Analysis

American law firms spent much of 2024 and 2025 arguing about whether generative AI was a billing problem, a malpractice problem, or someone else's problem entirely. Meanwhile, Australian firms quietly built governance infrastructure that actually works. The gap is now wide enough to be embarrassing...

There is a slow-motion disaster unfolding in legal departments and law firms right now, and most of the people responsible for preventing it are too busy celebrating efficiency gains to notice it happening. AI-first drafting workflows are producing faster output, lower costs, and happier business...

For decades, the notarization requirement sat quietly at the end of legal workflows like a toll booth on an otherwise clear highway. You could draft the perfect agreement, negotiate every clause, and align every stakeholder — and then spend three days coordinating an in-person signing...

The lateral hiring market is broken in a specific, expensive way. Law firms spend months courting partners, extend offers based on portable book projections that rarely materialize, and conduct reference checks that amount to polite telephone theater. The American Lawyer has reported for years that...

Litigation finance has always been an underwriting business dressed up in legal clothing. Burford Capital, Omni Bridgeway, and the dozen or so serious competitors who've entered the space since 2018 were never just passive capital sources — they were making probabilistic bets on legal outcomes,...

Most AmLaw 200 firms now have an AI acceptable use policy. Most of those policies are documents that exist to exist — drafted by a committee, approved by the executive committee, emailed to associates in a PDF, and never operationalized into anything resembling actual oversight....

There's a document sitting in a SharePoint folder somewhere at your organization. It was drafted in late 2024, reviewed by outside counsel, approved by the GC, and announced at an all-hands as evidence that the legal department was taking AI seriously. It covers ChatGPT. It...

The question used to be whether you used AI. Courts are now asking how, when, and which one. That shift matters enormously, and most litigators are not ready for it.

The traditional law firm org chart has two kinds of people: lawyers and everyone else. That binary is collapsing. Sitting in the gap between a JD and a computer science degree is one of the most compelling new roles in the legal industry — the...