A Law Firm's Guide to the Legal Tech Market

The legal tech market has somewhere between several hundred and several thousand products depending on who is counting and what counts. Most law firm decision-makers encounter a fraction of that — the same names on every shortlist, the same demos in rotation, the same sales cycle. That narrowness is reasonable; what a solo practice needs is different from what a 40-attorney litigation firm needs, and most people are rightly focused on their actual problem rather than the breadth of the market.

But that focus can leave firms with an incomplete map. A managing partner who knows one platform well may not understand how it relates to a dedicated intake CRM. An attorney who just saw a legal AI demo may not know where it fits relative to tools built on verified legal databases — or what either one actually does with client information. A firm administrator trying to evaluate a practice management replacement may not realize that what they actually need to fix is the intake layer, not the case management layer.

This guide is a market orientation. It covers the major categories of legal technology, the significant platforms and tools in each, the emerging AI layer, specialty tools by practice area, and some resources worth knowing for ongoing market research. It is not a ranked list. It is not a buying guide. It will not tell you which tool is best for your firm — that question requires knowing your practice area, size, workflow maturity, and implementation capacity, none of which fit in a market guide. What it can do is give you a more coherent mental model of the space before you walk into any of those conversations.

About This Guide

This article covers general-purpose practice management platforms, intake and CRM tools, AI assistants and research tools, contract and drafting tools, specialty practice-area software, ediscovery platforms, and independent market resources. It focuses on tools relevant to law firms and legal operations teams.

A disclosure note: Songbird Strategies has commercial relationships with some vendors mentioned here. Those relationships do not determine what is included or how it is described — the market is broader than any partner list, and the goal of this article is market comprehension, not a referral path. Product details, pricing, feature scope, and market positioning change; treat vendor information here as orientation, not a substitute for current documentation or direct vendor conversations. This article was current as of its publication date.

On sourcing: most framing in this guide is Songbird operational judgment based on working with law firms on technology decisions. Where data from published research is relevant, it is cited. Where it is not cited, the framing is advisory observation, not empirical assertion.

Where to Start in This Market

Most law firms do not need to read the entire market — they need to identify which part of the market is relevant to their current situation, enter that part with the right frame, and avoid the most common wrong turn for that category. The table below routes by situation. If your problem fits more than one row, start with the highest-impact one first.

How to Think About This Market Before Looking at Brands

The single most useful reorientation for legal tech buyers is to think in categories before thinking in brand names. The categories are structurally different from one another. A practice management platform and a legal CRM are not the same kind of tool, even though both might appear on a software-evaluation shortlist. A legal AI assistant built on top of a verified legal content database is not the same kind of tool as a general-purpose AI model with a legal-sounding name, even though both are marketed as AI for lawyers.

Three distinctions are worth making clearly at the outset.

System of record vs. point solution vs. specialty tool. A practice management platform is a system of record — the firm's operating system where matters, billing, documents, and client records live. A point solution solves one specific problem (scheduling, document automation, intake form capture) and typically integrates with the system of record rather than replacing it. A specialty tool serves a specific practice area or workflow with depth that general-purpose platforms don't match. These are not competing options. Most well-run firms use all three types. The mistake is treating them as substitutes.

Implementation burden matters more than features. Cloud-based legal practice management adopters were 43% more likely to have satisfied clients in Clio's 2022 research — a finding the research context attributes to the quality of systematic technology adoption more than to the specific platform chosen. Clio 2022 Firms that evaluate tools primarily on feature lists and demo quality, without equal attention to implementation capacity and adoption likelihood, are optimizing for the wrong variables.

Firm size and structure matter enormously. Tools built for large-firm or enterprise environments are often too expensive and process-heavy for small and mid-size firms; tools designed for non-legal businesses often miss the workflow patterns distinctive to legal practice. Reuters Legal 2024 The phrase "best legal tech" is only meaningful when combined with "for a firm like yours."

The Major Categories at a Glance

These categories are not mutually exclusive — many platforms span multiple categories, and the market shifts. Think of this as orientation, not rigid taxonomy.

Core Practice Management Platforms

Practice management is the most established category in legal tech. Most mid-size and larger firms already have a platform; for them, the question is usually "is this the right one, and are we using it well?" rather than "do we need one?" For smaller and solo firms, this is often the first major technology decision.

