Tech Team: Odella

Rethinking how legal work is delivered

One of the more interesting ideas emerging in legal technology is that AI doesn’t necessarily need to look like software.

Increasingly, it can look more like a member of the team.

Odella sits within this broader movement towards AI systems capable of taking responsibility for defined parts of a legal workflow rather than simply responding to individual prompts.

The distinction is subtle but important.

A conventional legal technology tool waits for someone to use it.

An AI-enabled workflow can potentially receive information, perform a series of defined tasks, apply organisational knowledge and rules, produce an output and escalate matters requiring human judgement.

That creates the possibility of designing specialised digital roles around repeatable legal work.

For legal departments and law firms, those roles might eventually support functions such as intake, document review, matter administration, knowledge retrieval, compliance processes or recurring contract workflows.

The lawyer’s role changes accordingly.

Instead of personally performing every step, lawyers increasingly become responsible for designing the workflow, establishing the rules and knowledge it operates against, supervising outputs and dealing with exceptions requiring professional judgement.

That is potentially a much more significant change than simply making existing legal tasks faster.

Products exploring this model are therefore worth watching because they raise a bigger organisational question: what does a legal team look like when some of its operational capacity is provided by AI?