Legal work, time returns to strategy

In the courtroom the formal principle states that the law is the same for everyone, but in the daily practice of a professional firm the real distinction lies in the availability of time. Faced with a complex file, two lawyers with identical methodological rigor can find themselves in profoundly different operating conditions. There are those who spend the entire morning before a hearing in the cross-check of jurisprudential precedents, extricating themselves from conflicting orientations and recent reforms, and those who have already closed the verification to dedicate themselves entirely to the defensive line.

This gap does not arise from different legal talent, but from the disproportion of resources. In structured realities there are entire teams of practitioners and collaborators dedicated to the preparatory work, while in small firms or in internal legal departments with few employees every single task falls on the shoulders of the owner or very few colleagues. The economic paradox is clear: professionals with high skills end up spending a large part of their day on compilation tasks with little added value, rather than enhancing the merit analysis and the relationship with the patient.

Beyond the mistrust of the sector

To date, much of the independent legal profession has looked at advanced digital tools with a combination of caution and detachment. On the one hand, international news weighs heavily: according to the data recalled by the company, there are over thirteen hundred judicial documents with errors generated by artificial intelligence, which in several cases have led lawyers to justify themselves before the judges.

On the other hand, the impression prevails that certain solutions are designed exclusively for large overseas law firms, distant in budget and approach from continental civil law systems.

To overcome these barriers, a change of perspective is needed: technology must not aim to replace the lawyer's intuition, ethics or signature, elements that are irreplaceable by their nature. Its primary function is to absorb the repetitive activities that take away profitability from the day.

Lexroom is moving in this direction, a scale-up founded in Milan in 2023 within Exor's venture builder Vento and today active in various European markets with 30 million ARR (recurring revenues) and over twenty thousand customers including law firms and corporate offices. The platform has structured a vertical operating system for European law, engineered on a local basis to respond to the specificity of the individual codified systems. The infrastructure is based on over thirteen million verified and constantly updated legal sources, with the methodological obligation to anchor each response to the encrypted source document, excluding user data from model training.

An operational efficiency multiplier

For a lean structure, these tools can reduce the time spent on preparatory activities. Being able to delegate the initial phases of regulatory recognition, the summary of documents and the first draft of an opinion is equivalent to placing a virtual team of dedicated assistants alongside the professional, capable of operating simultaneously on multiple fronts.

"The clones make visible something that every lawyer knows: in a day you would need a researcher, an editor and someone to check each source. With Lexroom these functions work in parallel and the lawyer remains the only one to decide", explains Gianfranco Bellino, head of marketing of the company. The point of balance is precisely this: while the processing of texts, the verification of sources and the integration with the Telematic Civil Trial proceed in a single operating environment, the lawyer governs the direction of the dispute without wasting energy.

It is not a question of extending working hours, but of eliminating the dead time of preparatory research to give back space to the interpretation of the rules, negotiation and high-profile consultancy. For small businesses, where economic sustainability depends on the ability to manage increasing loads without increasing fixed costs, access to these tools can help reduce the organizational gap with more structured businesses.