The platforms in this category manage case or matter records, time tracking and billing, document storage, deadlines and calendars, reporting, and increasingly embedded AI features. The differences between them are real but often overstated in demos — the category is mature enough that most platforms handle the fundamentals competently. Material differences show up in workflow depth, practice-area fit, UI speed for high-volume users, and implementation complexity.

Clio

Clio is the broadest general-market platform in the space and functions as the de facto benchmark for most legal tech evaluations. Its product suite includes practice management (Clio Manage), intake and client onboarding (Clio Grow), payments, document automation, and embedded AI features. The breadth is genuine — and the breadth is also the trade-off. Firms that need deep specialization in any single dimension often find that feature integration across one platform comes at the cost of workflow depth. Clio's install base and ecosystem of integrations make it a reasonable default benchmark for evaluation, even for firms that ultimately select something else.

Filevine

Filevine has a heavier workflow engine and more configurability than most SMB-oriented platforms — a strong fit for personal injury, mass tort, and litigation-intensive firms that need to model complex case workflows with real depth. That configurability has a cost: Filevine implementations tend to require more planning, more internal ownership, and more upfront build work. A firm that can invest in the implementation typically gets genuine operational depth. A firm expecting to be operational in a few weeks is often surprised.

MyCase and the 8am Ecosystem

MyCase (now part of the 8am legal technology ecosystem) targets smaller and mid-size firms with value-tier positioning relative to Clio. It covers the practice management fundamentals plus billing, payments, client messaging, and intake. The 8am ecosystem also includes CasePeer (PI-specific case management) and 8am IQ (AI tools embedded in the platform). For firms evaluating practice management in the small-to-mid range without complex specialty requirements, MyCase/8am is a common shortlist contender with a competitive price point.

LEAP

LEAP is designed as a deeply integrated all-in-one system combining practice management, document automation, accounting, and legal-specific document templates. The document automation depth is one of the cleaner differentiators in the SMB platform market. LEAP tends to fit firms that want a single-vendor story and are running Windows-heavy infrastructure — and to frustrate firms that need flexible API access or want to build their own integration stack.

Smokeball

Smokeball is particularly useful for small firms that bill by time and want automatic time capture — it monitors activity across email and documents to record time that would otherwise be missed. The document automation is solid. It fits Windows-centric, document-heavy practices well.

PracticePanther and Rocket Matter

PracticePanther and Rocket Matter both serve the small-firm market with cloud-based matter management, billing, and reporting. Neither has the feature depth of Clio or the workflow customization of Filevine — but for firms that need a functional, maintainable platform without extensive implementation overhead, both are legitimate options that appear regularly on evaluation shortlists.

The general note for this entire category: the right practice management platform is not the one with the most features or the best demo. It is the one your firm's actual daily users will operate consistently at the workflow depth the platform requires to deliver its value. See How to Choose Legal Tech Without Letting the Demo Decide for You for the evaluation and selection framework that applies to any platform here.

The Intake and Front-Office Layer

This is the category law firms most consistently undervalue — and when they do invest here, the impact is often more immediate than a practice management upgrade. The intake layer is where prospective clients first experience the firm's operations. Firms using client-facing intake capabilities saw 51% more leads and 52% higher revenues in Clio's 2024 research — described as an observed association rather than a guaranteed outcome, but a consistent one. Clio 2024

The distinction from practice management matters: intake and CRM tools are designed around the pre-client funnel — lead capture, follow-up sequences, consultation scheduling, retainer signing — while practice management platforms are designed around the active client file. Some practice management platforms include intake features. Dedicated intake and CRM tools go deeper on the funnel side. For firms with inconsistent lead conversion, that depth is usually where the problem lives.

Lawmatics

Lawmatics is the clearest example of a dedicated legal CRM — a front-office automation system built for lead management, follow-up workflows, intake pipelines, and client onboarding. For firms that have a functioning practice management platform but inconsistent lead conversion, Lawmatics addresses a different part of the system than adding another PM feature would. It integrates with the major practice management platforms rather than replacing them.

Smith.ai

Smith.ai handles live call answering, lead qualification, appointment booking, and chat using a combination of AI and human agents. For firms losing leads at the phone layer — unanswered calls, voicemails that don't convert, after-hours gaps — Smith.ai addresses a problem that software alone typically doesn't solve. It is not a practice management tool and not a CRM. It is front-office coverage for the firm's phone and chat channels.

