The Cravath system has governed American legal practice for over a century. You join as an associate, bill extraordinary hours, survive a brutal tournament, and — if you are among the fortunate few — make partner. The partnership itself operates as a profit-sharing collective, distributing...
Analysis
Page 9 / 10Opinion and analysis for lawyers, legal ops professionals, and CLOs.
Most law firm AI policies I've reviewed fall into one of two categories: a three-paragraph memo that says "use AI carefully," or a 40-page document that nobody reads past the table of contents. Neither protects your clients, your attorneys, or your firm. What follows is...
Enterprise legal departments have never had more technology to choose from — and have never been worse at choosing it. The average Fortune 500 legal ops team now manages between 12 and 18 distinct software platforms, according to the 2025 Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker Benchmark...
The gap in coverage has been glaring long enough. We've run exhaustive analysis on e-discovery platforms, contract lifecycle management, and AI-assisted document review, but virtually nothing on what happens when a litigator actually has to perform — in a hearing, before a jury, in a...
The legal AI funding wave didn't crest — it bifurcated. On one side, you have a cluster of well-capitalized companies building horizontally across the legal stack, chasing law firm and in-house enterprise deals worth seven figures annually. On the other, a scrappier cohort is going...
Clients don't leave law firms because of bad legal work. They leave because they sent three emails asking about their case status and got silence for two weeks. They leave because they needed a signed agreement and had to call twice to get someone to...
Legal research has always been expensive, slow, and unforgiving. Miss a controlling case in the Ninth Circuit and you've committed malpractice. Spend six hours chasing a circuit split that a paralegal already mapped last week and you've blown the client's budget. AI-assisted research promised to...
Remote work didn't just survive in BigLaw and boutique firms — it calcified into something permanent, structurally embedded, and increasingly complex to manage well. The conversation has moved past "should we allow it" into something more operationally urgent: how do you run a real law...
There is a billing system running inside a major regional law firm right now that predates the iPhone 3G. The partners know it. The billing coordinators know it. The CFO has built her entire monthly close process around its specific brand of brokenness. And until...