Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
The privacy law landscape has never been more fragmented, more demanding, or more consequential for legal practitioners. Lawyers sit at a uniquely uncomfortable intersection: they are simultaneously subject to privacy law and advisors on it. Getting this wrong carries professional discipline liability, regulatory exposure, and...
The legal industry has spent the last decade congratulating itself for adopting cloud storage and e-signature tools. Meanwhile, the lawyers actually doing the work — the associates, the junior counsel, the clerks who just passed the bar — are using Claude or ChatGPT to draft...
The legal tech graveyard is littered with document automation subscriptions that lasted exactly one billing cycle before someone quietly canceled them. Law firms and in-house teams buy these tools with genuine enthusiasm, discover that the setup demands more time than drafting by hand, and quietly...
The days of hiring a sharp paralegal and calling it a "legal ops team" are over. In 2026, building a functional legal operations department means making deliberate choices about role architecture, skill weighting, and onboarding structure. Get it wrong and you'll spend two years burning...
Everyone in legal tech has heard about Mata v. Avianca. Two attorneys submitted a brief packed with invented citations, got sanctioned, and became the cautionary tale that launched a thousand CLE presentations. It's 2026. If Mata is still the ceiling of your understanding of AI...
Law firms are extraordinarily good at billing for complexity. They are extraordinarily bad at managing it internally. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the accumulated technical debt sitting beneath the surface of most mid-size and large firms — a slow-moving crisis that doesn't...
The relationship between in-house legal teams and outside counsel has always been complicated. It's a bit like hiring a contractor to renovate your kitchen — you need the expertise, you're paying serious money for it, and you'll be furious if they show up three weeks...
For decades, legal pundits have been writing the obituary for the billable hour. They were wrong in 2008, wrong in 2015, and they are largely wrong again now. The billable hour has not died. But if you are running a firm and pretending that AI...
The gap between lawyers who get useful output from AI and those who get expensive garbage is almost never the tool. It's the prompt. Most attorneys approach AI the way they approached their first summer associate: vague assignment, high expectations, profound disappointment. The difference is...