Clio Grow

Clio Grow is Clio's intake and client-onboarding layer. For firms already on Clio Manage, it provides native intake pipeline management, intake forms, e-signature, and onboarding workflows without a separate vendor relationship. It is less specialized than dedicated tools like Lawmatics on the CRM and automation side, but the integration advantage is real for firms that want to minimize their vendor count.

The AI Layer: What's Real, What's Emerging, and Where the Hype Is

Legal AI has attracted more vendor activity and more marketing noise per dollar of actual firm adoption than any other category in this market. Roughly 30% of attorneys reported their offices were currently using AI-based tools as of the ABA's 2024 technology survey. ABA 2024 That number mostly reflects individual experimentation rather than systematic firm-level deployment with governance structures in place. The gap between what AI vendors are selling and what firms are actually ready to govern responsibly is still wide.

The most important distinction in this category: tools built on top of established legal content databases and tools that apply general-purpose AI to legal tasks are not the same thing. The difference matters for accuracy, for supervision requirements, and for how attorneys should think about reliance.

Legal research and knowledge AI: CoCounsel, Lexis+ with Protégé, vLex Vincent AI

Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel, LexisNexis's Lexis+ with Protégé, and vLex's Vincent AI are the clearest examples of AI tools grounded in established legal content. CoCounsel operates within the Thomson Reuters and Westlaw ecosystem, drawing on verified case law, statutes, and secondary sources. Lexis+ with Protégé integrates with Lexis content and Shepard's citation service. vLex Vincent AI is backed by vLex's global legal content database. For firms already invested in one of these research ecosystems, the AI layer extends capabilities they have already evaluated and licensed.

The grounding in verified content does not eliminate the need for attorney review — AI outputs from any tool require substantive review before reliance — but it substantially reduces the hallucination risk that makes general-purpose AI unreliable for legal research. The architecture difference is meaningful, not cosmetic.

Harvey

Harvey has positioned as an enterprise legal AI platform operating across analysis, diligence, drafting, and collaboration workflows. It has built its market primarily with larger firms and in-house legal departments, and its pricing and implementation complexity generally reflect that positioning. For small and mid-size firms, Harvey is more useful as a market signal than as an immediate operational consideration.

Emerging legal AI for small and mid-size firms: Paxton and August

Paxton and August represent a newer generation of AI assistants targeting small and mid-size law firms specifically, offering research, drafting, and document analysis at a different price point and implementation profile than enterprise tools. Their outputs still require attorney review — that is non-negotiable for any AI tool touching legal work — but both are designed for the workflows and budgets of smaller practices. This category is moving quickly; product capabilities and pricing should be verified directly rather than assumed from any guide published more than a few months ago.

Verticalized AI for personal injury: EvenUp and Supio

EvenUp and Supio are AI tools built specifically for personal injury workflows — demand letters, case analysis, medical chronology review, and settlement support. Rather than adapting general-purpose AI to PI tasks, both tools are built around the actual workflow patterns of PI practice. The depth is real and the fit is narrow. For non-PI practices, they are not relevant. For PI practices evaluating AI tools, they are worth understanding as an alternative to general-purpose tools that have been given a PI configuration.

Where the hype outruns reality

A few honest notes on this category. First, "AI features" in practice management platforms vary enormously — the phrase can mean anything from a substantive drafting assistant to a smart-search button, and buyer due diligence is warranted before assuming a platform's AI features deliver the value the demo implies. Second, the governance gap is real: most firms experimenting with AI tools have not built the vendor review, data-handling verification, and supervision standards that responsible AI use requires. Adopting a capable tool before the governance infrastructure is in place produces liability faster than productivity. Third, AI tool capabilities and vendor positioning change on a shorter cycle than any other category. Treat specific product claims from any source — including this one — as orientation rather than current documentation.

The AI governance cluster in this Insights library covers the confidentiality, supervision, and policy questions that apply to any AI tool before it touches client information. See What to Ask Before Your Firm Uses Any AI Tool With Client Information for the vendor review framework, Stop Writing One AI Policy for an Entire Law Firm for the governance and permission matrix, and A Firm AI Policy People Will Actually Follow for the policy architecture.

