"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.""
"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."
"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 became a pervasive vendor buzzword in 2025, appearing across product copy and marketing with little credible meaning. Clio's CEO Jack Newton largely avoided the term at the 2025 conference, mentioning it only twice and emphasizing automation and teammates as strategic priorities. In legal practice, agentic AI typically denotes either fully autonomous systems that act on user goals — a risky, malpractice-like model — or layered cascaded prompts that functionally amount to automation rebranded for marketing. Many legal products that claim to be agentic are actually standard automation, and Clio's omission signals a cautious, user-focused approach.
Read at Above the Law
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