Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
There is a quiet assumption embedded in how law firms supervise associate work product, and it has never been written down anywhere because it never needed to be. The assumption is this: time spent correlates with care applied. A research memo that took a junior...
The conventional wisdom held that the firms with the largest legal tech budgets would win the AI transition. Buy the best tools, hire a Chief Innovation Officer with a LinkedIn bio full of buzzwords, and let scale do the rest. Eighteen months into genuine, production-level...
The sales pitch for AI contract review is compelling: upload an agreement, receive a prioritized list of issues, accelerate your redline. What the pitch omits is the growing problem of phantom clauses — flags raised by AI tools against provisions that are, on careful reading,...
The invoices started arriving quietly. A line item labeled "AI-assisted research and drafting" for $1,200 on a routine employment matter. A "technology infrastructure surcharge" of 2.5% tacked onto a $400,000 M&A closing bill. A vague "innovation fee" that no partner could fully explain on a...
There is a category of malpractice-adjacent mistake that legal AI tools are quietly producing at scale right now, and almost nobody in the vendor community is talking about it honestly. The mistake looks like competence. The brief is well-organized, the citations are Bluebook-correct, the argument...
The legal tech M&A headlines of mid-2026 have a suspiciously uniform shape: AI-native vendor acquires practice management platform, or CLM incumbent absorbs an AI drafting tool, or an e-billing provider merges with a contract intelligence startup. The press releases all say the same thing —...
There is a quiet scandal developing in legal AI procurement, and almost nobody in legal operations is talking about it yet. Your contract review platform almost certainly performs differently depending on when you use it. Not differently in ways that crash dashboards or trigger support...
The conference circuit has a new obsession. At every deal conference from SuperReturn to the ABA Business Law Section's spring meetings, some version of the same panel has appeared: AI in Transactions — Managing Risk in the New Deal Environment. And somewhere in the middle...
The contract review platform your firm procured in 2024 almost certainly had a clean compliance narrative. Narrow use case, low risk classification, straightforward data handling. Your legal ops team ran the vendor assessment, procurement signed off, IT provisioned the access, and everybody moved on. What...