Contract, Drafting, and Document Tools

This category covers AI tools focused specifically on contract drafting, review, and legal writing — not full practice management, not research databases, but tools that operate at the document and draft level. The use case is narrower and more practice-type-dependent than other categories. Transactional practices and in-house legal teams tend to find more use for dedicated tools here; litigators may find research AI and drafting features within their research platform sufficient.

Spellbook

Spellbook operates inside Microsoft Word and uses AI to assist with contract review, drafting, and research. For transactional lawyers who live in Word, the in-environment integration is the differentiating design choice — it meets the workflow where it already lives rather than requiring a context switch.

DraftWise

DraftWise focuses on contract drafting grounded in the firm's own precedent library and prior deal knowledge. The model here is that the AI improves over time as it learns from the firm's actual drafting patterns — which has genuine value for firms with substantial transactional volume and established precedent libraries, and limited value for firms that don't.

Clearbrief

Clearbrief takes a more conservative angle than most AI drafting tools: it is specifically designed to verify that factual claims in legal documents are supported by the cited source material. For brief writers who rely on record citations, the core value proposition is accuracy verification rather than speed. The framing aligns well with the supervision obligations that apply to AI-generated work product — it helps attorneys do the review they're already responsible for, rather than inviting them to skip it.

Specialty and Practice-Area Tools

The clearest illustration of why category and fit matter more than brand recognition: there are practice areas where a purpose-built specialty tool substantially outperforms any general-purpose platform, regardless of that platform's general reputation.

Personal injury: CasePeer, EvenUp, Supio

Personal injury practice has a specific software lane that general platforms do not fully serve. CasePeer (part of the 8am ecosystem) is a PI-specific practice management system that models the treatment tracking, negotiation, and case progression workflows of PI practice with the depth that general platforms typically lack. EvenUp and Supio (covered above in the AI layer) provide AI tools built around PI-specific deliverables. For PI-heavy firms evaluating software, the relevant architecture is a PI-native practice management platform combined with a PI-specific AI layer — not simply "which general practice management platform has a PI module."

Immigration: Docketwise

Immigration practice has similarly specific software requirements — USCIS forms, multilingual client intake, case status tracking, and workflow patterns that don't map cleanly to general practice management structures. Docketwise is purpose-built for this workflow, including multilingual intake forms and immigration-specific case management. For immigration practices evaluating software, the most important decision is the category one — specialty tool vs. general platform — rather than the comparison between general platforms.

Ediscovery and Litigation Data Intelligence

Ediscovery is a distinct software category that is largely irrelevant to small and mid-size litigation practices handling routine matters — and genuinely critical for practices handling large-volume document review, investigations, or complex commercial litigation.

Everlaw is a cloud-native ediscovery platform designed for collaborative litigation review, analytics, and case preparation across mid-size and larger matters. Relativity (and its cloud-native variant RelativityOne, with the aiR AI layer) is the enterprise-grade incumbent in large-scale legal data and ediscovery, widely used by large firms, legal service providers, and corporate legal departments. Both are substantially different in design orientation from practice management tools — built for document-intensive litigation workflows at scale, not for firm operations management.

Independent Resources Worth Following

The legal tech market has a small but useful set of independent resources that provide coverage, analysis, and market mapping without a vendor agenda. These are worth knowing as reference points for staying oriented in a market that produces new product announcements faster than any guide can track.

• Legaltech Hub — A legal tech directory and analyst resource with product briefings, market maps, and a taxonomy of the space that is broader than any vendor's own framing. Useful for initial category research and for understanding where a specific tool fits in the wider market.
• LawSites / LawNext — Robert Ambrogi's long-running independent coverage of legal technology and innovation. LawSites has been covering this market for longer than most of the products in it have existed, which gives it historical context that vendor marketing cannot replicate.
• Artificial Lawyer — Independent news and analysis focused specifically on legal AI and the business of law. For tracking the AI layer in particular — new product launches, acquisitions, market positioning shifts — it is one of the more reliable ongoing signal sources.
• ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) — The professional association for legal technology practitioners. Its publications, communities, and events reflect practitioner experience rather than vendor positioning, which is a useful corrective to a media environment that often leads with vendor announcements.
• ABA TECHSHOW — The American Bar Association's annual legal technology conference. For attorneys and firm administrators wanting structured legal technology education alongside CLE credit, it provides a compressed view of the vendor landscape and the conversations practitioners are actually having about legal tech in practice.
• Clio Legal Trends Report — An annual research report on law firm operations, technology adoption, AI, and client trends. It is vendor-sponsored and should be read with that context in mind, but the data is generally rigorous and the benchmarks are useful for firms evaluating their own practices against broader patterns in the market.

