Teo Doremus, CEO and co-founder of litigation AI platform Advocacy, is making a direct case to lawyers: the moment to embrace AI-native practice is already here.
Doremus, who traded a litigation desk in China for a startup in San Francisco, joined host Jared Correia on the Adventures in Legal Tech podcast to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping the legal profession.
His platform, Advocacy, is built around what he calls the “digital desk,” a concept designed to unite the fragmented narrative silos of litigation that have historically lived in Microsoft Word and nowhere else.
The core argument Doremus makes is that AI in law is not a replacement for lawyers but a co-pilot, and the profession needs to stop treating those two things as the same.
“The pilot and the autopilot are not enemies. Neither are lawyers and AI. The question is figuring out who does what,” Doremus said during the episode.
He drew directly on that pilot analogy to reframe how lawyers should think about their own value in an increasingly automated working environment.
The lawyer of the future, Doremus argues, looks like a pilot who no longer holds the stick for seventeen hours: rested, prepared, and ready for whatever the automation cannot handle.
One of his sharper observations concerns the gap between AI subscription rates and genuine daily use, with Doremus noting that real adoption means using AI regularly enough that it changes how you work, not just having a login.
He also addressed hallucination risk, arguing that understanding the fundamental limitations of AI tools is a lawyer’s best practical defence against the technology’s most serious failure mode.
Doremus is equally clear that specialised legal AI tools and general AI tools are not competitors with each other, and that lawyers should deploy both strategically depending on the precision a given task requires.
The billing question, which dominates most legal AI conversations, also came up, and Doremus handled it with what Correia described as one of the more useful analogies in recent discussions of lawyer compensation in an AI world.
Doremus also reflected on what he personally got wrong about law practice and why he believes lawyers broadly misunderstand what AI actually does when it appears to be helping them with substantive legal work.
Advocacy, which can be found at advocacy.ai, is positioned as a litigation-focused platform aimed at connecting case narratives that have traditionally been scattered across disconnected documents and tools.
The Adventures in Legal Tech podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube, with the full episode featuring Doremus available across all major platforms now.