Independent analysis
Sharp, conflict-free commentary on how law and technology actually collide — for lawyers, legal-ops teams and CLOs.
The legal tech graveyard is littered with document automation subscriptions that lasted exactly one billing cycle before someone quietly canceled them. Law firms and in-house teams buy these tools with genuine enthusiasm, discover that the setup demands more time than drafting by hand, and quietly...
The days of hiring a sharp paralegal and calling it a "legal ops team" are over. In 2026, building a functional legal operations department means making deliberate choices about role architecture, skill weighting, and onboarding structure. Get it wrong and you'll spend two years burning...
Everyone in legal tech has heard about Mata v. Avianca. Two attorneys submitted a brief packed with invented citations, got sanctioned, and became the cautionary tale that launched a thousand CLE presentations. It's 2026. If Mata is still the ceiling of your understanding of AI...
Law firms are extraordinarily good at billing for complexity. They are extraordinarily bad at managing it internally. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the accumulated technical debt sitting beneath the surface of most mid-size and large firms — a slow-moving crisis that doesn't...
The relationship between in-house legal teams and outside counsel has always been complicated. It's a bit like hiring a contractor to renovate your kitchen — you need the expertise, you're paying serious money for it, and you'll be furious if they show up three weeks...
For decades, legal pundits have been writing the obituary for the billable hour. They were wrong in 2008, wrong in 2015, and they are largely wrong again now. The billable hour has not died. But if you are running a firm and pretending that AI...
The gap between lawyers who get useful output from AI and those who get expensive garbage is almost never the tool. It's the prompt. Most attorneys approach AI the way they approached their first summer associate: vague assignment, high expectations, profound disappointment. The difference is...
The legal press loves a merger announcement. Two firms shake hands, issue a joint statement about "complementary practices and shared culture," and promise seamless service continuity for clients. Then, eighteen months later, partners are quietly lateraling out, billing rates are a mess, and nobody can...
The EU AI Act entered into force in August 2024. Most prohibited-use provisions kicked in last February. The high-risk requirements — the ones that will reshape how law firms procure and deploy AI — become enforceable in August 2026. That gives your firm roughly three...