The Business Intelligence problem AI is about to make visible

Winning the BIALL Supplier of the Year award this month meant something special to us, and not just because of the recognition. BIALL's members are the people inside law firms who have always taken information quality seriously, often without much support or visibility, and being seen by that community as a company that understands their world is something we have worked hard to earn.

It also prompted me to write something I have been meaning to write for a while.

Vable started in the legal information world. We did not come to law firms with a generic content platform and adapt it. We built for this space from the beginning, which means we have spent years building our platform for the people who actually manage what lawyers read and rely on. And one of the things that strikes me now, watching the legal AI conversation play out, is how much of it is happening at the wrong level.

As AI collides with the legal sector, there is great emphasis on evaluating tools, models, interface design, which vendor has the most convincing demo. These are not bad questions, but they are downstream of a more fundamental one that most firms have not put on the table yet: is the underlying business intelligence actually good enough and reliable enough to be useful?

The data tools law firms rely on for BD and client development, to understand their clients' industries, track deals, identify relationships, monitor the competitive landscape, were not initially designed for how lawyers work. They were designed for financial services and investment banking, and law firms have been making do with it ever since. Over time the workarounds became part of the job, and the people who work closest to this data developed a kind of fluency with its limitations. They know, through proximity and experience, which records to verify before a pitch goes out, which sector classifications are a reasonable approximation and not an accurate description, where the deal data is strong and where it gets thin. While useful knowledge, it is a sign that something in the foundations needs fixing.

This has always created friction; however, adding AI on top without solid underlying data makes this an unmanageable task. A model working with that data does not hedge. It produces an output that looks authoritative, and it does so at a scale where the gaps are no longer catchable by the person in the team who happens to know better. The data problem was always there. But AI makes it everyone's problem.

We are building a business intelligence layer at Vable specifically for law firm BD and marketing teams: companies, deals, sectors, people, structured around the workflows that actually matter in a law firm rather than borrowed from a different industry entirely. It sits alongside the award-winning legal intelligence layer we already deliver, and it is the part of what we are building that I am most excited about right now.

To build it properly, we need someone in our team who has spent real time close to this problem from the user side, someone who has worked in law firm BD, marketing intelligence, or research, who understands what these teams actually need from an intelligence product and has developed strong views about where the existing tools fall short. This is not a role for someone who wants to inherit a finished product and refine it at the margins. It is for someone who wants to build something from a standing start, with the domain knowledge to do it properly and the commercial instinct to understand why it matters. If that sounds like you, or if you know who I am describing, the details are at the link below.

We are offering £500 for any introduction that leads to a hire.

Matthew Dickinson
CEO & Founder, Vable