Ted Theodoropoulos

More than 60% of lawyers now use AI.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Almost none of their firms have changed how the work actually gets done.

That's the finding from new research by Positive Group, RSGI, and Harvard University's Ashley Whillans, drawn from interviews with leaders at 16 firms including Baker McKenzie, White & Case, and AO Shearman.

The report has a name for the gap: accumulation. New tools layered onto old ways of working.

I talked about the 5 waves of legal AI transformation last week (see below) and Wave 3 is the "Process Re-engineering" phase.

Copilot licenses and Harvey seats sit on top of the same workflows, the same leverage model, and the same supervision structure the firm ran in 2019.

So efficiency gains get absorbed into volume instead of showing up in quality or margin.
The research found that the firms making real progress weren't the ones with the most advanced tech.

They were the ones whose leaders forced the redesign question. If research is instant, what should associate training look like?

If a first draft takes minutes, what does supervision actually mean?

This is where the K-shaped divergence in legal begins that I talk about in my article "How AI Will Kill Law Firms" that got over 63,000 views: views

The divergence doesn't start at the tool purchase. It starts at the redesign in Wave 3.

So here's my question for firm leaders: what workflow has your firm actually redesigned around AI, not just accelerated?

The full report is available here: The full report

This is how I prepare for ILTACON.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An IV with all the goodies to get ahead of the onslaught of alcohol, germy people (kids are back in school), lack of sleep, and the insane schedule.

Here's how you should prepare:
• Get an IV (if possible).
• Wear comfortable shoes.
• Go to bed no later than midnight.
• Come by the Infodash booth for Liquid IVs and ibuprofen

And you should DEFINITELY come to our product briefing on Wed 3:30pm in Magnolia Mezzanine Room 22.

If you can't make it to that schedule time to see how over 1/3 of the Am Law are delivering AI powered digital workplaces internally and data driven extranets to their clients!

If you're a KM or innovation leader trying to plan ILTACON around what your firm is actually working on I have a resource which will help.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last month I published the nine objectives Big Law leaders say they're prioritizing in their AI transformations: I spent the last several weeks researching what objectives Big Law lea…

Our team took that framework and re-sorted the entire KM&I track against it. Every session mapped to a priority, with day, time, and room, so you can make the hard scheduling calls before you land in Nashville.

A few things jumped out during the mapping:

Delta B is the KM room all week. If knowledge and skills are your priority, you barely need to move.

Davidson North is the governance room. All five governance sessions run there.

Tuesday at 2:00 PM is the worst conflict of the week. Two data-layer sessions run head to head.

Thursday afternoon is where "redesign the work" concentrates. Four of six sessions land in the final two blocks. Don't book an early flight home.

The full guide is free.

Which sessions are you locked in on? I'm trying to figure out which ones will be standing room only.

A 1990 paper by economist Paul David explains why many law firms will get AI wrong.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David studied the electrification of American factories. In 1899, electric motors powered less than 5% of factory machinery, two decades after the technology was proven.

Why the lag? Factory owners ripped out the steam engine and bolted a big electric motor in its place. Same layout, same line shafts, same belts. The gains were marginal.

The productivity boom of the 1920s took two more moves. First, wiring the building for a motor on every machine. Then the bigger one: redesigning the factory floor itself, because the old layout existed to serve a drive shaft that no longer did anything.

(Sound a bit like AI native firms?)

The motor delivered energy savings. The redesign delivered the value.

I see legal AI following the same arc, in five waves.

Wave 1: Bolt-on. Rented copilots bolted on onto existing workflows. Faster drafts, faster research, same process. This is where most firms are today. It's the steam-era factory with an electric motor in the corner.

Wave 2: Infrastructure. Clean data, structured knowledge, integrated systems, the skill layer. Unglamorous work that largely stays beneath the surface. This is the wiring, and the work isn't optional.

Wave 3: Process re-engineering. This is the redesigned factory floor. Firms unbundle legal work into its component tasks and make a deliberate call on each one: automate it, or put a human in the loop. Richard Susskind has been writing about decomposing legal work for over a decade. What's changed is that firms finally have an economic reason to do it. A matter that has never been broken into tasks cannot be selectively automated. It can only be bolted onto.

Wave 4: Agentic. Real work automated end to end. Contracts negotiated to the edge of the ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) before a lawyer ever opens the document. But agents automate the process you designed in Wave 3, running on the foundation you built in Wave 2. Firms that skip the middle waves will get stuck here.

Wave 5: Business model. Pricing, staffing, go to market, capital strategy, client engagement and the definition of legal work get rebuilt around the new means of production. Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals report counts roughly $143 billion in legal and accounting spend that clients have put under active reconsideration. That dynamic will force this wave to happen

The waves overlap. But the sequence stays intact. You can't design processes around data you don't have, and you can't deploy agents effectively into processes you haven't redesigned.

The losers of the next decade won't lose in the agentic wave. They're losing right now, in Waves 2 and 3.

The corporate legal department of the AI era will look like a Gazelle-phant.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That was one of my favorite concepts from this week's podcast with Bjarne Philip Tellmann.

The idea came from something Bjarne heard years ago while traveling through India with the president of Coca-Cola’s Indian operation:

To compete in a fast-moving market, you need to be an elephant on the back end and a gazelle on the front end.

For an inside legal team, that means:

The elephant:
A stable technology and data platform. Clean data. Defined processes. Governance. Infrastructure. Systems that reliably generate information and insights at scale.

The gazelle:
Small teams of highly skilled lawyers and legal professionals embedded closer to the business, able to react quickly, exercise judgment and move at the speed of their internal clients.

AI connects the two.

The backend increasingly becomes a mini “AI factory” that organizes data, generates insights and automates repeatable work.

Those outputs make the people on the front end faster and more capable.

And the work they do generates new data that flows back into the system, creating a continuous learning loop.

Bjarne’s warning about where to start: Not with the AI.

Start with the elephant.

What is Legal there to accomplish?
What problems are getting in the way?
What processes need to change?
What data needs to be organized?

Only then do you ask which technology accelerates the model.

A lot of organizations are trying to buy the gazelle before they’ve built the elephant.

And without the backend infrastructure, the front end can’t really run.

Airtable just sold for 2.7x revenue.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three days later, Harvey reportedly raised at 44x.

Bending Spoons just bought Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.

In 2021, Airtable was valued at $11.7 billion. PitchBook calls it roughly an 80% discount.

Three days later, The Information reported Harvey is in talks to raise at $15.5 billion.

Run the math on both.

Airtable does about $480 million in ARR. 500,000 organizations use it, including 80 of the Fortune 100.

This is not a failing company. It sold for 2.7 times revenue.

Harvey does about $350 million in annualized revenue. At $15.5 billion, that's 44 times.

Same week. Same software market. One deal at 2.7x. One at 44x.

Yes, Harvey is growing MUCH faster. Growth explains part of the gap. It does not explain a 16x difference in multiple.

I'm not picking on Harvey here. I'm actually impressed with what they're building. The same is true at Legora and other legal tech SaaS companies.

Harvey's raise just happened to coincide with the Airtable sale so their data point is the most relevant.

Bankers call the Airtable deal a transaction comp.

Every buyer at the table for the next SaaS deal will point at 2.7x and say "that's the number."

Legal tech should pay close attention.

There is a vintage of legal tech unicorns carrying valuations they never grew into.

Real companies. Real revenue. Founders who might happily take a clean exit and go build in AI or join a lab.

Bending Spoons IPO'd last month at $18 billion. Its entire model is buying real businesses at deep discounts and running them for profit. Evernote. WeTransfer. Vimeo. Now Airtable.

Someone is going to run that playbook in legal tech.

How can the Harvey bet and the Airtable comp both be right about what software is worth?

The most important job in the AI-era law firm might be one that a third of firms have never written down.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2026 Blickstein Group Law Firm COO Survey, 213 respondents, tells the story in three numbers.

Technology investment is now the top strategic initiative at 28%.

First time in the survey's five year history it has beaten talent.

The median COO already runs six direct reports with finance, IT, and HR nearly tied as their biggest functional areas.

I've seen a lot of different reporting structures as it relates to CINOs, CKIOs and CAIOs.

Sometimes they report directly to leadership and other times they have access through innovation committee membership but formally report to the COO.

The COO role is an important one regardless, yet 37% have no written job description or mandate.

27% rank lack of operational authority as the structural issue they would fix first if they could fix one tomorrow.

Read those together and you get the actual finding: firms just handed their COOs the transformation but in some cases without the clear mandate or necessary empowerment.

Technology has stopped being a back office utility and became the means of legal service delivery.

Once that happened, the person who owns operations, budget, vendor risk, pricing, and adoption all at once became the person who determines whether AI investment turns into transformation or into shelfware.

The survey says the COOs recommendations get implemented 68.9% of the time, but implemented is not the same as empowerment. A recommendation can be accepted and still die in a practice silo.

Here is my prediction. The K-shaped divergence everyone talks about in AI adoption will not be decided by which model a firm picks.

It will be decided by whether the firm gave one operator a written mandate, a budget, and the authority to make decisions stick.

The firms that treat the COO as an administrator will buy tools. The firms that treat the COO as an enterprise strategist will build capability.

In 2011, Harvard's Michael Norton ran a study where people paid 63% more for furniture they assembled themselves.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He named it the IKEA effect.

People place far more value on things they help build.

Law firms are about to waste the biggest free advantage in professional services.

I learned about the concept from my brilliant friend Lucía who is a lawyer and behavioral scientist on last week's podcast (min 34:51).

The client service model is getting rebuilt right now. How work is delivered. How it's priced. How clients are engaged. AI is forcing all three.

And most firms are rebuilding it the same way they built the last one. Internally. Quietly. Then presenting it to clients as a finished product.

That's exactly backwards.

Deloitte just surveyed over 120 senior in-house legal leaders and found 58% say their outside firms rarely or never proactively discuss AI with them.

The redesign is happening in isolation from the people it's supposed to serve.

Here's what firms are missing. A pricing model a client helped shape is a pricing model they'll defend in their own procurement process.

A delivery model they had a hand in designing is one they'll value more, forgive more, and gravitate towards because they invested in it.

That's the bias Norton measured.

A model handed to them fully assembled gets inspected for flaws.

I've had a string of conversations with in-house legal leaders recently, and they're not shy about what they want to build toward:

• Transparency into how work actually gets done.
• What technology is being used.
• How leverage is being applied.
• What efficiency gains are showing up on matters of similar size/shape.
• Control of their own data.

The blueprint is sitting there. Clients are volunteering it.

The firms that win the next decade won't be the ones with the cleverest new model.

They'll be the ones whose clients can say: we built this together.

So a question for law firm leaders: have you invited a single client into the room where you're redesigning your delivery model?

The 11 Big Law sacred cows AI slaughters:

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

1. Performance metrics: Traditional top-line metrics become less useful as AFAs displace hours.

2. The billable hour: It is more than pricing. It influences comp, staffing, promotion, KPIs, LPM, and more.

3. Business professionals: Firms need to rethink how they recruit, develop, compensate, and empower people outside the practice.

4. The apprenticeship model: If AI handles more junior level work, how do we develop experienced lawyers.

5. Systems and data: 2.4% tech spend will not be sufficient to build a durable technology and data layer.

6. Incentive structures: Compensation plans, origination credit, and the partner track will need to evolve with new delivery models.

7. Cash basis/profit sweep: Firms that distribute most of their profits each year have limited retained capital for long-term investment.

8. The partnership model: As firms consider outside capital and more investment intensive businesses, the traditional structure will face new pressures.

9. Decision rights: Transformation will change who participates in strategic and operating decisions. The table will need to include more than the lawyers.

10. Client transparency: Clients will increasingly expect better visibility into cost, quality, and turnaround time.

11. Go-to-market: Firms will not be selling talent alone. Technology, data, pricing, and packaged offerings will become a larger part of the conversation.

None of these changes stands alone. Adjust one part of the model, and several others move with it.

And the renovation has to happen while the building remains fully occupied and while producing record profits.

The technology may be the most visible part of the transformation.

The harder work will be adapting the foundational structures that have shaped the industry for decades.

Harvey pays its legal engineers up to $320K.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Big Law is paying the people building its actual AI systems less than that.

Josh Kubicki pulled three legal engineer job specs this month. Kirkland, Norm AI, Harvey. One title family, three seemingly different jobs. His read: a builder, a translator, and a seller.

Josh's article: Josh's article

These reqs are all over the place because most firms haven't named the need. So let's trace the need backwards.

