Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
In a recent live-streamed conversation with Lawyers Weekly, Parachute’s head reflected on how mid-market firms can move beyond AI experimentation and embed intelligent technology into their core operations.
At Tech Innovate, hosted late last month, Ryan Zahrai, CEO and co-founder of Parachute, spoke about how mid-market legal practices are increasingly embedding AI technology to boost operational efficiency throughout legal research, document drafting, contract review, due diligence processes, invoicing, and client engagement.
Just recently, Australian judicial bodies and legal scholars have been exploring the potential for automated tools to aid in court administration, seeking to enhance operational efficiency and widen public access to legal services while safeguarding procedural integrity, institutional autonomy, and public confidence.
Although AI offers opportunities to streamline administrative workflows and inspire novel pricing strategies, Zahrai cautioned against unverified outputs, warning that such fabricated tools could pose severe risks to professional reputation and client trust.
Firms are being encouraged to adopt source-grounded systems with human verification, open integrations, and strong confidentiality protections, while also preparing lawyers to develop new skills in assessing AI-generated work and adding the contextual judgement that AI cannot provide.
AI integration and efficiency
Zahrai explained that AI can make legal work more efficient by connecting everyday tasks and reducing the need to switch between different platforms.
“It’s seamless, and it’s less about jumping from point solution A, to B, to C, to D, and using a central kind of control room interface which allows you to do all the things that a lawyer or a principal or any lawyer in a small firm would generally do on a day-to-day basis,” Zahrai said.
Further, Zahrai pointed out that current legal solutions often focus narrowly on drafting and review, neglecting both the initial workflow and auditable client delivery.
“The majority of the kind of legal solutions that are being provided right now in the market are focusing on this piece which is drafting, review and deliverable, but it’s ignoring the kind of beginning part of that flow and also the end, which is then how you deliver that back to the client in a way [that] is auditable,” he said.
Additionally, Zahrai indicated that centralising workflows into a single interface saves lawyers significant time on routine tasks.
“If we can consolidate as much of that as possible in a central space, then you’re shaving minutes off something that lawyers do 20 to 30 times a day,” he said.
AI adoption and the future of law firms
Zahrai highlighted the inevitability that AI is changing how law firms compete, operate, and provide services, explaining that firms should develop strategies to keep up with the drastically changing client expectations.
“There’s a competitive element, where other law firms will do it sooner – so, there’ll be an element of FOMO or fear of missing out, so law firms, there’ll be pull factors and push factors into that AI strategy component,” Zahrai said.
“The key things I think there for the next 12, 24 months are law firm principals thinking about what their AI strategy looks like to create harmony within their wider practice.
“How to increase, not decrease revenue by virtue of new and innovative billing methods with being enabled by AI.”
Zahrai also noted that technological capability, specifically providing an AI bridge to clients, will become a primary differentiator for law firms.
“There’s also technical elements there or technology, which is the law firm that can offer their clients an AI bridge into that law firm is now differentiated from the law firm left and right of them,” he said.
“I’m extremely confident – I would say 95 per cent – that we’re going to see more and more AI-first law firms.”
Importance of verifying AI-generated legal outputs
As legal practitioners expand their reliance on AI, addressing inaccuracy, ensuring precision and validating automated work products continue to be essential considerations for the most efficient technology integration.
“There’s big risk for hallucination and inaccuracy [using chatbots], the verification structure is not there, and it still requires a lawyer to jump to another platform to verify,” Zahrai said.
“Even esteemed lawyers who have significant experience in their practice, including counsel, have been chastised as a result of not verifying the outputs prior to submission to courts.
“And so, there is a mechanism whereby you can click on a hyperlink that goes straight to the case law, you can then verify that particular section or paragraph of a judge’s reasoning.”
When asked how lawyers can effectively assess AI-generated legal advice despite not having performed the underlying work themselves, Zahrai accentuated the importance of built-in verification tools against legal sources.
“Make sure that the AI, as the scaffolding or the wrapper, has the functionality; click on a hyperlink to verify the actual thing that it’s saying … don’t take it on face value,” Zahrai said.
“Look at the source material and make sure that it is built within your platform.”