Where Firms Get Lost in This Market

The market-orientation problem is not just that firms don't know the map — it's that specific, predictable wrong turns send them into the wrong category entirely. These are the most common ones.

1. Treating practice management and intake as the same category. Adding intake features to a PM platform does not solve a conversion problem caused by missing response protocols, uncovered phone lines, or absent follow-up sequences. The categories serve different parts of the client lifecycle. PM tools manage active matters. Intake tools manage the pipeline before the client file opens.
2. Shopping AI tools before governance is in place. The adoption sequence that produces liability: see demo → adopt tool → discover a data-handling problem after the fact. The sequence that works: establish data-handling and supervision standards → evaluate tools against them → adopt. The governance article cluster in this library is designed to close that gap before it opens.
3. Using demo quality as a proxy for implementation success. Every platform demos well — that's what demos are for. Implementation surfaces the friction that demos cannot show: the user who won't adopt, the integration that doesn't work as described, the workflow that requires more internal build than the onboarding timeline suggested.
4. Comparing specialty-area needs against general platforms. A PI firm evaluating Clio vs. MyCase is asking the wrong comparison question if the real question is "do we need a specialty PI platform at all?" The primary decision is category — specialty tool vs. general platform — not which general platform handles PI better.
5. Confusing market familiarity with evaluation readiness. A firm that has read this guide and oriented to the market map has done useful preparation. It has not yet done the evaluation work: defined the workflow problem specifically, named an implementation owner, identified real daily users for the pilot, and set measurable success criteria. Market comprehension is the entry point, not the exit point.

How to Navigate This Market Without Getting Lost

Market comprehension is useful. It produces a better mental model for evaluating vendor claims, asking more precise questions, and placing individual tools in context. But market comprehension is not firm-level decision-making, and the distance between them is where most evaluation failures live. Here is the order of operations.

1. Define the workflow problem specifically. Not "we need better technology" — that is not a problem statement. Start with where the current process is actually breaking down: leads are lost before they reach an attorney; billing is consistently missed for a specific matter type; documents are stored in three different places. The specific problem determines the relevant category.
2. Identify the category type. Is the problem in the system-of-record (practice management), the front-office layer (intake, CRM, conversion), the AI or research layer, or a practice-area-specific workflow? Each category has different evaluation standards, different implementation requirements, and different ROI timelines.
3. Determine whether this is a replacement, first implementation, or addition. Replacing a platform means auditing current failure modes before selecting the next one — otherwise you bring the same problems to the new tool. Adding a tool means confirming integration requirements upfront. First implementation means defining workflows before selecting software, not the reverse.
4. Narrow by category before looking at brands. Once the category is right, the shortlist is manageable. Before the category is determined, the market is unsortable. The routing table at the top of this article is designed to accelerate this step.
5. Evaluate implementation burden as carefully as features. The platform that your firm will actually operate consistently at the workflow depth it requires is the right one — not the platform with the most features or the best demo. See How to Evaluate a Legal Technology Vendor for the staged evaluation sequence and vendor scorecard, What a Legal Technology Budget Should Actually Cover for the full cost picture beyond the license fee, and How to Run a Legal Tech Pilot That Gives You a Real Answer for the charter, scorecard, and issue-log structure that makes a pilot produce a real answer.

As of early 2026, 79% of law firm respondents in Thomson Reuters' 2024 research expected AI to have high or transformational impact on the profession within five years. Thomson Reuters 2024 That expectation is probably not wrong. It is also not an implementation plan. Build the selection discipline first.

How This Article Connects to the Rest of the Library

This guide is the market orientation layer. The articles below it are where market comprehension turns into firm-level decisions. The table below routes by the specific question that follows from identifying your category.