In June, Deloitte surveyed over 100 in-house legal teams. Their message was clear. Law firms aren't engaging them on how AI will change the cost and quality of their service.

Why the silence? Because an honest answer leads straight to pricing.

And pricing is the scariest conversation inside a law firm.

Move away from the billable hour and you touch everything built on top of it. Compensation. The partner track. The KPIs the firm measures itself against. The actual identity of a lawyer.

That is deep human work, and it is daunting.

So firms do the logical first thing instead.

They bolt AI onto workflows that have barely changed in 20 years.

That gets you incremental efficiency gains inside the old model. It does not get you to value-based pricing.

Fixed fee requires fixed scope.
Fixed scope requires re-engineered work from first principles.
And most firms aren't staffed to re-engineer work.

There have been pockets of real process engineering in Big Law for years. They've largely stayed pockets.

If I were retooling my org to align to the needs of this AI transformation I would think about how to incorporate formal process engineering discipline.

Lean Six Sigma exists for exactly this problem. Lean attacks waste, which is cost. Six Sigma attacks defects, which is quality.

Cost and quality. The two things clients just told Deloitte their firms aren't talking to them about.

I've held a Lean Six Sigma black belt for over 20 years and have personally rebuilt legal workflows with these methods WAY before it was cool (see below).

Ron Friedmann Law Factory case study: Ron Friedmann Law Factory case study

The work is unglamorous. The results are not.

So here's my question. How many firms are focusing on rebuilding the org structure around real process engineering capabilities?

Your process engineers do NOT need to be JDs. You have plenty of JDs to pair them with.

Outside of the AI native space, it feels like we're less focused on the process than we are on the tech.

ILTACON is three weeks out and my session calendar is already a mess.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If yours looks the same, here's some help. This Wednesday I'm sitting down with Joy Heath Rush, CEO of International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), for an insider preview of ILTACON 2026.

Nobody knows this agenda better than Joy. We'll spend 20 minutes on the themes driving this year's conference, the sessions and events she thinks deserve a spot on your calendar, and her advice for anyone walking into the Gaylord Opryland.

Then you get 10 minutes to ask her your own questions. Live.

Wednesday, August 5 at 12:30 PM ET. It's free and open to everyone. 30 minutes, in and out.

See you there!

If law firms want to understand how they will be impacted by AI they should understand their customers' expectations.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Deloitte just gave us the answer key.

They published a study last month of 121 in-house legal leaders and there are some warning lights flashing.

58% of General Counsels say their law firms rarely or never bring up AI with them. Only 4% have seen any actual benefit from their firms' use of it.

Your clients are not waiting for you.

Here's what they told Deloitte: They expect hourly rate work to fall from 72% of engagements today to 44% within 2 to 3 years. In the Americas, from 82% to 56%.

Some GCs are committing to cut external legal spend by 20 to 40% over the next three years. Those targets directly impact outside counsel revenue.

They're already running AI across years of your invoice narratives to decide what gets insourced or automated. Your billing data is training their sourcing strategy.

And a new workflow is spreading: legal departments draft with AI first, then send the document to their firm for review. The firm's role shifts from author to editor.

There's debate as to whether that's creating more work for law firms or less.

Regardless, most firms aren't tackling the conversation head on.

48% of legal departments report only initial conversations with providers about AI. 19% report none at all.

Deloitte's read is pretty clear: where firms stay silent, clients draw their own conclusions.

Then the client opens the conversation with pre-formed demands on price and transparency, and the firm negotiates from a defensive stance.

The window hasn't closed. 42% of GCs say AI cost savings should be split equally between firm and client.

Almost half your clients are literally offering to share the upside with firms that show up prepared.

The firms that move first get to frame benefit sharing as collaboration.

The firms that wait will explain their rates to a procurement team armed with their own invoice data.

A proactive approach wins the day here.

Waiting until the client brings it up puts firms at a disadvantage.

The biggest legal AI risk isn’t vendor selection.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s giving away the intelligence your firm should be building.

35 companies signed a letter this week arguing that open weight AI is the foundation of American technology leadership. NVIDIA. Microsoft. Meta. IBM. OpenAI. Palantir. Hugging Face. The Linux Foundation. Even DoorDash.

No legal tech company signed it. No law firm signed it.

The letter names the sectors where AI has to gain traction for any of this to matter: factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, main street businesses. Legal isn't on that list either.

Strip out the policy language and the letter is an argument about ownership.

It says organizations should be able to "own that value through self-improving models, specialized capabilities, and accumulated knowledge."

Translated it means that the model is a commodity you rent. What you build on top of it is the asset.

Most law firms are playing that backwards.

When a firm routes its matter data, its precedent, its lawyer feedback, and its workflow logic through a single AI vendor, it isn't building an asset. It's improving someone else's.

The contract renews in three years, the price moves, and there's no leverage, because everything the firm learned lives in a system it doesn't control and can't take with it.

The skill layer is tightly coupled to the legal AI platform the law firm rents.

The implications of that are worse in legal than almost anywhere else.

A tech company that needs to rearchitect their stack raises a round and buys its way out.

A law firm can't raise outside capital without messy work arounds. Mistakes get paid for out of partner distributions, one year at a time.

The people writing the rules for the AI economy have never read an OCG. That's fine.

But it does mean nobody is going to make this argument on our behalf.

Own the skill. Rent the model.

I spent the last several weeks researching what objectives Big Law leaders say they are prioritizing as part of their AI transformation and these are the 9 that show up most.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The inputs: managing partner interviews, podcasts, survey data, Georgetown, Citi Hildebrandt, Axiom’s 2026 In-House Legal AI Report, TR Institute, NALP, Blickstein, and eighteen months of conferences from all over the world. Too many resources to name.

1️⃣ Make the AI strategy visible. Most firms now have one. But 35% of professionals at organizations with an AI strategy say they cannot see it in their actual work. Firms need to bridge that gap.

2️⃣ Fix the data layer. Matter, document, client, experience, and people data are often a mess and sit in silos. AI deployments quickly hit that wall.

3️⃣ Own the knowledge and skills layer. Models are converging. Firm judgment is not. The durable asset is the owned knowledge, workflows, and learning loops. Many are beginning to believe these assets need to be decoupled from the model/platform and managed on firm infrastructure.

4️⃣ Prove efficiency to clients. 78% of corporate buyers say AI-driven quality improvement is essential. Just 6% say providers are delivering it. We're almost four years into AI and buyers are increasingly expecting firms to demonstrate efficiencies.

5️⃣ Rebuild the apprenticeship model. Summer classes at the largest firms are the smallest since 2012. NALP does not attribute that directly to AI, but AI is likely part of the pressure.

6️⃣ Govern AI for the real world. Written policies and mandatory training are not enough if lawyers ignore them and review processes fail. Hallucinations continue to make their way into documents submitted to the court.

7️⃣ Measure ROI. Technology spend rose 9.7% last year which is just the beginning of the investment needed. Yet only 18% of organizations track AI ROI.

8️⃣ Rethink pricing. About 90% of legal dollars still move hourly, while clients increasingly want value-based offerings. Firm leaders want to experiment with clients before buyers dictate the outcome.

9️⃣ Redesign the work. Transformation does not come from buying more licenses. Firms must decide which tasks change, where judgment enters, how output is reviewed, and how improvements become repeatable.

What would you add/edit/delete from this list?

And if you sit on an executive committee, which of these is truly on the agenda and which is still just conference talk?

Firms who decided to wait to migrate to Microsoft 365 are now at risk.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Extended support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 ended July 14.

The same day, Microsoft shipped what are now the final scheduled security fixes for both.
In the same window, CISA confirmed active exploitation of four SharePoint Server flaws where attackers steal IIS machine keys.

Those keys could let them walk back into a fully patched server.

I know several firms who looked at the risks and decided to wait.

I get it. Migration is expensive, disruptive, and nobody gets promoted for finishing one. There is always a matter, a merger, or a DMS project sitting in front of it.

But the math changed on July 14. Before that date, staying on-prem meant accepting a patch cadence you controlled.

After it, staying means accepting that the next critical SharePoint vulnerability has no fix coming. Not a delayed fix. No fix.

And yes, Subscription Edition is still supported. It is also still a farm you patch, keys you rotate, and servers you keep off the open internet.

This is where it stops being an IT decision.

On-prem SharePoint sometimes holds firms holds matter files, deal rooms, investigation workspaces, and records under litigation hold.

A machine key compromise is not one server. It is potential access to everything the farm serves.

That pulls in breach notification analysis, outside counsel guidelines, insurer notice, and preservation decisions before the technical work is even finished.

So the question for firms still waiting is not "when can IT get to this."
It is "who is signing off on running unsupported infrastructure and what do they tell the client who asks."

I talk a lot about the skill layer being THE most important asset and why the firm must own where it lives.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Here's the how and what it might look like.

Every law firm says it's "embracing AI." Almost none of them mean the same thing by it.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After enough conversations with firm leaders, you start to see two distinct playbooks.

One set of firms is making bold moves. The other is limping in.

And the gap between them is compounding.

Here's what the two playbooks actually look like, side by side.

I know mid-market firms executing the bold playbook and AmLaw 20 firms limping in.

The dividing line isn't just money. It's intentionality versus drift.

Drift feels responsible while you're doing it. Wait-and-see sounds prudent.

It's how firms end up two years behind without ever making a single decision they'd call a mistake.

Which playbook is your firm actually running?

Not the one in the partner retreat deck.

The real one.

In 1982, Harvard Law School banned computers from exams.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two 1L students brought an Osborne 1 and an Apple II to Alan Dershowitz's criminal law exam.

The story made the front page of a section of the Wall Street Journal. Time Magazine covered it.

The school held a hearing and banned word processors from "any and all forms of exams."

The concerns will sound familiar: unfair advantage, stored answers that could be "called up during exams," economic divide between students who could afford the machines and those who couldn't.

One of the banned students told the university president: "I opened the door to 21st century technology and they slammed the door in my face."

Within a few years, computers were everywhere in law school. The ban didn't slow anything down.

It just meant the institution spent its energy fighting the tool instead of figuring out how to teach with it.

Steven Sinofsky told this story in an a16z piece this week, prompted by the University of Chicago Law School's new policy restricting AI, phones, and laptops for first-year students.

He wrote that the people controlling things had no idea how the actual work would change because of the tool.

A typewriter wasn't for writing or thinking. It was better handwriting. The word processor changed what writing WAS.

That's where we are with AI in legal. New associates arriving at firms right now are AI natives.

They will use these tools no matter what policy says, the same way MBA students ran Lotus 1-2-3 before the banks they joined did.

The firms treating this as a policy problem are going to lose talent to the firms treating it as a teaching problem. And that gap compounds.

This is how the K-shape forms: not in one big strategic decision, but in dozens of small choices about whether to slam the door or hold it open.

Which side of the door is your firm on?

OpenAI shipped GPT-Live, GPT-5.6, and ChatGPT Work in two days.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The feature that matters most got almost no airtime.

ChatGPT Work is the headline product. Give it a goal and it can plan the approach, break the work into steps, delegate parts of the project to sub-agents, and work through longer, more involved tasks across connected apps and files.

SharePoint. Teams. Google Drive. Email. Calendars. CRMs.

More than 1,400 plugins.

But in the new desktop app, Work can also be given Computer Use.

With the required OS, application, and folder permissions, it can work with local files, applications, browsers, and other tools including creating and changing files directly on the machine.

Which brings me to legal.

If you run technology at a law firm and have lawyers are using unmanaged or shadow AI in your environment this deserves attention.

A user who enables Computer Use and approves the required permissions can give an autonomous agent meaningful access to a laptop that may connect to content from the DMS and contain confidential and potentially privileged email.

It is not just one toggle.

But it may be only a handful of permission prompts that users click through without fully understanding the consequences.

Rule 1.6 does not care how easy the prompts were to approve.

Agents are clearly where knowledge work is heading, and the firms that figure out governed adoption will pull further ahead of the ones that freeze.

But firms should decide who gets Computer Use, restrict plugins and applications by role, configure approval requirements, limit local-file and network access, set usage and spending controls, and tell their people what changed before they discover it on their own.

Because the announcements will not do it for them.

That was kind of the point.

Rockefeller did not win the oil age by drilling the most wells.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He won by controlling the pipelines, the refineries, and the distribution.

The wells were interchangeable. The rails were not.

I thought about that this week when Ornn, a startup founded by two MIT grads, raised $33 million led by Andreessen Horowitz to build a commodities market for AI compute.

