'AI is a top priority': Peter Duffy on the tech bets reshaping Big Law

Mar 3, 2026

Peter Duffy, founder of Titans and legal tech advisor, explains why top law firms have moved from pilots to firm-wide AI scaling. He discusses why firms buy a general legal AI platform first, how point solutions fill gaps, and why workflow-fit and enterprise readiness beat bespoke LLMs. He urges firms to focus on AI fluency across the workforce rather than trying to outbuild vendors.

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INSIGHT

Copilot Is Productivity Not Legal Specialist

Copilot excels at general productivity tasks but lacks legal nuance compared with specialist platforms.
Peter says Copilot is useful for email/search/transcripts, while legal-specific platforms remain superior for nuanced legal work.

INSIGHT

Funding Creates A Top-End Platform Moat

Well-funded startups like Harvey and Legora create a power-law advantage at the top end that is hard to displace.
Peter explains CIOs prefer deeply funded teams as strategic bets for platform roadmaps and long-term delivery.

INSIGHT

Client Collaboration Is Promising But Hard

Client collaboration portals are promising but face cultural and execution hurdles in law firms.
Peter notes lawyers' reluctance to share work-in-progress and past slow adoption of portals despite new technology making them more feasible.

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Legal tech has gone from “let’s run a few pilots” to “we need to scale this across the whole firm” - and Peter Duffy says that shift is now well underway in the UK’s top law firms firms.

Peter is the founder of Titans, a boutique legal tech and AI consultancy advising large law firms, and he joins the podcast to take the temperature of the market and explain why things feel like they’ve accelerated so sharply in the past year.

We dig into how firms are buying right now: a strategic bet on a general-purpose legal AI platform - with Harvey and Legora emerging as the leading contenders at the top end - and then a layer of point solutions where the platform workflows still leave gaps. Peter also explains why many in-house tools made sense early on, but why firms are increasingly hitting a ceiling trying to compete with well-funded vendors shipping at startup speed.

Peter weighs in on the recent chaos around Anthropic’s legal tools and why he thinks the market reaction was knee-jerk. “If I was to run an RFP… that would absolutely not be in the top 10,” he says, arguing the product is still nowhere near what specialist vendors can do today - even if the direction of travel is obvious.

Finally, we talk moats and where legal tech competition is heading next: why Peter doesn’t think bespoke LLMs are the differentiator right now, why workflow-fit and enterprise readiness matter more than people think, and why the smartest move for law firm leaders is simple: make sure the whole workforce is AI fluent - while avoiding the temptation to burn money trying to outbuild the vendors.

The Non-Billable Podcast is sponsored by Legora. To find out more about Legora, visit: https://legora.com/

Chapters

00:01 Introduction

01:41 Taking the temperature of the legal AI market

04:02 From pilots to platforms: how firms are buying AI

06:32 What the leading legal AI platforms actually offer

09:56 How much law firms are investing in AI

10:53 Copilot, in-house tools and the limits of DIY AI

13:08 The platform power law: Harvey, Legora and the funding gap

25:10 Anthropic, incumbents and the battle for legal infrastructure

33:55 The smartest AI decision law firm leaders can make

About Non-Billable

Non-Billable is the media company for modern legal professionals across private practice, in-house and legal tech.

Visit our website: ⁠⁠https://www.nonbillable.co.uk