A Summary of the Market

The legal tech market is larger and more fragmented than most law firm decision-makers realize — and smaller and more mature than the vendor marketing environment implies. The core practice management category is established; the major platforms have real track records. The intake and CRM category is frequently underused and often where the highest-impact investment lies. The AI category is genuinely active but uneven: some tools are built on serious legal-content foundations with appropriate governance expectations, others are general-purpose AI wearing legal branding. Specialty tools in PI, immigration, and litigation data deserve their own evaluation categories, not comparisons to general platforms.

There is no single best legal tech stack. There is the stack that fits your firm's practice area, workflow maturity, staff capacity, and implementation resources — and there is everything else. The routing table at the top of this article connects your situation to the right entry point. The library crosswalk above connects your category decision to the specific articles that complete the evaluation. This article is the market orientation. The rest of the Insights library covers the selection, evaluation, budgeting, piloting, and governance decisions that follow from it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is practice management software and do I need it?

Practice management software is the firm's operating system — it handles matter records, billing, time tracking, documents, deadlines, and reporting in one connected system. Most firms above a solo-plus-one-staff size benefit from one, though the specific platform choice matters enormously for fit and adoption. Firms running their practice from email and spreadsheets are not managing without software; they are managing with software not designed for legal practice, which creates specific and predictable failure patterns.

What's the difference between a practice management platform and a legal CRM?

A practice management platform manages active matters — the work a firm does for current clients. A legal CRM manages the pre-client relationship — leads, follow-ups, intake pipelines, consultation scheduling, and retainer conversion. Most practice management platforms include some intake features; dedicated legal CRMs go deeper on the funnel side. For firms with meaningful lead volume and inconsistent conversion, a dedicated CRM often makes more difference than an upgrade to the practice management platform.

Is legal AI the same as general-purpose AI applied to legal work?

No, and the distinction matters practically. Some legal AI tools — CoCounsel, Lexis+ with Protégé, vLex Vincent AI — operate on top of verified legal content databases, which substantially reduces hallucinated citations and authority. General-purpose AI tools applied to legal tasks generate output from training data without real-time access to a verified legal corpus. Both require attorney supervision before reliance; the architectural difference affects how much supervision is needed and what failure modes to anticipate.

What should law firms verify before using any AI tool with client information?

At minimum: whether the vendor excludes customer inputs from model training (confirmed in writing, not assumed), what the actual data retention policy is for the plan and configuration in use, whether a data processing agreement is available, and whether the vendor has a SOC 2 Type II or equivalent security assurance report. Consumer-tier accounts on general-purpose platforms typically lack these protections. The detailed diligence framework is in What to Ask Before Your Firm Uses Any AI Tool With Client Information.

How do I know if my firm is ready for a new platform?

Implementation readiness matters more than the platform choice itself. Before evaluating platforms, the firm should be able to describe the current workflow at the task level, name the primary users and get their input on the evaluation, identify an adoption owner with the authority and capacity to drive implementation, and define what success looks like at 60 days. Firms that cannot answer those questions before signing are evaluating the product without evaluating their own readiness. See How to Choose Legal Tech Without Letting the Demo Decide for You for the pre-purchase framework.

What does ediscovery software do and does my firm need it?

Ediscovery software handles large-scale document review and management in litigation contexts — used in commercial litigation, investigations, and mass-tort matters with high document volumes. Most small and mid-size firms handling routine litigation do not need purpose-built ediscovery tools; they use document management within their practice management platform or outsource review to litigation support vendors. Firms handling large-volume document review internally are genuinely underserved by general practice management tools and warrant a separate category conversation.

How often does this market change, and when should I re-evaluate my stack?

Continuously, and the AI layer changes faster than the rest. AI features in established platforms update multiple times per year. New tools appear; older tools are acquired or shut down. Pricing shifts. A firm that made its last technology decisions more than three years ago should expect the current market to look meaningfully different. A reasonable cadence is an annual review of whether current tools are being used well and whether the category landscape has changed, with a full evaluation triggered when adoption problems are persistent or when a new category becomes clearly relevant to the firm's workflow.

Where do I start if I'm evaluating legal tech for the first time?

Start with the workflow problem, not the product search. The most useful first step is mapping where the current process is actually breaking down — where leads are lost, where matters are tracked inconsistently, where billing is missed, or where documents are stored unreliably. Once the problem is specific, the relevant category usually follows. The routing table at the top of this article will confirm which category fits your situation and which library articles to read next.