For all our talk of AI disruption, few legal teams are tackling the true productivity killer: tab switching. Email bloat. Scattered context. Carl Davidson noticed it while practicing immigration law. His clients needed answers. His inbox overflowed. His case files were always one click too far away. And somewhere between toggling screens and pasting notes, he realized the problem wasn’t the complexity of the law it was the friction in the workflow.
Davidson left law practice and built Candle AI, a tool designed to bring structure to legal email. But what he’s really building is a broader argument for legal innovation: the future is not just about powerful tech. It’s about invisible tech that removes the invisible barriers buried in our day-to-day work.
Watch the full interview on “Notes to My (Legal) Self” here:
Why Lawyers Don’t Adopt Good Tools And How To Fix It
Davidson spent years in product at Intuit before launching Candle. There, he learned something every in-house legal team should internalize: the user experience must deliver value instantly.
“The magic moment needs to happen in seconds,” he said. “You can’t expect people to adopt something if they can’t see the value within a few seconds.”
It’s not because lawyers are change-averse. It’s because most tools ask too much before they give anything back. Log in. Learn a new dashboard. Remember one more password. All before answering the client’s actual question.
Davidson built Candle to show value where lawyers already work right inside Gmail and Outlook. No tab switching. No tool toggling. No delay between question and answer. The result? Structured case data at your fingertips while you reply to that 11:57 p.m. email from the GC.
Legal Isn’t A Practice Anymore, It’s A System
If this sounds familiar, it should. Whether you’re reviewing vendor contracts or prepping for litigation, the pattern is the same. Legal professionals are not failing because they lack knowledge. They are failing because the knowledge is buried. In inboxes. In PDFs. In siloed systems.
This is not a UX problem. It is a system design problem. Davidson’s insight applies beyond email. It applies to every contract repository that can’t be searched, every clause that gets redlined five times, every intake form that still arrives as a Word doc.
Small frictions create massive drag. Remove them, and velocity returns.
From Friction To Flow: What In-House Teams Can Do Now
The good news is that solving small frictions does not require overhauling your entire tech stack. In fact, the most powerful gains often come from integrating tools into existing habits.
Start where the friction lives. Is your contract review process stuck in version hell? Add pre-analyzed certification layers that score risk before you ever open a redline. Is your team overwhelmed by inbound vendor requests? Create structured intake flows that automatically trigger the right playbook.
The solution is not more software. It is software that shows up in the right place, at the right moment, with the right structure.
Design Tools Around Attention, Not Just Output
Carl Davidson did not build Candle because email is sexy. He built it because email is where attention lives. That’s the strategic unlock. The most impactful legal tools are not the most advanced. They are the ones that respect attention. That show value before asking for commitment. That reduce friction rather than adding features.
“You can’t automate judgment,” Davidson said. “But you can eliminate the noise that distracts from it.”
That is the real value proposition. Not artificial intelligence. Actual usefulness.
What Contract Tech Can Learn from Inbox Tech
At TermScout, we’ve learned a similar lesson. You don’t need to wow users with AI. You need to reduce the time to trust. That means certified contracts that speak for themselves. Clause-level insights that eliminate guesswork. Interfaces that work inside your existing review tools.
Legal professionals don’t need more power. They need less friction. Tools that nudge clarity forward. Systems that surface the right context at the right moment. Frictionless adoption is not a UX bonus. It is the difference between tools that get used and tools that get ignored.
Carl Davidson didn’t build Candle to change the world. He built it to change the day. And sometimes, that’s the only change that matters.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.
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