Not to buy GPUs. To build the layer that prices them, trades them, and hedges them.

Their index is already on the Bloomberg Terminal, and Intercontinental Commodity Exchange has announced compute futures tied to it.

The smartest money in tech is betting that the durable value in AI sits in the connective layer, not the raw capacity.

Capacity commoditizes. Rails compound.

Now look at how many law firms are approaching AI.

A lot of energy is going into picking wells. Which model, which point solution, which vendor's demo looked best last quarter.

Those tools matter, but they should be the most interchangeable part of the stack.

Two years from now, the underlying models and platforms will have leapfrogged each other a dozen times.

What will not be interchangeable is the connective layer. How AI reaches your firm's knowledge/data.

How it moves through your workflows. How it shows up for your clients.

The firms building that layer are accumulating an advantage that survives every model/platform release.

Firms buying point solutions think they are renting wells. They are actually renting pipes.

Every prompt library, workflow, and work product that lives inside a vendor's closed platform is plumbing the firm does not own.

The model underneath will be swapped out dozens of times. The plumbing is what you cannot leave.

So here is the question to ask about every AI dollar in your 2027 budget: are we buying a well, or are we building pipes?

Alex Karp went on CNBC and called token-based AI pricing a "wealth tax on enterprise America."

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He runs Palantir, so consider the source. But he's onto something every law firm leader should sit with.

Here's the pattern I see in legal right now.

The first wave of AI transformation has been point solutions.

The Hargoras of the world.

Really good tools, and a logical first step as firms start to re-architect legal workflows from first principles and redesign the work to be tech-enabled.

But that transformation is happening on infrastructure the firms don't own.

Every prompt a lawyer writes. Every workflow they refine. Every piece of judgment they encode into these systems.

That's the reinforcement loop between human capital and token capital, and it's the most valuable asset a firm will build over the next decade.

Right now, it's compounding in someone else's system.

I watch really smart people at really well-run firms deploy their intellectual capital into third-party platforms every day.

It feels like progress. It is progress. It's also lock-in. Switching costs grow every month until you hit a point of no return.

Karp isn't saying AI is a waste.

He's saying dependency is dangerous when you don't own what the dependency produces.

Same logic applies to legal.

Putting a ring on any vendor's finger this early in the transformation presents way too much risk.

Tools and foundation models will keep leapfrogging each other. Best-in-class today won't be best-in-class in 18 months.

Optionality is the whole game right now.

Law firms need to own the infrastructure that captures the human and token capital reinforcement loop that Satya Nadella talked about in my last post.

That's where enterprise value will accrue.

Not to the firms that adopted the most tools. To the firms that own what those tools taught them.

Control your own destiny.

Satya Nadella just described the biggest risk facing law firms.

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He wasn't even talking about legal.

His argument goes like this. Every company now has two kinds of capital.

Human capital, the judgment and pattern recognition of its people. And token capital, the AI capability it builds and owns.

The firms that win won't be the ones that pick the best model.

They'll be the ones that build a learning loop on top of models, where those two forms of capital compound each other.

This hits different in legal.

Law firms are pure human capital businesses. The value proposition is judgment accumulated over decades.

Precedent knowledge. Negotiation instincts. Knowing which argument lands with which judge.

Right now, most firms are renting token capital.

They subscribe to point solutions, feed them matter data, and the learning accrues to the vendor.

The expertise flows out. Very little compounds back in.

Satya's warning is blunt: If a handful of models absorb everyone's expertise and commoditize it, entire industries get hollowed out.

He compares it to what outsourcing did to industrial economies. The GDP looked fine. The displacement was real.

For law firms, the defense is architectural.

Your learning loop has to live inside your walls.

Your data, your tenant, your evals, your accumulated judgment encoded in systems you own.

You should be able to swap out the underlying model without losing the "firm veteran" expertise built on top of it.

That's the test of sovereignty.

Can you change models without losing what makes you different?

Most firms can't answer yes today.

The ones that can in three years will be the ones that started building now.

Happy 250th birthday, America!

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today our neighborhood held its annual July 4th golf cart decorating contest.

My daughter took the lead on ours this year.

Her concept: a hot dog stand on wheels.

She and her friend dressed up as vendors, complete with the paper hats and aprons.

We took second place.

I’ve spent my career thinking about strategy and execution.

She just beat me at both with construction paper and balloons.

250 years of this country, and the best parts of it still look like this. Kids with big ideas. Neighbors showing up.

A little friendly competition on a hot July morning.

Proud of her. Grateful for this country.

GOD BLESS AMERICA! 🇺🇸

Ford's General Counsel just told law firms they're losing the AI race...to their own clients.

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Steven Croley runs legal at Ford. Former Latham partner. He made the case in Bloomberg Law.

His point: Ford's in-house team, running AI agents across its legal work, is now generating efficiencies faster than its Big Law firms.

And he asked the question GCs are all thinking....why do the rate hikes keep coming with no AI savings to show for them?

So Ford rewards the firms that innovate and pulls back from the laggards.

More work in-house. More matters to the firms that deliver.

This is the client keeping score. In public.

I get why this is hard. The billable hour pays you for the exact hours your client now wants gone.

The system was built to resist the efficiency they're demanding. Seeing the trap doesn't get you out of it.

It was never only about the tools. Firms buy them and don't CHANGE how they work. That's most of the gap.

It just became a revenue problem.

You can't raise rates on work your client just learned to do itself.

The market is splitting into a K shaped trajectory.

A few firms on the upward leg of the K went all in early.

The firms on the downward leg are still deciding if this tech will really deliver.

If I'm honest, the slow ones don't all make it.

Treat this as the wake-up call and you keep the work. Sit on it, and your clients build the workaround.

Your clients are grading how you deliver with AI.

How will you like the grade?

The Financial Times Law 50 on Thursday and four days later inducted as a Fellow into the College of Law Practice Management.

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What a week!

Two humble brag posts in one week feels like a lot and I almost didn't post this but someone way smarter than me told me that would be dumb.

Being included on the FT list was once of the highlights of my career.

But this one is a little different.

A list is a group of very smart, well informed people watching the industry (like Reena SenGupta) and deciding who counts.

Fellows of the College are nominated by other Fellows and elected by the Board.

You have to have been in the industry no less than 10 years and nominated by two Fellows and then confirmed by a board vote.

By people who have spent their careers doing this work.

It's a really high bar and you don't campaign for it. You can't buy your way in. Someone already inside has to vouch for you, and then a room full of people who have earned their own seat decides whether you've earned yours.

I've spent almost 20 years in this industry. A lot of it was unglamorous.

Migrations that ran until 3am. Projects nobody clapped for. Being told the thing I was building didn't need to exist.

So to be recognized by the practitioners I've quietly measured myself against for two decades means more than I can put in a post.

To Debbie Foster and Patrick DiDomenico who nominated me and those Fellows who voted for me: thank you.

I know what your seat cost you. I don't take being allowed to sit next to you lightly.

Congratulations to everyone in the 2026 class including my buds Glenn LaForce and Kate Cain!

Now back to work.

A paper written by a Yale Law School professor in 2019 tells us how AI will kill law firms.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Morely analyzed the mechanics of law firm failures in his article in Business Lawyer called “Why Law Firms Collapse”.

He analyzes 37 law firm failures and finds a clear pattern.

I lay out the essentials of Morley's "run on the bank" thesis and illustrate how this dynamic might play out in the not-so-distant future at laggard firms.

Update: I've gotten a lot of doubters in the comments that we're heading towards a bifurcated market so I thought I'd share this article by the Ford Motor Company GC. This dynamic is absolutely real.

Named to the Financial Times Law 50.

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve read it three times to make sure my name was really on it.

This list is a who’s who of the people shaping where law goes next.

Neal Katyal has argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court.

Zach Posner is channeling the tidal wave of capital pouring into this industry.

These are giants.

Seeing my name next to people I’ve studied and learned from for years is humbling in the real sense of that word, not the LinkedIn sense.

Thank you to Reena SenGupta for including me as a speaker and for putting me on a list with this caliber of people.

I don’t take it lightly.

To everyone else on the FT Law 50, I’ll work hard to earn the spot.

Everyone keeps asking whether outside investors can “own” a law firm.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The more interesting question is whether they need to.

One of the emerging workarounds in US regulated professional services is the managed service organization (MSO) model.

The legal practice entity remains lawyer owned. The licensed lawyers still advise clients.

But the MSO owns the layer behind the firm.
• The technology
• The workflow
• The data infrastructure
• The AI systems
• The brand
• The sales and marketing engine
• The finance, HR, pricing, project management, and business-of-law functions

As David Morley eloquently put it on last week's Legal Innovation Spotlight podcast:

In other words, the MSO owns the hive. The lawyers become the worker bees.

That sounds provocative, but it gets at the core economic tension.

As legal work becomes increasingly tech-enabled, the value may accrue less to the professional entity delivering the advice and more to the platform that enables, standardizes, scales, and monetizes that delivery.

The law firm keeps the license.

The MSO keeps the operating system.

And operating systems are where enterprise value tends to compound.

A traditional legal practice may still be profitable. But a tech-enabled legal services platform with recurring revenue, workflow automation, proprietary data, embedded client relationships, and scalable delivery infrastructure starts to look a lot less like a law firm and a lot more like a software or tech enabled services company.

That distinction matters.

Because those businesses can trade at VERY different multiples.

The legal practice entity will generate income.

The MSO will generate enterprise value.

That creates a potential split between where the work happens and where the value accumulates.

Regulators may focus on who owns the licensed entity. Lawyers may reassure themselves that professional judgment remains protected. But the real control point may shift to the layer that determines how matters are priced, delivered, measured, automated, and improved over time.

The question is not simply:

“Can investors own law firms?”

The better question may be:

“When the technology, brand, data, workflows, and business infrastructure sit outside the firm, who really owns the future economics of legal service delivery?”

The uncomfortable truth about AI: You are never going to be “done” learning it...Ever.

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of our careers, professional development had a finish line:
• Get the degree
• Learn the system
• Attend the training/CLE
• Master the workflow
• Then leverage that knowledge for years

That era is over.

AI is not a tool you learn once. It is a fast moving target.

The model you thought you understood in June may feel outdated by December.

The workflow/automation that impressed everyone last quarter may be table stakes by the next meeting.

I heard someone recently compare staying current with AI to going to the gym, and I think the analogy is exactly right.

Nobody gets fit once and stays fit forever.

You build a routine. You show up repeatedly.

You adapt as your body changes, your goals change, and the training methods improve.

AI fluency is going to work the same way.

Not a one-time training session.
Not an annual CLE.
Not a certification you can hang on the wall.

A habit.

Two or three hours a week experimenting, testing, reading, prompting, comparing tools, and asking: “How could this change the way I work?”

For some law firms, this is a mindset shift.

I see some firms treat AI adoption like a project:
• Select the tool
• Deploy the tool
• Train the lawyers
• Check the box

But the firms that win will treat AI as a continuous learning system.

The advantage will not go to the lawyers who “know AI” today.

It will go to the lawyers, teams, and firms that build the muscle to keep learning as the technology changes.

Because in the AI era, falling behind won’t happen all at once.

It will happen the same way getting out of shape does: slowly, quietly, and then suddenly very obviously.

My 13 year old son spent $60 on a birthday gift that AI could have faked for free.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It shows that AI will NOT replace all human work even when it makes economic sense.

A group of guys in Africa, dancing by a river, holding a chalkboard. "Happy birthday Ted. Connor loves you."

(Watch it with sound on. If it doesn't make you smile I'll Venmo you $10)

They printed a photo of my face and held it up. Sixty bucks. Delivered in two days.

It's not AI....I checked.

This could have easily been generated by AI for a fraction of $60.

But my son wouldn't have bought it even if it was 10x less.

It wouldn't have been special at all.

What made it special was 9 dudes halfway around the world dancing to Gangham Style while wishing me a happy birthday.

That fact is the entire product.

AI can match the output and still deliver nothing, because it cannot manufacture the one thing that mattered.

We keep telling ourselves that if AI produces similar output, it always wins.

That is a trap.

Output equivalence is not always value equivalence.

True for a birthday video and just as true in some of our work.

The brief, the memo, the advice are often not the product.

The accountable human who put their name on it is.

Where that holds, no amount of cheap or free automation replaces the human part.

My son knew that without thinking about it.

Thanks Connor. Best gift I have gotten in years buddy.

