone chatbot to a multi-capability assistant embedded in real work.

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