Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
The redlines started appearing sometime around mid-2024. A boilerplate paragraph, usually tucked between the billing rate schedule and the conflict waiver, informing clients that the firm "may utilize artificial intelligence tools in the course of providing legal services." Careful. Passive. Hedged to the point of...
There is a particular kind of wrong that is extraordinarily dangerous in legal practice. Not the wrong that looks wrong — the scrambled citation, the obvious non-sequitur, the clause that reads like it was translated twice. Those errors announce themselves. The dangerous wrong is the...
The underwriting questionnaire sitting in your renewal packet looks different this year. Buried between the standard questions about your firm's practice areas and claims history is a new section — sometimes a full page — asking whether your attorneys use AI tools to draft documents,...
The conversation nobody at BigLaw wants to have is already happening in every associate bullpen from Midtown Manhattan to the Loop. A third-year puts a $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, a drafting assistant, or a legal citation checker on their personal Amex. They use it to...
The narrative was supposed to go one way. In-house legal teams would deploy AI, automate the repetitive work, shrink their LPO spend, and redeploy budget toward strategic headcount. It was a clean story. It was also, for a significant number of legal departments, wrong.
If you're running technology for an AmLaw 100 firm right now, there's a reasonable chance you're paying Microsoft for Copilot's responsible AI features, paying Harvey for its proprietary citation verification and hallucination containment, and then paying a third vendor — Perceive AI, Docugami, or one...
The six-minute increment exists because courts and clients needed a defensible unit of accountability. Charge for a tenth of an hour, and you can point to something — a phone call, a paragraph reviewed, a client email answered. That logic is now structurally broken, and...
There is a specific kind of organizational frustration that arrives when a tool has been purchased, integrated, technically configured, and then quietly shelved while procurement, IT security, and outside counsel argue about where the data actually goes. Legal departments across the Fortune 500 are living...
The surcharges were always a gamble. Starting in late 2023 and accelerating through 2024, law firms began appending line items to their invoices — "AI-assisted review," "legal technology infrastructure," "intelligent workflow optimization" — typically ranging from 1% to 5% of total matter costs. Some firms...