Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
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...
If you're a GC or legal ops lead and you haven't been pitched an agentic AI platform in the last six months, you're either very good at avoiding vendor calls or you're working somewhere that doesn't exist. The pitch is compelling: chain together specialized AI...
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....