Legal Technology

The legal tech M&A headlines of mid-2026 have a suspiciously uniform shape: AI-native vendor acquires practice management platform, or CLM incumbent absorbs an AI drafting tool, or an e-billing provider merges with a contract intelligence startup. The press releases all say the same thing —...

This briefing synthesizes findings from a structured survey of 150 third-through-fifth-year transactional associates across 20 AmLaw 200 firms, conducted between October and December 2025, with follow-up interviews completed in January 2026. Participating firms included representation from the M&A, private equity, technology transactions, and commercial real...

Energy and infrastructure legal teams sit at the intersection of the most document-intensive, jurisdiction-fragmented, and technically specialized practice areas in corporate law. Project finance counsel managing utility-scale solar transactions routinely process interconnection agreements, power purchase agreements, environmental impact statements, and state utility commission orders simultaneously...

Across 214 deal teams surveyed at AmLaw 200 firms and Fortune 1000 legal departments between October 2025 and January 2026, AI-suggested contract language was accepted without modification by counterparties at an average rate of 38%, modified and accepted at 29%, and rejected outright at 33%....

As of mid-2026, the U.S. legal profession finds itself in a familiar posture: regulation trailing technology by a margin wide enough to drive a hallucinating large language model through. Fewer than a dozen states have formally amended their competency frameworks to explicitly incorporate AI literacy...

Methodology: Interview-based fieldwork, 34 law firms and corporate legal departments | Job posting corpus analysis, January 2025–June 2026

The debate over AI in litigation has focused almost entirely on judges — their standing orders, their sanctions, their public statements. This briefing redirects attention to the professionals who actually read most of what gets filed in federal court: law clerks. As the primary pre-screening...

Prepared for General Counsel, Managing Partners, Legal Ethics Counsel, Legal Operations Directors, and Bar Association Professional Responsibility Committees

Vendor lock-in has always been a feature of enterprise software procurement. What is different about legal AI is the speed at which dependency compounds, the opacity of data architecture, and the near-total absence of institutional exit planning. Based on practitioner interviews conducted between January and...

The first wave of enterprise legal AI deployments — rushed into production between 2023 and 2024 as firms scrambled to demonstrate AI competency to clients and boards — is now producing a second-order problem: lock-in. Legal operations directors, law firm COOs, and general counsel who...