This year, “agentic” became the sexiest buzzword to hit vendor PowerPoints. It’s everywhere from specific products to the era itself. At times, it seems that no copy can leave the door without the word “agentic” crammed in there, despite it hitting the ear with roughly the same credibility as “putting the law on the blockchain” or “building a metaverse practice.”
And then, Clio did something remarkable at its 2025 conference: it didn’t say it.
Much like jazz, sometimes the most important part of a conference is what you don’t say. As CEO Jack Newton unveiled an ambitious future for the company’s plan to take on the world as a more or less everything app for lawyers, he wasn’t talking about agents. By my count, Newton mentioned the term exactly twice during his keynote, and both times in passing reference to broader industry trends as opposed to describing Clio’s own products. Instead, he opted for terms like “automation” and “teammates.” These may seem like semantic differences, and to some extent they are, but the absence of agentic — the conscious omission of a ubiquitous term — says a lot about Clio’s strategy and engagement with its users.
As someone who has staked out a position as an aggressive hater of 2025’s most overrused empty signifier, I couldn’t have been more pleased by this.
In the legal industry, the term “agentic AI” means one of two things, and neither particularly useful. Either it’s describing a truly autonomous system that takes user goals and some vague constitutional guidance to chart out its own workflow that it goes out and pursues before delivering a final product. This is what we in the business would call “malpractice.” Agentic can also describe a series of vetted, cascading prompts we’d otherwise just call “automation” but for Silicon Valley gloss. Mercifully, most products calling themselves “agentic” in the legal space fall into the latter category — competent workflow automation that lawyers would embrace if it weren’t wrapped in terminology that suggests their AI might go rogue and file a motion without them.
While every other company at legal tech conferences this year has been tripping over themselves to hype their spin on agentic, Clio seems to have read the room — or, more precisely, the lawyers. Chief Product Officer John Foreman, confirmed that this rhetorical choice was very much intentional. “If you’re saying agentic, who are you talking to?” Foreman asked. “Investors? Certain media publications? What if you want to talk a solo lawyer in the audience that needs to use this stuff? ‘Agentic,’ as a term, does nothing.”
Average attorneys don’t want to send their work to agents. An agent is someone you hire to go out on your behalf and get you a better deal while hiding how the sausage is made. They do your work instead of you and then ask for 10 percent. A “teammate” on the other hand is someone who works with you. An associate or paralegal is someone who does work for you that you — based on your actual experience — then redline into oblivion.
“What do agents do?” Vice President of Legal Content and Migrations Chris Stock asked. “Agents do stuff for you, but they don’t always get it right. What do members of your team do? An assembled team works together, they get to the right conclusions together, they support each other.”
“Human in the loop” is the vogue pushback that agentic advocates make, but this is a superficial nod. You say “we’ll keep you in the loop” is what you say to the most annoying guy in your group while planning the after party. Lawyers shouldn’t be in the loop, they should be the center of the whole conversation.
On the surface, what most companies are calling agentic might not differ from what’s being called a teammate, but it carries a ton of subconscious baggage. If vendors set out to be agentic, the pressure is always on them to move more tasks behind the veil. But, as we’ve put it around here, this “GPT-sus take the wheel” mentality just further moves the lawyer and their professional judgment out of the center. It’s not enough to “edit at the end,” because lawyering is an iterative process that requires those breaks in the process where the team can — to quote from the Bard — stop, collaborate, and listen.
A lot of the magic happens when a junior shows a senior the work-in-progress. A system that jumps from input to final product, will still get an edit, but it’s a different mental process than engaging with work product over and over throughout its production. “It’s all about checkpoints,” Foreman told me. “You’re not necessarily going after automating this whole thing into a Rube Goldberg machine of AI.” Figuring out ways to keep the AI actively leveraged while not losing the appropriate interruption points is a key difference between thinking in agent vs. thinking in teammate.
This might not impress investors and podcasters as much, but it should make lawyers much more comfortable.
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