Insights from Craig Nesbitt 2.0: How AI and Legal Tech Are Reshaping the Future of Law
- cosmonauts
- Nov 12
- 5 min read
When it comes to bridging the worlds of law, data, and technology, Craig Nesbitt has truly seen it all. Over the past two decades, he’s helped shape the evolution of ediscovery and legal operations - from the early days of cloud-based startups to leading innovation within major corporations like Fox Film & Television, 21st Century Fox, and Disney.
Armed with an MBA from UCLA Anderson, Craig built his expertise on both sides of the legal tech ecosystem — first as a corporate leader guiding multimillion-dollar legal operations, then as an innovator helping firms modernise their practices. As the Manager of Solution Architects at DISCO, he now leads a talented team transforming how lawyers harness technology to work smarter, faster, and more strategically.
In this exclusive interview, Craig Nesbitt, Manager of Solution Architects at DISCO, shares how AI and legal technology are transforming litigation, driving innovation in legal operations, and empowering the next generation of digital lawyers.
How do you see AI and advanced legal technology reshaping the role of lawyers in the next five years, particularly in litigation and ediscovery?
AI and advanced legal technology will more efficiently process vast amounts of data, identify key information, and predict case outcomes, significantly reducing costs and time. This shift empowers lawyers for complex analysis and strategic decision-making, with AI acting as a crucial "teammate" for drafting, summarizing, and predicting.
However, this evolution demands lawyers adapt to new technologies and embrace data-driven decision-making. Legal professionals must enhance their data insights and project management skills as data volumes explode. Effective use of technology, verifying its outputs, and linking diverse data sources will be fundamental requirements to build the strongest case for clients, while identifying weaknesses in the opposition’s methods.
Many law firms and in-house teams struggle with adopting new technologies. From your perspective, what are the key factors that drive successful adoption of legal tech solutions?
Successful adoption of legal tech hinges on several key factors. First, fostering a culture that embraces technical solutions and continuous learning is crucial. Firms need to build teams with a mix of complementary skills and variable career paths, enhance technical training, and create an environment where legal professionals are encouraged to embrace new technologies throughout their careers.
Second, firms must strategically seek out and invest in effective, user-friendly technology, drive widespread implementation, and continually drive internal adoption. While change management and initial cost may seem high, long-term ROI will result from from increased agility, reduced external spend, greater internal talent, and stronger client retention.
Finally, legal teams must market and sell their achievements. Just as companies have to market and sell their products, legal professionals must quantify the value they create by adopting new technologies and sell it to their current clients, future prospects, and internal stakeholders. Whether it is wins, time saved, or dollars gained, effectively communicating measurable benefits regularly is a must.
Beyond efficiency, how can platforms like DISCO contribute to expanding access to justice and leveling the playing field in complex legal matters?
Platforms like DISCO can significantly contribute to expanding access to justice and leveling the playing field in complex legal matters by democratizing powerful legal technology. Traditionally, the software costs and technical skill required for extensive ediscovery, document review, and legal research have been prohibitive for smaller firms, legal aid organizations, and pro bono initiatives. DISCO's solutions can drastically reduce the time and cost associated with these tasks, making sophisticated legal tools more accessible to a wider range of practitioners. This levels the playing field against well-resourced opponents, ensuring that justice is not solely dependent on the financial capacity of the parties involved.
DISCO allows legal professionals to handle more cases with fewer resources, directly benefiting underserved communities and individuals who might otherwise be unable to afford comprehensive legal representation. This efficiency enables professionals to expand their pro bono practice and helps legal aid groups take on complex cases that were previously out of their scope due to resource limitations.
As data volumes continue to grow, security and ethical considerations become critical. How is DISCO approaching data protection and responsible AI to maintain client trust?
DISCO approaches data protection and responsible AI to maintain client trust through a multi-faceted strategy. This includes robust security measures to protect sensitive legal data and adhering to industry best practices and compliance standards. Regular third party testing and industry standard certifications help simplify the security and compliance assessment burden placed on customers and their counsel, allowing for rapid adoption.
For responsible AI, we focus on transparency in how the AI tools function, ensuring that legal professionals understand the technology's capabilities and limitations, and human judgment remains paramount in legal decision-making. Our tools emphasize human oversight, providing explanations and citations to underlying sources to allow users to trust, but verify, AI-generated results.
Finally, DISCO has a dedicated team responsible for research, design, and implementation of AI technologies. We have analyzed and tested over 40 LLMs and related technologies as part of our design and build process. The result is balancing effectiveness, cost, security, and scalability, while providing AI outputs that are explainable and defensible.
What emerging trends in legal innovation are you most excited about, and how is DISCO positioning itself to lead in those areas?
I am excited about the continued evolution of legal technology, particularly in areas like consumerization of enterprise technology and data driven insights, and intelligent automation.
DISCO is positioning itself to lead in these areas by:
Empowering the "digital lawyer": DISCO's solutions help legal professionals work smarter and faster by designing modern workflows around how legal work is actually performed, not how engineers think it should be done. Since our founding, DISCO has centered its product design process around deep analysis of the problems our customers face, and then building elegant yet powerful solutions akin to the technologies we interact with daily. This allows for easier adoption and greater self reliance.
Fostering a data-driven culture: DISCO helps law firms and in-house teams build a culture that embraces data-driven insights, accessible via intuitive visual interfaces and natural technology interaction. Our Search Visualzation is an interactive, point-and-click graph that allows users to rapidly explore patterns of communication across millions of communications. DISCO’s Cecilia Q&A provides a private experience enabling users to ask questions in plain language and receive answers with citations to the most relevant documents.
Automation through a suite of technologies: DISCO has been building legal tech for over a decade, always with an eye to increasing efficiency through automation. For example, our cross-matter tag prediction AI allows users to apply learnings from prior document reviews to future work, including early case assessments and privilege screenings, which helps lower risks and costs. Our new Auto Review offering further automates the document review process by combining the new wave of generative AI prompting with tried and true methods of doc review sampling to achieve document tagging speeds of 25,000 documents per hour.
As a headline sponsor, what excites you most about participating in Future Lawyer USA, and what key messages or insights are you hoping to share with the legal community at the event?
The legal industry often adheres to traditional processes due to historical practices, knowledge silos, old training methods, and technological limitations, leading to slow adaptation. Modern technology like DISCO offers a solution, enabling lawyers to work more efficiently. This allows them to dedicate more time to business development, knowledge acquisition, skill set expansion, greater pro bono work, or simply achieving a better work-life balance.
DISCO at Future Lawyer USA
Future Lawyer USA showcased an incredible exchange of ideas about how technology is transforming law — and we were thrilled to be part of it. The energy, curiosity, and forward-thinking mindset from attendees reaffirmed that the future of law is not about replacing lawyers with AI, but empowering them to do more.
The conversations don’t end here. At DISCO, we’ll continue driving innovation to help firms operationalize AI, enhance accuracy, and create more human-centric, data-driven practices.
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