16-17 June 2027 – London, InterContinental O2 | Magazine

LegalTech Diaries Volume 17

Andrew Mancilla

Founder & CEO
OurFirm.ai

LegalTech Diaries Volume 17

Andrew Mancilla

Founder & CEO
OurFirm.ai

You spent 15 years as a trial attorney across criminal, civil and appellate litigation before founding OurFirm.ai. Was there a moment in the courtroom or working on a case that convinced you general-purpose AI tools weren’t built for how litigators work?

It wasn’t one moment, it was a pattern I couldn’t unsee. AI was stuck inside the legacy tools, and the only products that had meaningful output, like Claude, didn’t know the judge, didn’t know what the other side had argued in their last three filings, and hallucinated all over the place. The good AI tools were just built for a different job. Litigation isn’t just a higher-level, precedent-dependent writing exercise. It’s an adversarial one. Someone across the aisle is working, right then, to beat you in front of a specific judge with specific habits, and a tool that ignores context misses the entire point of the work.

OurFirm.ai is built on the idea that legal AI needs to reflect how specific judges rule and how opposing counsel argues, not just generate generic legal text. What surprised you most about the gap between what litigators say they want and what earns their trust in a tool?

Nothing surprised me. I’m a litigator. I’m the user. I know what earns my trust as a platform. I need quality and depth in legal analysis, creativity without hallucinations, and the nuance that AI generally has a hard time with. That’s our magic.

You’re building for solo practitioners and trial boutiques as much as AmLaw litigation teams, in a market that’s mostly obsessed with big firm adoption. Where do you think the real disruption in legal AI is going to come from, and what’s a prediction about the future of litigation technology you’d be willing to stake your reputation on?

The real disruption is going to come from the bottom, not the top. The first movers were the big firms, but they signed agreements with companies that were more obsessed with capturing market share than with developing a product that evolved as fast as the industry. That’s why you’re still seeing fake cites being filed, and being filed by big firms, because their attorneys are using the cutting-edge AI (which isn’t built for law) that their firm doesn’t offer. The litigators with the most to gain are the ones without the headcount: the solo running a federal defense practice, the fifteen-lawyer boutique going up against a firm of two hundred. For them, this isn’t about efficiency. It’s about firepower. It closes the gap between them and an opponent who used to simply have more hands, and they’re the ones who move fast, because for them the value is survival, not convenience. That second wave of adoption is in the small to mid-sized firms, and that adoption is what will create real disruption.

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