Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
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...
The Big Law recruiting machine remains one of the most efficient talent pipelines ever constructed. On-campus interviews, pre-determined callback windows, offer deadlines coordinated by the NALP — it is a closed, self-referential system that law school career services offices understand deeply and maintain religiously. The...
There's a negotiation dynamic quietly metastasizing across commercial contracting, and most transactional lawyers aren't talking about it yet. When you use an AI drafting tool to generate your first draft, and your counterparty does the same, you aren't starting from opposing positions. You're starting from...
The pitch is seductive. Load your contract playbook, connect your template library, and let the AI negotiate your NDAs end-to-end while your associates work on something that actually requires a law degree. Every major legal AI vendor — Harvey, Ironclad, Spellbook, ContractPodAi, and a half-dozen...
The legal profession spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 worrying about AI hallucination — the fabricated citations, the phantom judges, the cases that never existed. Mata v. Avianca gave every partner a cautionary tale to forward around. But there's a quieter, more insidious...
Here is what the demo never shows you: paste a 180-page master service agreement — complete with six schedules, two exhibits, a data processing addendum, and a statement of work — into your AI contract review tool, and watch what happens to the indemnification analysis...
There is a quiet crisis building inside the upper floors of large law firms, and most of the partners contributing to it do not fully realize it yet. They are signing off on memos, briefs, due diligence summaries, and contract analyses that were substantially drafted...
The General Counsel finds out the same way they find out about most shadow IT problems: accidentally. A vendor renewal crosses the right desk, a data incident triggers an audit trail, or someone in IT mentions offhand that compliance has been running a separate contract...