The top 10 tells that your post/comment is AI slop:

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

1. "Here is a question almost nobody is asking"
2. "It's not X. It's Y.
3. "Here is the quiet part nobody says out loud"
4. "Let that sink in." / "Read that again."
5. Dashes between an unnatural number of words
6. "Here's the kicker."
7. Too many emojis as bullet points: 🚀 💡 ✅
8. Hashtags
9. "Here's the part that stopped me cold"
10. Rule of three, forced everywhere

I didn't include the em dash because if you're still doing that, I can't fix you.

That is all.

I have recorded over 140 episodes, and this week's edition is with what might be the most well-informed legal mind I've had so far.

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David Morley was the Global Managing Partner of A&O Shearman for 14 years and joined the firm when it was 100 lawyers with one office and $7M in revenue.

He now consults with law firms and investors interested in deploying capital into the industry.

David and I riff on the structural friction the industry faces and why/how private equity is changing the dynamics.

Even if you're not a listener of Legal Innovation Spotlight I highly recommend this episode.

It's 10/10 if you want to understand how the industry works at a foundational level.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Three days at the first annual OpenClaw conference and my mind is officially blown.

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The keynote on multi-agent orchestration?

Game changing.

The breakout session on retrieval at scale? I took four pages of notes.

The hallway conversations alone were worth the price of admission.

The energy in this space right now is unreal.

Everyone is shipping. Everyone is iterating.

The future is being built in real time and I am here for it.
…

Okay. None of that happened.

I am in Maine. I am eating lobster.

The only orchestration here is the kitchen plating my Cobb salad.

The shirt is real. The conference is not.

Back to actual work next week.

For now, I am off the grid and on the claw.

Gartner says legal tech budgets will DOUBLE by 2028.

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 2029 about half of contract reviews will run on self-service systems, and only one in ten will still go to a human.

That's a lot of tech to invest in between here and there.

But the size of the budget was never the whole problem.

Law firms have underinvested in IT for decades.

Tech spend still sits around 2.4% of revenue, per the 2026 Citi Hildebrandt report put together by Gretta Rusanow and Brad Hildebrandt

Accounting, the closest professional-services cousin, spends roughly double that.

Doubling a number that started too small does not fix the gap by itself.

That money usually buys more off-the-shelf point tools. Generic by default.

Harvey or Legora are outstanding tools but if you buy them, your competitors can buy the exact same thing.

This differentiates no one.

Worse, most firms will bolt those tools onto systems that were never built to feed them clean, connected data.

AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and most firms have a shaky data foundation for it to stand on.

The dollars that matter do not show up as a software line item.

They go to rationalizing the data you actually own, the integration layer that connects your back-office systems, and the change management, training, and process work that few put in a budget deck.

The unglamorous stuff.

So by all means, double the budget.

Just be deliberate about where the second dollar goes.

The firms that spend it building the foundation will pull away from the ones that spend it on more tools.

Gartner article: Gartner article

2026 Citi Hildebrandt Advisory: 2026 Citi Hildebrandt Advisory

Law firms aren't technology companies....yet.

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lot of them will be, whether they planned for it or not.

The firms that get this first are going to win. And the prize is bigger than most people think.

Kirkland just told the rest of the legal industry what the next ten years look like.

$500 million to build their own AI platform. Not license it. Build it.

Legal is very likely heading into a wave of consolidation. The Am Law 200 becomes the Am Law 50.

The legal market is unsustainably fragmented.

The revenue of the entire Am Law 200 is around $200B.

The closest adjacent industry to legal is accounting/consulting where the Big 4 generate about $230B.

FOUR accounting/consulting firms generate more revenue that the top TWO HUNDRED in legal.

The firms that limped into this transformation will get bought at fire sale prices by the ones that moved early.

Five years, ten years, I won't pretend to know the exact timeline. It is coming either way.

Why?

The things that have set elite firms apart for decades, brand, marquee wins, practice depth, geographic footprint, are going to continue to be important but there's a new element entering the differentiation equation.

The client service model (CSM).

And the CSM of the future runs on a real technology layer underneath it that taps the collective knowledge and wisdom of the firm.

Off the shelf tools don't create differentiation.

The tech layer is expensive. It takes serious capital and serious commitment.

Bootstrapping your way into it one matter at a time is going to be a tough slog for all but the biggest firms.

Kirkland can write a $500 million check and barely feel it. Most firms cannot. That is the entire point.

The ones still on the PoC merry-go-round or waiting to see how this shakes out are already behind.

Guess whose flight had ZERO air rage issues?

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mine.

I had the privilege of sitting next to Evander Holyfield this evening.

Everyone was very well behaved the whole flight.

He is one of the most grounded humans I've talked to in a very long time.

Told me about how he was the youngest of nine growing up in the projects and how his mother and grandmother shaped his life.

Extremely personable and patient with people who fanboy/girl on him.

We talked a good bit of the flight and several people came up to our row and asked if it was really him.

I said yes and told them I was his bodyguard.

No one believed it but he pretended to think it was funny.

He said that he sparred Tyson the first time when he was 21 and Tyson was 17 and that he got the best of him.

The whole world watched them fight two times years later.

I was a fan before but a bigger one now!

Spent the day in Fort Lauderdale with Zach Posner and Tanner Rogers, JD, MBA from The LegalTech Fund.

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Adam C Young and I flew down for a full day deep dive on the future of our business and the legal market.

Here is why a session like this matters right now.

AI is rewriting every layer of legal at the same time.

-How law firms operate.
-How in-house teams buy legal services.
-How vendors compete.
-How SaaS itself gets built and sold.

None of these forces move in isolation. None of them are slowing down.

If you are building legal tech without a clear point of view on where all of this is headed, you are building blind.

Having capital partners who live inside the legal industry every day is a real advantage.

Zach and Tanner are not generalists watching from the sidelines.

They are in the rooms, in the data, and in the conversations shaping where this market is going.

A full day of unfiltered debate on the law firm market, the competitive landscape, and the AI shifts moving through SaaS sharpens our roadmap in ways no internal-only session can match.

We are building Infodash into the next generation legal innovation platform.

Days like today are part of how we make sure we are building the right thing for the right moment.

Grateful for the partnership.

The verdict's in. Sam Altman won the Musk vs OpenAI trial.

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That verdict tells you almost nothing about who won the actual fight.

The lawsuit was never the real move. The lawsuit was the distraction.

Musk filed in February 2024. The trial wrapped this week.

That's over 2 years of Altman managing depositions, leaked communications, and front-page litigation coverage.

Now look at what Musk built during the same window:
• xAI went from $24 billion to $230 billion.
• SpaceX absorbed xAI at a $1.25 trillion combined valuation.
• Colossus 2 came online with over 500,000 Blackwell GPUs.
• SpaceX locked up a Cursor deal pointed straight at Codex.
• 12 days before the verdict, Musk leased Colossus 1 to Anthropic.
• 5 days before the verdict, Musk was on Air Force One to Beijing.

Altman won the verdict. Musk got the leverage.

The same pattern is playing out in legal AI right now. And most law firm leaders are watching the wrong fight.

The loud fights:
• Harvey vs Legora vs Claude.
• Off the shelf vs Mike OSS.
• Which "legal AI" solution wins the latest pilot.
• Which logo shows up on the next AmLaw RFP.

The quiet moves:
• Who controls the integration surface across DMS, time, finance, and intake.
• Whose AI gets embedded into the workflows lawyers already use every day.
• Which vendors run inside the firm's own Microsoft tenant, and which ones ship your data out to theirs.
• Who owns the curated data sets your AI actually needs to be useful.

The vendors winning the loud fights are forcing your decisions onto a battlefield they picked.

The vendors winning the quiet moves are encircling the integration layer while everyone watches the headline pilot.

The real moves are rarely loud. They are the moves you make while everyone is watching the loud one.

The verdict ends a trial. The fight is just getting started.

Vibe Coding is all the rage in legal tech right now, and rightly so.

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm hosting a LinkedIn Live at 11 a.m. Eastern Time today, showing a live example of how to build internet and extranet pages through vibe coding.

It will definitely be worth your time if you have aspirations of building a digital workplace at your firm.

Please join us or if you have a conflict register for the live, and I'll send you the link after the fact.

We were finalists for two ILTA awards this year.

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I flew to Denver last weekend, got all dressed up in suit and didn't bring home the hardware.

So why in the hell am I posting about awards I didn't win?

I think we need to tell more stories of how vendors and law firms create exceptional outcomes together.

Infodash was a finalist for Solution Provider of the Year and a joint finalist with Gowling WLG for the Trailblazer Award. Here's why both projects matter.

Solution Provider of the Year was for our work with Eversheds Sutherland (US). They were our first extranet client. We're well established on the intranet side of the house (1 in 3 Am Law firms use Infodash), but extranet was a new offering for us.

Eversheds had canceled their contract with their legacy provider, and we had a hard go-live date of July 1 last year. No room to slip.

We hit some curveballs migrating their content. We fell behind and it was on us. The pressure was on.

So I started attending every stand-up at 7am, five days a week, for six weeks. I didn't add a lot of value in those meetings.

But the CEO showed up every single day to demonstrate how important the project was to us.

I dug in. I worked to understand where the problems were and how we could deploy more resources effectively.

We got Eversheds live on time. Fully implemented. I was not going to let our first extranet client be anything other than successful and they recognized us with the nomination for Solution Provider of the Year (thank you!🙏).

The Trailblazer Award was a joint nomination with Gowling WLG. The firm was a long time intranet customer but Al Hounsell had a vision for how we could use our extranet platform to build a client-facing enterprise search platform using in-tenant Microsoft AI technology.

The data never leaves Gowling's four walls. Their clients access it safely and securely, with no separate credentials. They sign in with their native Microsoft 365 login.

It's one of the most innovative things I've seen done with a law firm's own data in 20 years in legal.

Two finalist nominations. Zero wins. There must have been some genuinely compelling candidates in those categories, because the work behind both of these projects is something I'd stack up against anyone's.

International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has a hard job picking winners, and I'm grateful they put us on the shortlist.

Most of all, thank you to the Infodash team who made both of these projects happen, and to Katrina Dittmer and Douglas Tarkington at Eversheds US and Al Hounsell, Julie Wilson, Rodrigo Meister, and Richard McConnell at Gowling WLG for trusting us with the work.

We'll be back next year!

The biggest threat to BigLaw isn't AI.

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It's the economic model AI exposes.

Most large law firms are still built around a partner-funded, profit-distribution model. Partners fund the firm. Profits are distributed annually. Major technology investment competes, directly or indirectly, with partner income.

That worked when the primary input was lawyer time.

It becomes harder when the means of production includes a serious technology layer.

Every firm will have access to off-the-shelf AI tools. That will not be the differentiator.

The differentiator will be what only that firm knows, and how well that knowledge and wisdom gets translated into systems that deliver services uniquely.

That requires more than licenses.

It requires clean data. Knowledge architecture. Workflow redesign. Product thinking. Security controls. Change management. New pricing models. New training models. New incentives.

In other words, it requires long-term investment in firm infrastructure.

And that is where the traditional partnership model starts to crack.

The pyramid model that drives BigLaw economics is built on layers of dependency. Associates generate the leveraged hours that fund partner profits. Compensation rewards billable production. Partnership track selects lawyers who originate work and produce hours. Bonus pools, equity decisions, internal status, all of it traces back to the same input-driven engine.

When technology absorbs a meaningful share of what junior lawyers produce today, the whole system has to be rewired.

Compensation has to change. Partnership criteria have to change. Pricing has to change. Training has to find a new apprenticeship model when much of the entry-level work is no longer done the old way. Client engagement has to change.

That is the hard part.

Not buying AI.

Rebuilding the economic foundation while the building is fully occupied and generating record profits.

Phones will not stop ringing tomorrow. BigLaw is not going away.

But the alternatives are coming fast: in-house legal teams with better tools, ALSPs with lower-cost delivery models, and AI-native firms built from the ground up around speed, transparency, and fixed-fee work.

The question is whether firms can change the business model fast enough to capture the value AI creates before someone else does.

Everyone's talking about the AI agent that deleted a production-level database and its backups.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why are we not asking how on God's green earth it was given permissions to perform such actions?

There is no scenario I can imagine where this would make any sense at all.

None.

Would you ever give a junior developer the keys to those sorts of permissions in production?

More people failures masquerading as AI failures.

What if your intranet could build itself?

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Join me and Infodash CTO, Kameron Berget, live on Thursday, May 14 to see how Infodash turns connected firm data into secure, usable digital experiences, fast.

