A Practical Guide for Lawyers When Choosing the Right Legal Tech

Live at the ABA TECHSHOW, host Terrell interviews Jay McAllister of Paragon Tech about how law firms should evaluate legal technology, especially AI, with a skeptical, results-driven approach. Jay explains that marketing hype often overstates capabilities, using software “integrations” as an example, where firms must check whether syncing is unidirectional or bidirectional. He ties vendor due diligence to lawyers’ duty of competence, urging firms to understand the benefits and risks of new tech and to ask what large language model powers a tool and, more importantly, what primary legal data sources it uses to reduce hallucinations. Jay describes Paragon’s “Leverage AI” framework, starting with identifying a firm’s limiting operational constraint, and shares a case where a custom GPT cut discovery chronology work from over an hour to five minutes with human verification.00:00 Live From TECHSHOW00:20 Meet Jay And Paragon00:58 Why Stay Skeptical01:24 Integration Claims Explained02:57 Vendor Due Diligence03:35 Ai Model Hype Check05:59 Ask About Data Sources08:45 Leverage AI Framework09:14 Case Study Discovery Timeline10:49 Human In The Loop11:51 Pick The Right Tool12:50 Show Floor Wrap Up13:36 Closing Thanks