Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
No practice area in American law is fighting harder about AI adoption right now than environmental law. Not IP, not securities, not even criminal defense — environmental. And the fight is unusually bitter because both sides have genuinely compelling arguments, the stakes involve real ecosystems...
Something uncomfortable is happening in law firms that have been running AI tools for eighteen months or more, and the partnership is mostly not talking about it. The quality floor is dropping. Not catastrophically, not all at once — but incrementally, invisibly, in the way...
When litigation departments at firms like Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis started quietly deploying AI drafting tools in 2023 and 2024, patent prosecutors largely watched from the sidelines. Not because they were technophobic. Because they were right to be skeptical.
Something is happening in legal AI that deserves more attention than it's getting in board rooms and procurement meetings. The major vendors — Harvey, Ironclad, ContractPodAi, and increasingly Thomson Reuters with its CoCounsel suite — are no longer selling point solutions. They're selling ecosystems. And...
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...