AI and the Firm's Money
What actually changes in how you capture, see, and collect revenue
Every legal software vendor now has an AI story. This one starts with a software CEO explaining the AI his own company built for the sake of having it — and what LeanLaw did instead. Free, ungated, no registration.
Prefer YouTube? Watch it on the LeanLaw channel.
- Recorded
- Aug 5, 2026
- Runtime
- 55 minutes
- Including live Q&A
- Cost
- Free
- No registration
Jonathon Fishman
CEO, LeanLaw
Steve Owings
Head of Engineering, LeanLaw
Five things, in the order they come up.
You run the firm's financial health. This session gives you a working view of AI — grounded in how money actually moves through a firm, from first retainer to collected revenue.
Firms are being asked to buy AI before anyone has defined what it should do for the business. That's how money gets spent on capability with no line to an outcome — no lift in realization, no faster collections, no clearer picture of matter profitability.
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What LeanLaw got wrong first
Jonathon opens with the confession most vendors skip: the AI LeanLaw shipped in early 2025 existed so the company could say it had AI, and it fell over. What the reset took — a fumble, then culture, then organized adoption with real metrics — before AI went back into the product.
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The three paths: buy, use, or build
Buy software with AI already inside it and you inherit that vendor's opinion of the job. Use standalone tools and the onus moves to your people. Build your own architecture and you take the biggest risk — and it's the wrong place for most firms to start.
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The data ladder, and which rung your firm is on
Workflow creates data, so nothing works without the discipline underneath it. From there: reports, dashboards, embedded AI, and an agentic experience where your financial data moves securely into whatever AI tool the firm already works in.
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Four questions for any AI vendor
What number does this change. What the AI actually does — read, draft, decide, or act — and who reviews it. What data it sees and where that data goes. And show me the before-and-after at a firm like mine.
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Adopt now, pilot carefully, or wait
A decision frame you can apply the same afternoon, including the subtlest wait signal of the three: your firm doesn't yet know what it's trying to solve.
Worth 55 minutes if you'd like to judge every AI claim you'll hear this year against what it does for the firm's money.
Ready to explore the agentic rung from the session? See how your firm’s own AI can use LeanLaw’s public API today, with the MCP layer in private beta.
The people who made the mistakes
Jonathon Fishman
CEO, LeanLaw
Jonathon leads LeanLaw's work defining Legal Revenue Operations — giving law firms operational command over financial health from onboarding through collections. On this session he makes the case a software CEO rarely makes: that no tool fixes a collections problem the firm's own expectations created.
Steve Owings
Head of Engineering, LeanLaw
Steve has spent over a decade leading and scaling SaaS engineering teams across operations management, workflow automation, and fintech. He handles the technical half of the hour — what an MCP actually is in plain terms, and what it looks like when a firm runs its practice in an AI tool with LeanLaw underneath it.
Decision to Go-Live — September 10
What switching your firm's billing system actually takes: the real timeline, who does the work, and the three places firms lose weeks. Co-hosted with ProsperSpark, free, and the recording goes to everyone who registers.
Or book a demo if you'd rather talk it through directly.