Two words that explain the firm
Scott Alderton has a phrase he uses about Stubbs Alderton & Markiles (SA&M) that functions as the firm’s operating principle.
"Technical excellence."
"We may be 45 lawyers, but we're as technically excellent as the global law firms. And we can provide service in a responsive and business-oriented manner that is better than what big law can provide," Alderton declares.
Previously, SA&M competed on price. They charged lower billing rates than Big Law for the same quality of work. Now the advantage has shifted. AI lets a 45-lawyer firm deploy the same depth of resources as a global firm with thousands of lawyers. The mid-sized firm story used to be about being cost-effective. Now it's about being even more efficient.
Running toward the market everyone else was running from
The firm's origin story matters to its AI adoption story because, to Scott Alderton, AI represents a similar defining moment.
Alderton recounts the early 2000s when the dotcom bubble burst.
"Most of the firms in Los Angeles were putting their tail between their legs and running from the (tech) market and saying we don't want to be involved in all of this dotcom and startup activity anymore."
The market was running away from tech and, since SA&M’s practice was early-stage, Alderton and his Partners seized the opportunity to build a firm targeting this practice area.
"There has to be a firm that's running towards tech," Alderton reflects, "and all of the firms in town seemed to be running from it. So we decided to create the go-to firm for these kinds of transactions."
Twenty years later, that decision has evolved into a full-service corporate, securities, and technology firm operating as the go-to venture-backed and middle-market technology law firm in SoCal.
Peter Saari, the firm's CEO, frames the firm's role as "a trusted business partner from inception to exit to whatever comes next."
Unlike most firms, SA&M is running towards AI much like they ran toward tech when everyone was running away.
The big-vendor hypothesis, and why it didn't hold
Alderton is SA&M’s managing partner. His inbox has been the landing zone for legal AI pitches for over a year, and he had a working hypothesis when he started exploring viable options for his firm.
"My initial philosophy was that the companies that quickly develop the tools are the ones that will dominate the market. So we expected the big players to do just that, and we’ve seen them rolling AI tools out at a rapid pace." Alderton said.
When the team finally ran side-by-side comparisons, the result surprised him.
"We were skeptical about Lucio however, when we ran the exact same searches side by side between Lucio and other vendors, it demonstrated pretty clearly to us that Lucio was a better tool. My concern was that vendors operating in the legal space, with access to vast repositories of legal data, would have an advantage. I was wrong."
The other thing that matters to him is harder to put on a comparison spreadsheet.
"We wouldn't be using Lucio right now if it weren't service first," he says. The big legal AI products built a tool, shipped it, and said ‘good luck’. Lucio’s team is always accessible and walks us through every question we have.”
Adoption that doesn't have an adoption problem
Peter Saari manages the business side, and his framing for AI is simpler.
"It's imperative for the firm to embrace AI. I look at it almost in the same vein as going from a typewriter to a computer. If you don't, you're going to be left behind," Saari quips.
When examining Lucio’s usability dashboard, the curve deviates from the conventional adoption gap analyzed by legal IT teams.
"I see everyone from top to bottom adopting Lucio. Whether they're in litigation or corporate, trademark privacy, whether it's a paralegal, legal assistant, or even myself as a CEO. To me, it's like Microsoft Excel or Outlook now," he adds.
Saari also articulates the counterintuitive top-line effect that most managing partners haven't yet noticed.
"I was talking to one of our heavy Lucio users this morning, and his billable hours have actually increased since we implemented AI tools. You'd think the opposite would have happened, but he's finding himself being able to do more," Saari concludes.
The same pattern, across every practice
The firm's lawyers describe the same pattern across the board. What used to be hours of tedious manual associate work now collapses into a starting point that lawyers across the firm then refine.
A few examples from the floor:
M&A red-flag review (corporate): A 130-document data room for a buy-side engagement.
Manual: 5 to 7 hours.
With Lucio: 30 minutes to produce the report and start partner-review categorization.Cross-examination prep (litigation): Mid-arbitration, with a day's rough transcript and prior depositions of the witness.
Manual: Hours of associate time across hundreds of pages.
With Lucio: As Evan, a litigation associate put it, "It made the impossible possible. Lucio took five minutes."Fraudulent conveyance valuation analysis (litigation): For a successor liability claim attacking an underlying sale with several hundred pages of valuation report.
Manual: Four to five hours.
With Lucio: 30 minutes.Privacy client onboarding (privacy). Brian Hall, a privacy lawyer, who sees most clients once a year, has built a prompt that pulls a client's website, recent news, and financing announcements. "That has been life-changing. It compresses the rebriefing time from twenty or thirty minutes of reviewing old notes to a few minutes."
But the tools only work if you use them correctly. Brian has seen the other side.
A cautionary tale
Brian has also seen the failure mode, courtesy of a counterparty using a different legal AI tool. The other firm sent over a contract draft so heavily marked up that the client called him in a state of panic. "Five minutes in, I'm like, this is an AI user error, wrong context. It was a firsthand experience of what can go wrong if you're not careful."
Running toward it, again
Twenty years ago, every firm in Los Angeles ran from the dotcom crash. SA&M ran towards it and built an incredibly successful law firm. A similar scenario is playing out again, however this time, running into rather than away from will level the legal playing field.
"Lucio is making us better, and our clients are the real beneficiaries," Alderton concludes.
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