ILTACON Live 2025: Actionstep’s Chief Product Officer Speaks on AI, Workflows, and the Future of Mid-Market Legal Tech

The legal technology market has found itself in an exciting moment of growth and maturation. With the rise of AI and more law firms looking to modernize how their practices do business, there has been a palpable shift in how, and what law firms are thinking about technological adoption.  

ILTACON 2025, that took place in National Harbor, Maryland, was the place to go for dynamic discussions about these changes. The largest ILTACON is history was buzzing with exciting new products, strategies, and discussions about the future of legal tech. 

At the center of the convention, legal tech journalist Bob Ambrogi sat down with Triona Buckley, Actionstep’s Chief Product Officer, to talk about the law firm management company’s evolving role in legal tech and what’s next for mid-market law firms globally. This is the fifth year that Actionstep has attended the conference, and Buckley notes how much has changed in that time. “Two years ago, we were just starting to talk about AI. Last year, the conversation shifted to all its possibilities. Now, we’re seeing real products and progress. The energy here around it has been incredible.” 

Actionstep has been slowly growing its global footprint as a law firm management platform; with strong bases in North America, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. It made a splash in the North American market with the acquisition of Canadian-based legal accounting product, Soluno – which has been renamed Actionstep Legal Accounting, and is the company’s flagship legal accounting solution. The acquisition was pivotal. As Buckley put it, the addition of a rock-solid legal accounting platform to their product suite creates “a really great end-to-end platform for North American Customers.”  

Actionstep’s product offering now covers both Practice Management and Legal Accounting for midsize law firms, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.  

AI, document automation, business intelligence, and more 

One of the biggest themes of the conversation was Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Generative AI (GenAI). While Actionstep has already launched Scout, an AI help tool, to take advantage of that technology, Buckley and her team have their sights set beyond just GenAI. Actionstep’s product team has already turned their focus to the potential of Agentic AI; using AI to assist humans with making decisions and performing automated tasks without needing much human intervention. “The goal is to make our AI tools feel seamless in your day-to-day,” Buckley explains. From embedding intelligence into workflows, reporting, search, and document management, the goal for Actionstep is to position AI as an invisible extension of a law firm’s workflows rather than a disjointed add-on. Managing the development of these agentic AI tools is Actionstep’s newly-launched AI Center of Excellence, which has been mandated with bringing meaningful solutions to Actionstep’s customers and internal teams. 

The development plans don’t stop there. Buckley continued to highlight recent and upcoming product innovations. Add-on module tools like Builder (document automation), and Capture (advanced forms) have been released to build on top of Actionstep Practice Management’s impressive workflow capabilities. A forthcoming Business Intelligence (BI) module will pair visual dashboards with AI-driven insights to aid managing partners with making informed, data-driven business decisions. A native integration with iManage, is also on the horizon. 

“Our customers are driving the development of our roadmap,” says Buckley. She goes on to explain that firms want their data to be connected, their workflows to be more efficient, and for their clients to receive consistent service across all their teams.  

The professionalization of practice management for mid-market law firms 

With all the exciting things happening in the legal technology space for midsize firms, Buckley has observed a larger shift within the legal industry: the professionalization and maturation of operations roles in mid-market firms. “We’re definitely seeing real business managers being brought into these larger midsize firms, and they’re making really strong business decisions.” What used to be managed ‘off the side of the desk’ by paralegals or partners is now increasingly led by dedicated business managers who are driving firm strategy and technology adoption.  

However, Buckley notes that smaller midsize law firms don’t often have these teams and systems in place to manage change internally. To close that gap, Actionstep connects law firms with its impressive community of consulting partners to help firms adopt technology strategically. 

Shifting mindsets and setting the framework

Ultimately, with all the exciting product launches and conversations, Buckley advises law firms to be mindful of the tech decisions. “Thoughtful change management is becoming increasingly important,” she says, “without careful planning, firms just end up with a collection of tools that aren’t particularly useful.”  

That being said, the legal tech space, especially for midsize law firms, is the most exciting it has been in decades, and Buckley finished the conversation with optimism. “I really think law firms are starting so see how they can bring these amazing things into their day-to-day. Conversations are much more informed. We’re all growing up as an industry and you can really feel the excitement around that.”