Co-Founder and CEO
Jude
Co-Founder and CEO
Jude
The difference isn’t marketing – it’s architectural.
“AI-powered,” in most cases, means an existing product has had a chatbot or a summarisation feature bolted onto it. The underlying system was designed before AI was part of the picture, so the AI sits on the surface – useful in moments, but disconnected from the work that matters.
AI-native is a different starting point. It means the data model was shaped for agents to read and write. Matter context persists between tasks because the system was built to hold it. The interface assumes handoff between human and AI rather than treating the AI as a side panel. The AI isn’t a feature of the product – it’s part of how the product is structured.
For a small or mid-sized firm, the distinction shows up in the day-to-day. Bolt-on AI asks you to stop what you’re doing, open another tab, paste something in, and bring the result back. An AI-native product is already there – in the matter, in the document, in the drafting – because it was built to hold all of that together.
My honest advice to any firm evaluating their options right now: don’t ask whether a product has AI. Nearly every product does now. Ask how deeply it’s woven in. Ask what the product looks like if you take the AI away. If what’s left is still a usable system doing the same job as ten years ago, that tells you where the AI actually lives.
What I kept: how to lead teams with purpose. My role at Datacom meant accountability for 120+ people across multiple disciplines — and that kind of operating experience doesn’t come from startup life alone. You learn how trust works across a group that size, how to hold a strategy together when the surface area is large, how to move decisively without losing your people. I use those muscles every day at Jude.
What I left behind is harder to say diplomatically: risk aversion. Large organisations optimise for not getting it wrong. Startups optimise for being right fastest. Both are rational — but only one of them leaps forward.
The honest version is that I didn’t leave Datacom because I was unhappy. I left because of something I kept noticing in the work. Three years sitting inside some of the country’s largest organisations, and the same pattern kept surfacing: the end customer was almost always an afterthought. Work got shaped around stakeholders, budgets, delivery cycles — and by the time it reached the person it was meant to serve, the centre of gravity had moved somewhere else. Lawyers know this pattern well – they’ve been on the receiving end of it for decades.
If the biggest companies are systematically underserving their users, that’s the whole opportunity. Great products change how people work. And with AI arriving as a genuinely new kind of capability, I didn’t want to watch that wave happen to lawyers from the sidelines. I wanted to build it with them.
This is the problem I’ve been most obsessed with since we started Jude, and I think it’s the most important problem in legal tech right now.
Every firm has a way of doing things. A house style for how advice is structured. A shared instinct for which questions to ask on a due diligence. A collective sense of what “good” looks like on a matter. That’s not one lawyer’s expertise – that’s the firm. It’s what clients come back for, it’s what juniors absorb over years, and it’s the single biggest thing that differentiates one firm from the next.
In most firms, that DNA lives almost entirely in people – in conversations between partners and juniors, in the way a matter gets reviewed, in the culture. Precedent libraries capture fragments of it, training captures some more, but the actual pattern – the way the firm thinks – has never really been codified, because until recently there was no good way to codify it.
That’s where we think AI changes what’s possible, and it’s where Jude is placing its biggest bet. Our platform is designed to capture how a firm actually approaches its work, whilst the work is being done, and turn it into playbooks that both the team and the firm’s AI agents can draw on. This is only possible because the AI sits inside the matter, not beside it. Not to replace anyone’s judgement – to put the firm’s collective best thinking behind every matter.
Why does it matter more now than ever? Two reasons. The first is continuity – firms are navigating significant generational change over the next decade, and most don’t have a plan for how their institutional knowledge travels from one generation of practitioners to the next. The second is competitive, the firms that systematise their DNA will run circles around the ones that don’t. Not because they’ll be bigger. Because they’ll be faster, more consistent, and more scalable at the exact level of quality that made them successful in the first place.
This is what genuinely excites me about building Jude. A lot of companies are putting AI into legal practice. Very few are building tools that help SME firms protect and scale the thing that actually makes them who they are.
The future of law is at LegalTechTalk – Europe’s Event for Legal Transformation.
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