We’ll demonstrate how firms can create modern intranet experiences on top of back-office systems while preserving the governance, permissions, and ethical wall controls legal teams depend on.

Join us live.

Tomorrow at 1:00 PM ET, I'm hosting a LinkedIn Live with Al Hounsell of Gowling WLG, and this one is worth blocking your calendar for.

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Here is why: it's another firm stepping up to show their peers how they actually did it.

Law firms learn best from law firms, and Al is bringing the real build, not the marketing version.

Gowling WLG and Infodash were just named finalists for International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)'s Trailblazer Award for this work.

We will walk through how the firm elevated a deeply structured knowledge base into a client-facing AI platform using Microsoft 365 and Azure AI Search, delivered directly inside the client extranet experience.

We'll get into what it actually takes to operationalize historical legal data at scale:

• Semantic search and natural language querying
• Security trimming so clients see only what they should
• Persistent AI interactions that hold context across sessions
• Governed, citation-backed legal insight

If knowledge, innovation, or technology is your lane at a firm, this session will show you how to unlock your institutional knowledge for clients on the Microsoft stack you already own.

Join us tomorrow at 1:00 PM ET (you know where to find the link)

Different niche, same principles: what sales leadership taught me about legal innovation content.

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Spent the weekend at my EO forum retreat in Scottsdale.

I got to hangout with🏄🏼‍♂️ Scott Leese over dinner and drinks.

130K+ followers on LinkedIn.

Hundreds of podcast episodes.

A thought leadership platform I admire.

What I didn't expect was how generous he'd be with the playbook.

Over dinner and drinks we got into what it actually takes to execute a thought leadership strategy at scale.

The discipline. The consistency. The willingness to keep showing up when the algorithm doesn't reward you.

A few things stuck with me.

Reach follows reps, not hacks.

Your podcast is your relationship engine.

Trust compounds. You can't shortcut it.

I've built my audience around legal innovation. Scott built his around sales leadership.

Different niches, same principles.

I left with a notebook full of ideas I'm already working into my own approach.

If you're not following Scott Leese yet, fix that.

He's the real deal.

Grateful for the conversation, Scott. Looking forward to the next one.

I sat down with Mark Dorman (CEO, Elite Technology), live from Elite’s VANTAGE Conference in New York City, to explore how AI and the cloud are transforming financial operations in the legal industry.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The full conversation will be on the Legal Innovation Spotlight website and Infodash’s YouTube channel next week.

I'm recording Legal Innovation Spotlight live this week at Elite Technology's Vantage conference in NYC.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had the absolute pleasure to interview Elisabet Hardy and many others today. Look for this conversation and the rest of them over the coming weeks.

Thanks to Ashley Pries and Riva Froymovich for hosting me!

I’m looking forward to this conversation with Al Hounsell about being named finalists for ILTA’s Trailblazer Award, which recognizes the joint efforts of Gowling WLG and Infodash.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We will walk through how Gowling WLG partnered with Infodash to elevate a deeply structured knowledge base into a client-facing AI platform using Microsoft 365 and Azure AI Search. This is a practical approach to delivering governed, citation-backed legal insight directly to the client extranet experience.

We will cover what it takes to operationalize historical legal data at scale, from semantic search and natural language querying to security trimming and persistent AI interactions.

If you are responsible for knowledge, innovation, or technology in a law firm, this session will show you how to unlock the value of your firm's institutional knowledge for clients.

Join us live.

Henry Ford would have called much of what we're doing in legal tech right now "building a faster horse."

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jordan Furlong recently published a two-part series worth reading. His argument is simple: AI isn't going to replace lawyers, but it is going to replace most of what lawyers currently do. Furlong frames the split as two spheres:

Sphere 1 is legal production: the researching, drafting, summarizing, and analyzing that fills most of a lawyer's billable day.

Sphere 2 is legal judgment: the hard uncertain calls, the strategic counsel, the moments where a client can't move forward without someone who knows the road ahead.

Sphere 1 work is already migrating to machines. Not next decade. Now. The firms whose revenue depends on volume billing for production work are standing on ground that's eroding under their feet.

Where lawyers remain essential is at the inflection points. The hostile takeover that could collapse. The ruinous lawsuit where strategy has to be exactly right. Judgment, composure, and experience matter more than producing a well-formatted memo.

Here's where I want to push Furlong's argument further.

If the future lawyer is selling judgment rather than task output, the tech we build for law firms needs to support that shift, not simply accelerate the old model. A lot of legal tech right now is still optimized for Sphere 1. We're making lawyers faster at doing things clients will soon do for themselves.

Henry Ford would have called this building a faster horse.

The question is what Sphere 2 tooling actually looks like. Better risk sensing. Better pattern recognition across matters and industries. Better ways to synthesize messy, incomplete information into something a lawyer can act on quickly. We're not replacing judgment. We're giving lawyers better inputs for it.

Furlong's second article covers the business model implications. Post-AI firms won't look like traditional pyramids. You don't need layers of associates if machines handle production work. You need smaller teams of high-judgment lawyers supported by diverse professionals and backed by strong business intelligence.

The billable hour is a terrible metric for Sphere 2 work. The best strategic call of a client's life might take ten hours. Value-based pricing, subscriptions, success-based fees. These aren't radical ideas. They're the logical conclusion of a market where the work that matters can't be measured in time increments.

If you're building legal technology, it's worth asking honestly: am I making Sphere 1 faster, or am I making Sphere 2 possible? Both have value right now. Only one has a future in law firms.

Part 1: Part 1
Part 2: Part 2

Today at Noon CT, Harvey Cofounder and President Gabe Pereyra joins me live to break down what that actually means.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We're covering Harvey's biggest launch yet. Agent Builder.

It lets firms create custom AI agents that reason through multi-step tasks instead of following rigid workflows.

25,000+ custom agents are already running on the platform.

We'll dig into what firms are actually building with them.

We'll also talk about Agentic Word, which reviews an entire agreement against precedents, flags issues, and executes redlines in a single pass.

That used to take associates hours. Now it takes minutes.

And the big question nobody's asking yet: when agents carry context across tasks, how do you enforce ethical walls?

Gabe has been thinking about this and will share his answer live.

Join us today at Noon CT on LinkedIn Live.

This one is going to be worth your lunch break.

Harvey is processing 400,000+ agentic queries a day and just launched Agent Builder.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Join me and Gabe Pereyra, President & Co-Founder at Harvey, to unpack what autonomous AI agents mean for the future of legal work.

Writing an AI policy is the easiest part of AI governance.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It's also the least important.

Amy Swaner, JD AIGP wrote a solid piece on why every firm needs one. She's right.

But a document doesn't fix the problems she describes. Process and infrastructure do.

If your DMS has 17 iterations of an unexecuted SPA and no data hygiene, your AI policy won't save you from hallucinated outputs.

If your integration layer can't enforce access controls at the data level, your confidentiality provisions are aspirational.

The policy is the starting line, not the finish line.

Most firms treat governance like a compliance checkbox. Write a document, circulate it, file it. Done.

That's theater.

Real governance requires infrastructure. Clean data. Security-trimmed access. A stack that makes it difficult to use data incorrectly.

Real governance requires culture. Embedded accountability. Champions who model the behavior daily.

Swaner nails it when she recommends "champions, not mandates." Adoption is a culture problem, not a document problem.

Process before technology. Infrastructure before policy. Culture before compliance.

If you're starting and ending with the document, you're very unlikely to be successful.

Does your law firm have permission gaps in M365 or ANY clients who restrict AI?

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

<<FYI...watch the video...it's worth 3 mins of your time>>

I don't know of many large law firms that can answer no to either of those questions...let alone both.

Copilot creates real challenges when the answer is yes to either question.

In addition to just not working nearly as well as other platforms, Microsoft's Terms of Use describes Copilot as being for "entertainment purposes."

The terms: "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk."

One thing to note is these terms apply to the consumer version and not M365 Copilot.

But who can keep track of what Copilot is what these days?

There are more Copilots then anyone can keep up with. This is a partial list:
• Microsoft Copilot
• Copilot Pro
• M365 Copilot Chat
• M365 Copilot
• Copilot Notebooks
• Copilot Pages
• Copilot Tuning
• Copilot Studio
• GitHub Copilot
• Copilot for Sales
• Copilot for Service
• Copilot for Finance (now Finance agents)
• Dynamics 365 Copilot
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Copilot+ PCs

Microsoft needs to reevaluate its entire AI strategy.

The early partnership with OpenAI looks shaky, Claude's add-ins work better than Microsoft's own native tools, and Copilot generally disappoints.

We're coming up on 4 years into the AI race and Microsoft is not a relevant player despite its vast resources and install base.

3% of M365 users pay for Copilot which means 97% don't.

What are we doing here Microsoft?

Excited for this one!

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dan Lomax, great to see you leading the charge in the UK as we grow our presence across Europe - perfect timing to have Alana H. Carson, JD, MLIS over as well.

Morgan Stanley predicted a "shock-level AI breakthrough" between April and June 2026.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They published that on March 13th.

Thirteen days later, Anthropic accidentally leaked Mythos.

Anthropic confirmed it's real. Called it "a step change" and "the most capable we've built to date."

The model is so advanced that Anthropic has been privately briefing top government officials about its cybersecurity risks.

Goldman Sachs' CIO said 2025 saw the biggest changes in his 40 years in technology.

And predicted 2026 would be even bigger.

Neither institution pointed to a specific model.

But both were tracking compute buildout at the major AI labs.

They knew something was coming.

Now we might know what it is.

At Morgan Stanley's TMT conference, a panelist said one recently introduced model "broke the trend in a big way to the upside" on AI task complexity benchmarks.

If Mythos is that model, we're not on the curve anymore.

We're above it.

I talk to law firm leaders multiple times a week.

Many are still taking a "measured approach" to AI.

Measured looks very different when the curve bends upward.

Legal AI vendors are hoovering up a lot of the legal engineering/innovation talent from law firms and then selling their time back to them at 4-5x.

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

These people have been underpaid and in many cases under empowered in law firms for many years.

If your legal engineers' compensation looks anything like the 2026 Jameson Legal salary guide, stop what you're doing.

Pull every legal engineer worth their salt into a room. Double or triple their pay. Ask them what they need. Then give it to them.

The Jameson Legal salary guide below puts Senior Legal Technologists at the equivalent of $80k to $120k USD.

That's WAY lower than what I've seen here in the US.

However, I've seen many legal engineering roles pay less than first/second year associates.

These are the people who make your technology investments actually work.

Many firms are paying them less than a second year associate.

Buying AI tools is the easy part. Any firm can write a check.

The hard part is layering your firm's knowledge and judgment on top of those tools to deliver something clients will pay a premium for.

Legal engineers make that happen.

AI vendors recruit these people out of firms, give them significant raises, and sell their expertise back to you at 4 to 5x the cost.

You're outsourcing your competitive advantage and paying more for doing so.

The most important investment a firm can make right now isn't another AI license.

It's compensating legal engineering and change management talent like the revenue drivers they are.

Firms that treat these roles as back office will lose them to vendors who won't.

Lawyers don't resist change because they're stubborn.

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Their brains are literally working against them.

Dr. Larry Richard joined me on Legal Innovation Spotlight this week.

He's spent 30+ years studying lawyer personalities with clinical-grade tools.

What he shared about the neuroscience of change resistance explains why change is hard for everyone but especially lawyers.

Every brain has threat circuitry scanning for danger 24/7.

Your amygdala fires when you encounter a threat (like a tiger) to protect you from danger.

This same circuitry fires when you encounter change like a new legal tech tool.

When it does, it hijacks cognitive resources.

If you're a gardener, no big deal.

But if your value depends on sharp analytical thinking, that hijacking hits different.

Distracted. Irritable. Depleted. And you don't know why.

Often the real culprit is the brain burning energy on uncertainty.

Now layer AI on top of that.

Lawyers score in the 90th percentile on skepticism and the bottom 10% on resilience.

That's a brutal combination when change goes vertical.

The firms that navigate this won't have the best tech strategy.

They'll understand the psychology of the people they're asking to change.

You know where to find the link.

Only 7% of legal tech jobs are pure AI roles.

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The other 93% should make you rethink your career plan.

Hundreds of legal tech job postings were analyzed on Reddit.

Here's what the data actually says:
• Operations/consulting/advisory roles dominate at 49%.
• Not prompt engineers. Not AI researchers.
• People who can make the tools actually work.

