The Great “A-ha!”
Jon Chan is a big fan of a lightbulb moment. The stir of energy. The burst of color.
“You can almost feel the heat above your head when you think, ‘I've got this amazing idea, there's something going on here,’” he says. Thankfully for Jon, AI has been a real gateway for innovation, bringing him more and more lightbulb moments.
As senior managing director at FTI Technology, Jon heads the e-discovery innovation team—a small, “geeky” group of lawyers, data scientists, software developers, digital forensic investigators, and e-discovery experts who solve really interesting, complex data challenges for their clients. “It’s exciting because we get to work at this inflection point where new technology solutions can be injected into issues that have been plaguing lawyers for decades,” Jon shares.
Jon’s passion for legal tech and eye for innovation has earned him a place in the 2025 cohort of AI Visionaries, where he joins 23 other industry thought leaders pioneering AI in new and exciting ways. With a title like “AI Visionary,” Jon’s insights on AI are worth sharing with the class.
In the Age of AI, Together Is Better
Legal Teams and AI
For Jon, AI is deeply collaborative—in more ways than one.
For starters, he believes that the exploration of AI—and of any new technology—calls for good old-fashioned teamwork: “Innovation requires collaboration, testing, and continuous feedback and improvement. That cycle can’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a community of people who can rally around shared objectives and add depth to the conversation.”
Jon’s team at FTI Technology brings together an array of backgrounds and experiences, from individuals who have worked as lawyers and served at regulatory agencies to those who’ve created patented tech and more. This diversity broadens the team’s perspective, unlocking new ways to leverage AI and deliver value to clients.
“We are all constantly learning from and sharing knowledge with each other,” Jon explains. Outside of working closely with each other, Jon and his team also run wires to connect and learn from their clients, partners, colleagues, and the global industry at large. It’s an intricate web of connection—and it’s proving fruitful.
You and AI
Successful AI use takes more than teamwork; Jon stresses a need for healthy human-AI collaboration. In the tech industry, we often call this the “human in the loop”—a framework and protocol that prioritizes human oversight at every critical stage of AI decision making. For as intelligent as AI promises to be, it hasn’t surpassed a need for human supervision.
So, we asked Jon the hot-button question of whether or not AI will someday replace human roles. He offers this: “The role of humans will certainly change over time, but in this profession, technology won’t be a replacement for the foreseeable future. Even as the technology continues to rapidly advance, the need for human intellect, problem solving, analysis, and oversight will remain. Certain tasks will become more automated, but the practice of law (and the functions around it, like e-discovery) will continue to require the expertise, critical thinking, and curiosity that only humans can provide.”
He reminds us that while AI opens doors, unchecked use can introduce risk—especially in sensitive legal contexts like disputes and investigations. Collaboration between humans and machines must be done responsibly.
Challenging AI (and Yourself)
Just as AI has something to gain from human oversight, Jon often finds himself wondering: “How can I use AI in a way that helps challenge me?”
It’s a question that recently led him to role-play a conversation with AI. To prepare for a meeting with a potentially AI-skeptical lawyer, Jon asked AI to play the role of the skeptic—challenging his arguments instead of providing scripted answers. For 15 minutes—during a bike ride, mind you—Jon and Chat GPT went back and forth in a rapid-fire debate.
“In some respects, I felt weird because I was speaking to an AI instead of one of my colleagues. But you know what? Apart from not disturbing my colleague, I did also get a kind of curiosity fostered in the conversation.”
Jon has found that his own personal use of AI is evolving: “It’s an illustration of how we've only just scratched the surface, right?” This is the kind of real experimentation that AI enthusiasts like Jon make room for in their everyday work—and the industry at large should take notes.
When AI Can Do It Well
Among many things to consider when using AI is its versatility: “You're sitting here thinking, ‘I need to explore this use case around compliance, but what about this one with contracts?’ And then there's five or six different use cases in query discovery, and then there's something here that will accelerate investigations, and then we've got this client asking us for something else.”
The list of legal and compliance AI use cases continues to grow beyond e-discovery. AI tools are being leveraged in contract lifecycle management, data protection, merger and acquisition due diligence, and much more.
With newfound opportunity, legal teams will have to assess and make decisions around what data problems to tackle next.
Moreover, high-stakes situations raise a need for flexibility: tech you can develop, implement, and customize in real time. While Jon acknowledges the need for a wide range of solutions to solve complex challenges, he emphasizes that where other tools might be rigid or limited, AI can adapt: “AI helps us deliver on expectations—it’s a highly flexible tool in a larger toolbox.”
Embracing AI
Jon encourages organizations hesitant to adopt AI to maintain a degree of caution, but not to the extent that they fall behind the adoption curve: “There are many ways to safely experiment with AI and I encourage organizations to look for opportunities to do so. For some of our clients, this has included running sample projects with AI in parallel with or after traditional approaches, then comparing the outcomes.”
But beyond how you use AI—consider which you use. When looking for a potential technology provider, Jon’s team at FTI Technology holds high standards of quality, reliability, security, data privacy, and scalability. They also look for a balance of innovation and practicality, seeking collaborators with cutting-edge capabilities and proven benefits.
Legal professionals like Jon are setting the pace for AI’s future—modeling how to explore opportunities, ask the right questions, and tread carefully. With that mix of curiosity and intentionality, your next lightbulb moment might be closer than you think.
Graphics for this article were created by Caroline Patterson.
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