Kicking off 2025: AI-powered legal tools, DeepSeek drama & the year of self-service! ??

Happy New Year! ??

Tom Dreyfus and Sam Flynn here—2025 is officially rolling, and we hope you got some well-earned rest. We kicked off the year with our annual strategy week on the beach in Australia (sorry to our friends shivering in the Northern Hemisphere ??).

We’re calling it early: 2025 is the year of self-service! Here’s what’s been on our minds lately:

?? AI-powered tenant rights tool launches in NYC

Just a few weeks ago, Josef , New York University School of Law , and Housing Court Answers teamed up to launch a first-of-its-kind AI-powered Q&A tool to help tenants in New York City enforce their repair rights. This is just the beginning—next up, we’re bringing similar tools to Ithaca, Philly, and Tennessee! This is what self-service legal tools are all about: putting access to justice in people’s hands.

Read more about it from Robert Ambrogi here.

?? Self-service: From L’Oréal to legal aid

Whether it’s streamlining in-house legal work at L’Oréal or helping tenants fight for their rights, the goal is the same: empower people to take action. Jordan Furlong put it best in his recent piece: we can’t just leave people to fend for themselves anymore—if we don’t build digital tools they can trust, they’ll end up using unreliable tools like ChatGPT, with potentially disastrous consequences.

?? RAG isn’t enough—so what is?

We’re obsessed with solving AI’s reliability problem, and this piece from Legaltech Hub nails why Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) alone won’t cut it. To build AI tools that legal teams can actually trust, we need more—in-context learning, real-time alarm systems, and escalation workflows. That’s what we’re focused on at Josef.

?? DeepSeek & the AI arms race

The TL;DR?

• Sam Altman is welcoming the competition. (See his take.)
• Investors? Not so much—NASDAQ took a 4% hit in a day.
• NYU Stern gave a great breakdown of what this means. (Check it out.)

The real takeaway for legaltech? It’s not that anyone will suddenly switch to DeepSeek (shoutout to Nicola Shaver ’s insights on privacy & security), but that everyone’s concerns about scalability are being proven wrong sooner than expected. As Moore’s Law predicted, the challenge isn’t computing power—it’s about people.

?? AI, storytelling & change-making

To that point, a timely reminder from adidas Legal Ops superstar Alex Herrity : no matter how advanced our knowledge tools get, stories won’t lose their place in knowledge sharing. The best AI tools are able to capture both the codified and the uncodified. It’s not about just answering questions—it’s about moving people forward.

Excited for what’s ahead? So are we. Here’s to the year of self-service! ??

Tom & Sam

With the launch of our AI assistant Roxanne, New York City renters can now get instant answers to all their rental repair questions. We’ve made rental repairs guidance both easy to access and understand.

Jenny Laurie, Executive Director, Housing Court Answers