Notes from the first Avvoka Customer Advisory Board
This quarter, we launched the Avvoka Customer Advisory Board. Eight senior innovation, knowledge and technology leaders from leading international law firms now sit around the table with us.
This is what came out of the first session, held at New York LegalWeek in March. Five themes. Each has already shifted something on our side.
Want to understand more about the board and how it’s shaping the future of legal drafting? Read about it here.
1. Technology should amplify expertise, not replace it
The board kept circling back to one point. Drafting tools have to support the lawyer’s judgement; they shouldn’t route around it. That’s been Avvoka’s thesis for a decade. AI gives you speed, but applied in isolation it detaches the work from the precedent and standards a firm has built over years. The board put it more bluntly than we usually do: any tool that takes the lawyer out of the loop won’t scale inside a serious firm, because the governance and client-service fallout catches up with it.
What it changes for us. It reinforces the line we lead with: Avvoka is drafting infrastructure that scales expertise. That’s the philosophy running through every AI capability we ship.
2. Microsoft Word remains central
Every board member could name AI tools that had failed inside their firm for exactly one reason: they asked lawyers to leave Word. For legal drafting, Word is the operating system. Anything that hopes to be adopted at scale has to meet lawyers there.
What it changes for us. We treat Word compatibility as a first-order design principle. Our new Word plugin takes it further – the lawyer never has to leave Word to use Avvoka. Every feature ships against a single test: does this help the lawyer without asking them to move house?
3. No-code resonates and it frees up capacity
Our no-code approach keeps landing well with the board, because it hands the building pen to the people who know the work. Several members talked about how it changes who in the firm can lead on automation. KM lawyers who’d otherwise have to queue up an engineer can ship on their own. That’s a different kind of scale, and it’s hard to get through vendor-led configuration.
What it changes for us. We’re doubling down on making no-code genuinely lawyer-usable. The real question is whether a KM lawyer would choose Avvoka over the alternatives. That’s the bar.
4. Value in AI drafting is measured downstream, at the client
The board’s sharpest challenge was about how the industry talks about value. Internal benefits – faster drafting, more consistent output, better precedent reuse – are easy to claim and hard for clients to verify. The harder question, and the more important one, is how drafting infrastructure changes what a firm can credibly promise the people paying the bill. Fewer drafting errors on the desk. Faster turnaround with more consistency. Terms that reflect the firm’s house position, not a generic template. That’s where trust is won or lost, and it’s where most legal AI pitches still go quiet.
What it changes for us. We’re reworking how we articulate downstream value, and it’ll show up in how Curate is positioned when it lands.
5. Senior innovation leaders want to shape products, not just buy them
Every member of the board came to the session with experience of AI drafting products launched by vendors who hadn’t asked early enough whether the firm would actually adopt them. The people making enterprise-scale adoption decisions have opinions – about governance, workflow fit, risk, client impact – that vendors rarely hear until the product is already in market. By then, pushing back on direction is expensive. Pushing back on implementation is much more so.
What it changes for us. The board now sees roadmap drafts before they’re locked internally – it’s already reshaped a couple of items on our backlog. The bigger point for the category: if vendors want serious adoption, the senior innovation layer has to be in the room earlier than the launch announcement.
What happens next
Next session is around Legaltech Talk in mid-June, followed by ILTA in August. A remote option is open to members who can’t make it in person. We’ll post a recap after each one.
If you lead innovation, knowledge or legal technology at an international law firm and want to be part of these conversations, drop us a line at hello@avvoka.com.