Here's the framework:
• Firms buy AI tools. That part is easy.
• Loose ownership on the rollout. Tools collect dust.
• Ops professionals step in. Adoption happens.
• Value finally shows up. Months late.

The bottleneck in legal tech was never the technology.

It was always the implementation.

Every firm who struggles with adoption has the same story.

Bought the tool. Under invested in change management.

Now wondering why nobody uses it.

AI focused roles are great but if you're thinking about moving into legal tech, stop chasing the AI title.

Start learning how to bridge the gap between purchase and adoption.

That's where the jobs are.

That's where the money is.

That's where the impact lives.

♻️ Repost for others to stop chasing AI hype and start building real skills.

Nobody reads the privacy policy.

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You know it. I know it. The companies writing them know it.

That's why they bury things in there.

GameStation once hid a clause granting them ownership of customers' souls. 7,500 people agreed. (seriously...see link below)

Google quietly changed Gemini's defaults so it could access your private emails and chats without you lifting a finger.

Meta started using your AI chat data for ad targeting last December.

The opt out? There isn't one.

These aren't hypotheticals. They already happened.

Here's what changed for me.

I opened a privacy policy for my home scanner and used Wispr Flow to speak this prompt in < 30 seconds into in Claude's side panel in my browser:

"What in this privacy policy should I be concerned about? Rate each issue and list them in descending order of risk. Exclude low risk issues."

I got back a risk ranked list I could scan in under a minute.

And I found out that the Ricoh can store the things I scan in places I was completely unaware of and for time horizons I'm not comfortable with.

Tax returns, bank statements, medical records, etc. all living on some servers for two weeks before they're deleted?!?!?

It took me 60 second to figure that out.

Pre-AI this document would have never been read like every other one before it.

Now every EULA update, every privacy policy change, every terms of service revision can get a 60 second risk check.

I will be disabling all cloud features on this scanner.

The tools exist. The friction is gone.

What's your excuse for not reading the fine print now?

We are literally always hiring and I don't post about job openings often.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

So when I do, it's because the opportunity is worth talking about.

Infodash serves more than one in four AmLaw 200 firms with a digital workplace platform built on Microsoft 365 and Azure.

We have a fast growing, profitable business with strong product-market fit and clients who genuinely rely on us every day.

That part is working.

Now we're entering the most consequential chapter in the company's history.

AI is changing what's possible inside the platforms where legal professionals already work.

The firms we serve are asking for it.

The technology is ready.

And we have the client relationships, the distribution, and the domain expertise to deliver something that actually matters.

What we need is a product leader who can take what we've built and make it dramatically more valuable.

This is not a "come figure out product-market fit" role.

It's a "we have the market, now build the next version of the product" role.

You'll own the roadmap, work directly with me and the leadership team, and shape how AI gets woven into a platform that the biggest law firms in the world depend on.

We're big enough to have real traction.

Small enough that every decision you make moves the needle.

I'm looking for someone who has led product teams, understands enterprise SaaS, and gets excited about building AI-powered capabilities for a market that's ready to adopt them.

Legal tech experience is a big plus but not required.

What matters is that you know how to ship product that customers love.

Apply, DM me or comment below if you're interested or know someone who would be a great fit.

Happy to share more details.

Over 50 AmLaw firms trust Infodash to be the connective tissue between their lawyers, their clients, and their AI tools.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We still use the words intranet/extranet because the market knows them but we are a digital workplace solution.

That's not something I take lightly.

We just completed SOC 2 Type II certification and I'm really proud of our team for getting this done.

Here's some context on why this matters.

Our architecture is a little different from most legal tech platforms.

We deploy directly into the law firm's environment.

We don't host their data.

We never touch it.

That means a certification like this wasn't technically required.

But the firms that trust us deserve more than "you don't need to worry about it."

They deserve proof.

SOC 2 Type II evaluates whether your security controls actually work over time.

Not a snapshot.

Not a self-assessment.

An independent auditor watching how you operate for months.

Security. Availability. Confidentiality. All independently verified.

We pursued this because trust is everything in legal.

The firms we serve handle the most sensitive work in business.

They chose us to be part of that workflow.

The least we can do is hold ourselves to the highest standard, whether the certification is required or not.

I'm grateful for every firm that has put their trust in Infodash.

This is one more way we're working to earn it every day.

AI didn’t break here.

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It did what it’s optimized to do: make something that sounds right.

Yesterday I showed how Claude Cowork pulled 96 ILTACON sessions from a speaker application, built a spreadsheet, and flagged the ones that matched my background.

It looked flawless.

Then I actually checked the dropdown on the application page.

Several of those sessions don't exist.

In fact, 72 of the 96 sessions were either completely made up or Claude took creative license with the wording.

Confident titles. Plausible descriptions. Narratives explaining why I'd be a great fit.

For sessions that were never real.

This is the hallucination problem and it's not solved.

My theory on what happened: the model likely filled gaps in what it could find as being a good fit for me as a speaker.

It wanted to please.

I reran the prompt but left out the task of finding sessions that were a good fit and it completed the task without hallucinating.

That's the danger.

Hallucinations don't announce themselves.

They show up dressed as facts, sitting right next to real data in the same spreadsheet.

The tools are incredible. I use them every day.

Always check the output. Especially when it looks perfect.

Conference session review is a tedious process.

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I just let AI do it for me.

ILTACON has 96 sessions and Claude picked the right ones for me.

In the past I would have opened the speaker application, scrolled through every single one, and spent time figuring out which sessions align to my expertise.

Instead, I had Cowork do everything for me.

I gave it a link to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) speaker application page and a very simple prompt.

It pulled every session, created a spreadsheet, and populated a row for each one.

Then it flagged the sessions that match my background.

It even wrote a narrative column explaining how my experience aligns to each topic.

96 sessions.

Analyzed, categorized, and matched.

Faster than you can make a cup of coffee.

Instead of reading dozens of session descriptions that aren't a fit, I can focus my attention on the ones that are.

This isn't about being lazy.

It's about redirecting time toward work that actually matters.

Figuring out what sessions to apply for used to be a pain.

Now it's a three-minute conversation with an AI agent.

This is a very trivial example but might be enough to inspire some thought.

I've been using Cowork for less than two weeks I'm already stumbling upon use cases multiple times a day.

Some of these tasks take Claude over an hour and they would take a human days.

The tools are here.

The question is whether you're using them.

------
Disclaimer: This was a very low-risk scenario. It was a trusted site and the process was closely monitored. Prompt injection risks do exist so spend a few mins understanding what that means and proceed accordingly.

When I saw Antti Innanen and Lev Loukhton going back and forth on a thread about how AI will impact what lawyers do, I thought MAYBE they would be gentlemen if I had them on for a debate.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

And I was correct.

It was a very intelligent conversation about the future of legal work and what the supply/demand dynamics might look like.

Antti argued that most legal work is "regular" legal work and an endless queue of strategic work isn't available to fill the void left by AI.

Lev has more of an abundance mindset about the amount of work available that is best performed by humans.

There was more common ground in the discussion then I expected.

When the perspectives of too really smart lawyers who are paying close attention converge, you have probably landed on the right answer.

I highly encourage listening to this episode!

(P.S. AI image generation still has a long way to go)

Anthropic's Claude legal plugin triggered a $285 billion market selloff and panic across legal tech.

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

But what did they actually ship?

Join me, Rob Saccone, and Josh Kubicki live as we open the plugin on screen and dissect it piece by piece.

You'll see:
→ The actual SKILL.md files opened and walked through live
→ A side-by-side comparison: plugin vs. the same instructions pasted into raw Claude
→ The same NDA review skill scored across six AI models with real data on accuracy, speed, and cost
→ A practicing lawyer grading the AI's contract review output in real time

No hot takes. No hype. Just the files, the outputs, and three informed perspectives.

45 minutes. Live demo. Q&A.

A post about AI wiping out all knowledge work just hit 60 million views on X.

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The core claim: AI can now handle tasks that take a human expert five hours.

That's technically true. At a 50% success rate.

The author left that part out.

He also left out that the benchmark behind the claim measures mostly software engineering tasks, not "all cognitive work" as he implies.

The METR research is real.

The trend is real.

AI capability IS doubling roughly every seven months.

Here's what matters for legal:

The gap between "AI can do this in a lab" and "AI is trusted to do this in a regulated industry" is measured in years, not months.

Liability frameworks. Institutional inertia. The need for human accountability when someone's freedom or fortune is on the line.

These aren't bugs.

They're features of a system built on trust.

The guy who wrote the post, Matt Shumer, has a history of sensationalism.

Most notably a model launch in 2024 that independent researchers couldn't replicate.

He later admitted he "got ahead of himself."

The truth about AI in legal sits between "nothing's changing" and "everything's over."

I meet with law firm leaders regularly....like multiple times a week regularly.

Some of these leaders tell me that they taking a "measured approach" (a.k.a. slow) to exploring tools and alternative service offerings.

"Measured approach" sounds sensible but I think it's a mistake.

If I'm being honest, I'm not sure if the firms moving slow are going to be here in 5 years.

Measured is too slow and reckless is too fast.

Finding the right pace is hard but necessary.

Don't panic but move with purpose.

There is no time for complacency.

The world is changing fast and you must too.

"It's the end of knowing as a differentiator."

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That one line from Rudy DeFelice got my attention.

Rudy is the Global Head of Harbor Labs and one of the sharpest minds in legal.

On episode 105 of Legal Innovation Spotlight, he made a case that should keep every BigLaw partner up at night.

The machines are going to know everything.

Whether you know more than me is going away as a competitive advantage.

So what replaces it?

Rudy's answer: Wisdom. Taste. Judgment. Ethics. Reading the room. Inspiring others.

Not what can we do, but what should we do.

He calls it the wisdom economy. And the historical precedent backs him up.

The printing press didn't kill authors.

The assembly line didn't kill auto workers.

Spreadsheets didn't kill accountants.

Every transformation pushed humans up the value chain.

Legal is next.

The firms that invest in tech enabled service deliver and uniquely human skills will thrive.

The ones still competing on "we know more" are building on a shrinking foundation.

Give this episode a listen. Rudy kicks some knowledge (and wisdom).

What do you think replaces knowledge as the differentiator?

Drop it in the comments.

Don't forget to login to my LinkedIn Live at Noon ET with Winston Weinberg to discuss what the Claude Plugin means for legal AI.

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This week was one of the most turbulent weeks in legal tech history.

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Join myself and Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey on Monday at Noon ET/9am PT for a live discussion about what the Anthropic announcement means for the future of legal AI. There are few people closer to the front lines than Winston so this should be an enlightening conversation. Register below and mark your calendar today. You won't want to miss this one!

Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude, and $285 billion in market value disappeared in 48 hours.

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bloomberg is calling it the "SaaSpocalypse."

Is this real disruption or market panic?

Join me and Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, for a conversation on what Anthropic actually released, what it means for legal AI vendors, and what law firms should do next.

Whether you're a legal tech buyer, builder, or investor, this is the conversation you need to hear right now.

Today legal tech got wiped out.

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That's what happens when fear meets inevitability.

Tens of billions wiped out in a single day.

Thomson Reuters down 15%.

RELX down 14%.

Wolters Kluwer down 11%.

All because Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude?

Here's the thing: no one paying attention should have been surprised.

The roadmap was public:
• November 2024: Anthropic launches MCP, making plugins possible
• July 2025: Claude for Financial Services goes live
• January 2026: OpenAI releases ChatGPT Health
• February 2026: Claude legal plugin drops

We all knew this was going to happen in legal.

The foundation models have been telegraphing vertical expansion for months.

So why the panic?

Investor sentiment.

$211 billion in AI venture capital deployed in 2025 alone.

That's just venture.

It doesn't include PE or the public markets.

54% of fund managers called AI stocks "bubble territory" according to BofA's latest survey

When markets are this nervous, any news becomes a catalyst.

The Claude legal plugin wasn't a surprise.

It was permission to panic.

The real story isn't what Anthropic built.

It's what investors are afraid they funded.

Dry January ends tonight but here's what a month of not drinking taught me:

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing.

Dry January sucks.

Worst month ever.

Most people train their GPTs on business content.

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I trained mine on me.

I built a custom GPT called Co-CEO over a year ago.

It knows everything about Infodash.

Core values. ICP definitions. Org chart. 2026 strategic plan. Revenue objectives. Monthly finance deck. Everything.

Every month I update the stuff that changes.

It's been a solid thought partner for over a year.

But something was missing.

It didn't know me.

