Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
The promises were everywhere in 2024. "Grounded AI." "Citation-verified outputs." "Hallucination-free legal research." If you attended ILTA or LegalWeek that year, you couldn't walk twenty feet without a vendor handing you a one-pager built around some variation of the claim that their large language model...
The legal profession has a disclosure problem, and it isn't subtle. Across litigation departments, solo practices, and BigLaw document review teams, lawyers are using generative AI to draft briefs, research memos, contract provisions, and demand letters — then presenting that work product as though a...
The United States is running out of court reporters, and the legal profession has spent the better part of a decade treating this as a calendar problem. It is not. It is an infrastructure crisis, and the gap between what the litigation system demands and...
There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from reading a law firm's AI governance policy and realizing, somewhere around page four, that it is significantly more rigorous than anything your own department has produced. This is happening to general counsel at mid-market and...
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.