A real co-CEO would understand how I think, communicate, and make decisions.

Like a long-time executive assistant.

So I fixed it.

I compiled every personality assessment I've taken over the years.

Culture Index. Predictive Index. Myers Briggs. Enneagram. Working Genius. DISC. Positive Intelligence.

Seven total.

I had AI analyze them all, flag conflicts, and ask me clarifying questions.

The output? Teds Personality.md.

My entire personality has been distilled down to a single markdown file.

I uploaded it and adjusted the custom instructions.

The difference is remarkable.

I now have a thought partner who knows my business AND how I operate.

I use it to pressure test ideas, brainstorm solutions, and sanity check decisions.

If you're building custom GPTs for work, don't skip this step.

The tool should know your business.

It should also know you.

Law firms spent 2.4% of revenue on technology in 2024 but still FAR less than their knowledge industry peers.

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2026 Citi Hildebrandt Client Advisory put together by Gretta Rusanow and Brad Hildebrandt has a lot of great data points but the tech spend number really jumped out.

The legal industry ranks 6th out of 9 major sectors in technology investment.

Just above construction and retail.

Yes, tech spending grew 9.7%.

The fastest real growth in the sector's history.

But is that the right trajectory for an industry that undergoing a massive transformation and has lagged its peers for decades?

Also, remember that technology is only part of the equation.

Change management. Innovation personnel. Training. Process reengineering.

None of that shows up in the 2.4%.

There seems to be consensus that corporate legal departments lag law firms in transformation today.

But board pressure to reduce external legal spend is accelerating.

Ask any CLO if there is more pressure to leverage tech to reduce spend then there was before AI.

The answer will almost certainly be yes.

80% of legal professionals expect transformational AI impact within 5 years.

Clients are already demanding efficiency gains.

The question isn't whether law firms are investing more.

They are.

The question is whether we're investing in change fast enough to stay ahead in this transformation?

In 2006, non-coders taught themselves HTML.

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not to become developers.

To make their MySpace page cooler than their friends.

They copied code from sketchy websites. Pasted it. Prayed. Broke things. Fixed them.

No one gave them permission.

They just messed around until it worked.

Fast forward to 2026.

"Vibe coding" is everywhere in legal innovation.

Describe what you want. AI writes the code.

You don't need to understand how to code. You need to understand the problem.

Suddenly "non-technical" people are building workflow tools and automating intake forms.

The MySpace generation already proved this:

You don't need to understand the code.

You need curiosity to try and resilience to fail.

You can turn your ideas into working prototypes to build a business case.

If that business case is compelling, you'll have fast tracked the requirements gathering phase of the project to productionize your idea.

Glitter cursors were the reason in 2006.

Efficiency is the reason in 2026.

The tools changed.

The energy is exactly the same.

Start experimenting.

**A virtual hat tip to all the vibe coders out there moving fast and breaking things like Jamie Tso, Oliver Schmidt-Prietz, LL.M., Tanya Sadoughi, Abigail Hope S., Scott Kveton, Dan Szabo, Nolan Hurlburt, Marc A. Pifko, Robert Friedman, Stephanie Goutos, Sara Miro, Megan McMillin, Dom Conte, Matt Pollins and all the others!

Harvey is the fastest growing legal tech company in history.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Winston Weinberg joins me on this week's Legal Innovation Spotlight and shared Harvey's origin story and lessons learned long the way.

He was vulnerable about things they got wrong and it allows his humanity and his humility to shine through.

It's a look more CEOs should embrace....including me.

Every CEO's journey involves learning by doing and that comes with making mistakes.

Embracing those mistakes is how you learn.

Owning them is how you earn respect.

Most people look at Harvey and think they were the golden child from day one.

But it started with a Reddit experiment.

Winston and his co-founder Gabe grabbed 100 landlord-tenant questions from r/legaladvice.

They built a chain-of-thought prompt using actual statutes.

Then they asked three attorney friends to review the outputs.

The instructions were simple.

Thumbs up if you'd send this to a client with zero edits.

Thumbs down if you'd change anything.

On 86 of 100 questions, all three attorneys said thumbs up.

No edits needed.

This was mid-2022.

GPT-3 had a terrible UI.

No instruction fine-tuning.

It would autocomplete your sentences if you forgot a period.

They cold-emailed Sam Altman and OpenAI's general counsel that week.

Subject line was something like "AI assistant lawyer."

OpenAI responded.

By July 4th they were pitching the C-suite.

The rest is history.

The lesson here isn't about luck.

It's about testing with real practitioners on real questions before building anything.

86% wasn't a projection.

It was proof.

Your legal AI is flying partially blind.

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

New research tested RAG systems on complex documents.

Every legal professional using AI should be aware of these results.

When humans marked relevant evidence on pages, AI models only found 16-17% of it.

83% of this supporting content could be invisible to your AI.

Tables, charts, and infographics are the hardest content for AI to process.

Legal documents are full of these.

Flowcharts in patents, timelines in litigation briefs, or tables in financial disclosures

What they call "multi-hop queries" perform worst.

These are questions requiring synthesis across multiple documents.

Many legal AI tools rely on text extraction.

They strip out visual context that makes documents comprehensible.

The gap between what AI retrieves and what it should is 10+ percentage points.

That's not a rounding error.....it's missing evidence.

Before trusting AI summaries of complex legal documents, ask:

Can it actually see what you're seeing?

A lawyer in Hong Kong vibe coded a working version of Harvery and Legora's tabular review feature.

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It took him an afternoon.

He also built a Spellbook alternative using Google AI Studio and Gemini.

Jamie Tso joined me on the Legal Innovation Spotlight this week to talk about what this means for legal tech.

Here's the uncomfortable question we explored:

If a non-engineer lawyer can replicate core features of $1B+ legal AI companies in a few hours, where's the moat?

Jamie's take is nuanced.

The frontier models are doing the heavy lifting.

The embedding models and enterprise infrastructure matter.

But the UI layer that many legal AI vendors lean on?

That's getting commoditized fast.

The more interesting insight was about innovation teams.

The innovation role may shift from sourcing and evaluating vendors to building and maintaining vibe coded tools themselves.

Because by the time procurement cycles finish, the lawyer's pain point may have already passed.

The line between technical and non-technical is getting blurry.

AI is the great equalizer.

If your legal AI makes a “judgment,” it’s not just following rules.

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s expressing a worldview.

Most software operates on if/then logic. Input X produces Output Y. Every time. Deterministic.

LLMs are fundamentally different. They're probabilistic, and new research shows just how much that matters.

A recent paper, "Evaluative Fingerprints" by Wajid N., studied 9 frontier LLMs evaluating the same content using the same rubric. The results are striking:

Inter-model agreement was near zero. Yet individual models were remarkably consistent with themselves, just not with each other.

The researchers could identify which model produced an evaluation with 89.9% accuracy based solely on its scoring patterns. Even GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.2 (same provider, different versions) were distinguishable 99.6% of the time.

The paper calls this the "reliability paradox": models don't agree on what "good" means, but they're so consistent in how they disagree that their evaluation patterns function as fingerprints.

Why should legal care?

In many ways, LLMs behave like people, who are also probabilistic. We've always known that different lawyers assess risk differently, interpret contract language differently, prioritize issues differently.

Now we're deploying AI with the same characteristics.

Consider a legal department implementing an agentic workflow that escalates matters based on risk assessment.

This research suggests the choice of model isn't an implementation detail.

It's a substantive decision that shapes outcomes.

As we build agentic processes that assert judgment (contract review, risk triage, compliance monitoring), we need to understand that model selection is a methodological choice with real consequences.

The question isn't whether to use AI for legal judgment.

It's whether we understand what theory of judgment we're encoding when we pick a model.

Everyone's asking how AI will change legal work which is the wrong angle on the question.

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For episode 100 of Legal Innovation Spotlight, I asked Ed Walters a better one.

What will great lawyers do in 2027 that AI cannot?

His answer reframed everything for me.

If we keep training lawyers to be the lawyers of 2007, we are going to fail.

Computers keep getting better at brute force legal work.

So the edge moves.

In 2027, the ceiling is built on human skills:
• Counseling
• Discernment
• Judgment
• Supervising software
• Picking the right tool
• Weighing risk with clients

Not soft skills.

Human skills.

AI raises the floor. Human skills raise the ceiling.

Episode 100 drops today.

Available wherever you listen to podcasts and on the Legal Innovation Spotlight website.

What human skill do you think will matter most?

Less than 3 years ago Goldman Sachs said 44% of legal work could be automated by AI.

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lot of people were skeptical.

McKinsey just confirmed it. And then some.

Their new report puts lawyers squarely in the "Agent-Centric" category.

That's the box highlighted in red in this chart.

70% of legal work hours are technically automatable today.

But look closer at the gray box inside.

That represents work requiring social and emotional capabilities.

Human in the loop work. About 25%.

70% minus 25% equals 45% which is REALLY close to Goldman's estimate.

That's the share of legal work that appears fully automatable right now.

As the tech gets better these ratios will change.

Goldman Sachs wasn't wrong. They may have been conservative.

But here's the thing.

In the mid-2010s AI was supposed to eliminate radiologists.

Between 2017 and 2024 employment in that role grew by 3%.

The jobs didn't disappear. They evolved.

The question isn't whether legal work will be automated.

It's whether you'll be designing the new workflows or getting displaced by them.

I decided to see if the top AI models could predict my career path based on my first-grade report card and I'm blown away at the results.

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I tested ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 and Grok 4.1 Thinking and redacted my name from the image.

By looking at my report card, I clearly didn't:
• behave
• work/play well with others
• follow directions

But I was good at:
• reading comprehension
• decoding unfamiliar words
• math

All the models nailed it but some were a little too good. This was Claude's answer:

"This kid becomes an entrepreneur or CEO — someone who builds their own thing rather than following someone else's playbook. The combination of strong verbal/analytical skills, intellectual curiosity, and a clear "I'll do it my way" attitude screams founder energy.
Bonus prediction: Something involving communication or content — those reading and verbal expression scores are too strong to ignore. Maybe a podcast host?"

The podcast host immediately raised a flag especially considering that I use a Claude Project to write the agendas for the Legal Innovation Spotlight podcast.

So I asked Claude if it cheated: "Did your memory influence your answer?" to which it responded "Ha — yes, absolutely it did!"

ChatGPT had a similarly accurate response and also admitted to using memory to influence its response.

I didn't tell the models that this was my first-grade report card.

ChatGPT and Claude inferred it.

However, Gemini and Grok also predicted the tech entrepreneur path and didn't use memory.

I analyzed their "thinking" and it appears they reasoned from first principles that I would be an entrepreneur which is true.

Gemini also predicted that my "temperament" would make me unemployable in a traditional corporate environment...also pretty much true.

Both Gemini and Grok guessed that I would gravitate towards tech and innovation.

So the takeaway here is two fold.

The models will absolutely infer facts (sometimes correctly) that weren't presented and make use of their memory in creative ways to get to the right answer.

The other takeaway is that even when they reason from first principals without gaming the exercise they can extrapolate and draw incredibly accurate conclusions.

Why Big Law Needs AI That Solves Everyday Problems

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When most people hear about artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal market, they imagine robots writing briefs or algorithms replacing attorneys. That’s the hype, but the reality is much more practical. The real value of AI for Big Law lies in removing the routine burdens that slow lawyers down.

The profession is starting to recognize this shift. Industry discussions increasingly focus on pragmatic tools that make legal work smoother, faster, and more human, rather than futuristic replacements for legal judgment. As one industry leader put it, the legal profession faces the biggest disruption in its history from AI, making practical adoption more critical than ever.

The Real Pain Points: Email, Meetings, and Admin

Behind the billable hours and high-stakes litigation, modern practice is dominated by routine tasks. Overflowing inboxes, endless meetings, and repetitive manual work take a heavy toll on productivity.

That’s where AI already makes a difference. Smart tools summarize email threads, highlight urgent messages, and suggest quick responses. AI transcription and summarization capture meeting discussions, decisions, and action items automatically. Workflow automation handles invoicing, data entry, and document prep, freeing lawyers for strategic work. Drafting aids and summarization tools help lawyers produce content quickly and review documents with less effort.

These capabilities exist today, and they target the friction points every lawyer knows. By taking on the chores, AI creates space for higher-value work like analysis, client counseling, and business development. The adoption curve is steep: AI adoption jumped from 19% to 79% in one year, with 95% of legal professionals expect AI to become central to their workflows within five years.

Productivity vs. the Billable Hour

If AI can make lawyers dramatically more efficient, what does that mean for firms that still depend on the billable hour?

Recent studies show the tension clearly. Firms piloting AI have reported 100x productivity gains in specific tasks, with one-third of firms expect 16% savings in billable hours. Yet, because more than 80% of revenue still relies on hourly billing, efficiency can feel like a threat.

The likely outcome isn’t fewer lawyers but different work. Lateral hiring increased 21% at large firms, while firms are also adding new roles like data scientists. Alternative fee arrangements are slowly gaining ground, but the billable hour isn’t disappearing overnight. Instead, AI is pushing firms to reconsider pricing models while giving lawyers more time for client-facing and strategic tasks. Meanwhile, 83% of legal departments face rising demand, suggesting the need for legal services continues to grow alongside technological capabilities.

Governance and Data Security Are Non-Negotiable

Clients are rightly cautious about how their information is used in AI tools. Confidentiality, accuracy, and reliability remain top concerns.

That means adoption isn’t just about efficiency but governance. The firms leading the way are the ones embedding AI inside their secure environments, setting guardrails to prevent errors, and aligning tools with firm policies. The question is no longer “should we use AI?” but “how do we do it without compromising trust?”

Corporate legal departments are already seeing results from structured approaches, with documented 284% ROI for corporate legal departments using properly governed AI implementations.

Practical AI in Action

Practical AI isn’t about replacing lawyers but embedding intelligence where it matters most: inside the systems lawyers already use every day.

For example, Infodash‘s AI Studio lets firms create secure, custom AI assistants called DashBots within their Microsoft 365 environment. Because the bots live inside the firm’s tenant, data never leaves the firm or gets used to train public models. DashBots can be tailored for specific use cases like HR policies, regulatory compliance monitoring, or matter insights while governance dashboards track usage and performance.

The principle is simple: make AI helpful, make it safe, and make it fit naturally into existing workflows. Microsoft’s Copilot scenario library for legal professionals provides additional examples of how AI can integrate seamlessly with familiar tools and processes.

Focus on Everyday Impact, Not Hype

AI’s real value in Big Law isn’t in writing entire briefs from scratch or replacing attorneys but in eliminating the daily friction that slows lawyers down and consumes billable time. Firms that adopt AI thoughtfully are already seeing extraordinary gains, from reducing drafting time to freeing hundreds of hours per lawyer each year.

The future of legal work won’t be defined by whether AI replaces people. It will be defined by whether firms embrace AI to remove the obstacles that stand in their way. Legal Design Lab research shows that human-centered approaches to legal technology adoption create more sustainable and effective implementations.

The path forward is clear: solve everyday problems, govern AI rigorously, and integrate it into the systems lawyers already know.

Do that, and AI stops being a buzzword and becomes what it should have been all along: a competitive advantage for firms and a better experience for clients.

Leveraging the Power of Intranets for Knowledge Management in Law Firms

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In today’s rapidly changing legal environment, Knowledge Management and Innovation (KM&I) teams are the unsung heroes driving operational excellence in law firms.

The rise of remote and hybrid work models has posed new challenges for legal organizations, compelling them to find innovative ways to organize and distribute vital information to their workforce.

Enter the intranet – the secret weapon in a law firm’s digital toolkit. These internal portals have become game-changers for KM&I departments, providing a centralized hub for communication, collaboration, and productivity. According to the 2022 ILTA Technology Survey, intranets rank as one of the top three KM assets, just behind document management systems and enterprise search.

Interestingly, most law firm intranets are built on Microsoft SharePoint. They are often considered more valuable than traditional KM tools like experience management, document assembly, and internal knowledge bases. However, to truly harness the potential of intranets, thoughtful planning and strategic implementation are crucial.

Deciding What’s Needed

If your firm is transitioning its intranet to SharePoint Online and reimagining its future state, it might be tempting to jump right into a formal requirements gathering process. Ten years ago, this approach made sense because there were few out-of-the-box legal intranet solutions, and those that did exist were often inadequate. This is no longer the case. Legal intranets have matured to the point where every practical use case is well known. The likelihood of uncovering a novel use case during requirements gathering is minimal. The legal intranet problem has been solved countless times over the past 25 years, and experienced vendors understand what firms need. Check if your vendor partner has a standard playbook like the one below. Following a proven playbook can save you many months and thousands of dollars in unnecessary planning activities.

Content is Paramount

Let’s get real – an intranet without quality content is like a library without books. Simply migrating old content into a new system can lead to chaos. Instead, energize your content creators to produce fresh, relevant material such as news, events, know-how, and training resources. Keep it current, accurate, and tailored to your audience’s needs. This is where solid content lifecycle management (CLM) comes into play, focusing more on people and processes than on technology.

Find It or Forget It

Many legal professionals feel like they’re searching for a needle in a haystack when trying to locate information on their intranets. Often, the content is present but difficult to find, leading to wasted time and missed opportunities. Enhancing content discoverability is essential.

Start with the user interface (UI). A cluttered, inconsistent UI leads to frustration. Implement clear page templates and style guides, train your content creators, and avoid complex navigation structures that require extensive searching to find information.

Next, consider taxonomy and metadata tags. Review your content types and establish meaningful tags for each. Ensure your content owners tag consistently and accurately. Proper tagging is crucial for efficient content retrieval.

Customizations: Handle with Care

If you’re a large law firm, you’re likely using or planning to switch to SharePoint Online for your intranet. The SaaS model offers benefits such as scalability, lower upfront costs, and enhanced security, but it also presents challenges.

Law firms often customize SharePoint to meet their specific needs. However, frequent updates from Microsoft can disrupt custom solutions, creating operational issues unless monitored closely.

To mitigate this risk, be strategic about customizations. Consider using a third-party intranet framework to minimize the impact of updates. Let the vendor’s team monitor updates and address potential issues. This approach allows you to focus on your core responsibilities without constantly managing your intranet. Notably, law firms have been moving away from in-house custom intranet solutions, with a 30% decline in custom solutions over the past four years, according to the ILTA Technology Survey chart below.

In conclusion, intranets have become essential tools for law firms’ KM&I efforts, especially in the era of remote and hybrid work. SharePoint Online provides a strong platform for legal intranets, but firms must prioritize quality content creation, effective content lifecycle management, and enhanced discoverability to maximize their intranet’s value. Customizations should be approached with caution, considering third-party intranet frameworks to mitigate risks associated with frequent updates. As the legal landscape continues to evolve, a well-designed and maintained intranet can be a crucial asset in fostering collaboration, productivity, and knowledge sharing within law firms.

What’s Next for Legal Tech in 2024

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Let’s dive into the future to reveal some transformative trends that will shape the legal tech landscape in 2024.

Venture Funds and the SaaS Shake-Up

In the dynamic landscape of venture capital, here is a forecast: more venture funds, mirroring the footsteps of OpenView, may soon shutter. The reason is an overabundance of investments made at unsustainable valuations. It’s a wake-up call for the industry to rethink strategies and focus on sustainable growth.

SaaS is over-saturated in many areas and less than one-third are profitable. There will be a correction in the SaaS market and those unable to demonstrate the efficient use of capital and an end game will fail. Future investment will gravitate towards platforms that use AI in meaningful ways.

AI – The Game-Changer for Law Firms

AI is set to be the catalyst for a technology revolution in law firms. Traditionally slow to embrace tech, law firms are now compelled to invest in legal technology as AI presents both opportunities and threats.

Firms that have invested in core knowledge management, cloud-based data strategy, and infrastructure are ahead of the curve. They are better positioned to swiftly incorporate GenAI into legal workflows, supercharging day-to-day capabilities. However, those who haven’t made these investments will be playing catch-up throughout 2024.

Separating Wheat from Chaff in Legal AI

AI will be a catalyst for law firms to invest in legal tech more broadly. With high interest rates and capital scarcity, angels and VCs will be more discerning in their investments. Ideas will require tangible use cases, and the legal AI landscape will witness a separation of the wheat from the chaff. There is still confusion in the legal industry as to where and how AI applies: 73 Percent Of Lawyers Expect To Be Using Generative AI Next Year…But To Do What Exactly? 2024 will be the year of experimentation as firms learn where AI can make economic and experience impacts that will inform their investment and business strategies.

Unlocking Potential

Collaboration platforms, KM taxonomies/SALI standards, precedent collections, enterprise search, client/matter/firm financials data, and matter management tools are all ripe with information for verticalized LLM’s, allowing firms to supercharge attorney and business professionals’ day-to-day capabilities. Seamless data integration and rationalization to power verticalized LLM’s will be a top priority for firms adopting and adapting AI strategies. As AI technologies become integral to legal processes, firms will prioritize embedding InfoSec and data governance policies into platforms and communication channels. Minimizing risks will ensure a smooth and secure transition into the era of AI-powered legal services.

Microsoft Teams and M365: Resistance is Futile

Nearly every Am Law firm will have AT LEAST started the move to M365, acknowledging that there’s no future in on-prem infrastructure. Microsoft Teams, once used for mere presence, chat, and online meetings, is set to play a pivotal role in client/matter work and collaboration with external parties (i.e. clients).

Conclusion

The legal industry, often labeled as a technology laggard, is gearing up for a shift as we enter the new year. When navigating change, one thing is certain: law firms that embrace change will be the ones leading the way, and those who fail to adapt might find themselves left behind.

Why Microsoft 365 is the Way Forward

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based suite of applications that includes popular tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, as well as other essential applications that cater to the needs of businesses and organizations. It is a popular choice for law firms worldwide due to its extensive range of features and capabilities that streamline various workflows and simplify daily tasks.

The legal industry has traditionally been slow to adopt new technology, but the pandemic has accelerated the need for digital transformation. With remote work and virtual collaboration being the norm, law firms must adapt and adopt new technologies to stay competitive. Microsoft 365 offers a range of features that can significantly benefit law firms and lawyers. Let’s take a closer look at why Microsoft 365 is the way forward.

Improved collaboration and communication: Collaboration and communication are crucial aspects of the legal industry, and M365 provides a robust platform for both. With applications such as Microsoft Teams, law firms can communicate and collaborate with team members, clients, and other stakeholders in real-time. Teams offers a centralized location for file sharing, document collaboration, and project management. By streamlining communication and collaboration, M365 can help law firms reduce miscommunication, enhance productivity, and improve client satisfaction.

Enhanced security and compliance: Data security and compliance are paramount in the legal industry, and M365 provides a secure platform for data management. The M365 platform offers numerous security features such as data encryption, two-factor authentication, and data loss prevention tools that help protect sensitive data from cyber threats and insider risks. Additionally, M365 is compliant with several regulatory standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, making it an excellent choice for law firms that deal with sensitive data.

Improved productivity and efficiency: M365 offers several tools that can enhance law firm productivity and efficiency. Applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint provide familiar and easy-to-use interfaces for document creation, data analysis, and presentations. These applications also offer several advanced features such as co-authoring, version control, and real-time collaboration that can streamline workflows and reduce errors. Additionally, M365 offers several automation tools such as Power Automate and Power Apps that can automate repetitive tasks, further enhancing productivity.

Flexibility and accessibility: One of the most significant advantages of M365 is its flexibility and accessibility. As a cloud-based suite, M365 can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, enabling remote work and collaboration. M365 also offers mobile applications that enable access to applications such as Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint, further enhancing accessibility and flexibility.

Cost savings: Adopting M365 can also result in significant cost savings for law firms. With M365, law firms can move away from traditional software licensing models and pay for only the applications they need on a subscription basis. This subscription-based model can reduce software costs, maintenance costs, and hardware costs, leading to significant cost savings over time. Additionally, as M365 is a cloud-based suite, it eliminates the need for on-premises servers, further reducing infrastructure costs.

Conclusion

Microsoft 365 is the way forward for the legal industry, providing numerous benefits such as improved collaboration and communication, enhanced security and compliance, improved productivity and efficiency, flexibility and accessibility, and cost savings. As law firms continue to face increasing pressure to adopt technology to remain competitive, M365 provides an all-in-one solution that can help them stay ahead of the curve. By embracing M365, law firms can enhance their workflows, improve client satisfaction, and achieve greater success in a rapidly changing legal landscape.

Why Working with a Legal-Specific Intranet Vendor Matters

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

If you’re considering a new intranet, there are a lot of decisions to make. Should we custom build the intranet on our own or with the help of a vendor? Should we leverage an intranet platform to reduce costs and speed up the timeline? Should we use an industry agnostic platform or something legal-specific? There are dozens of intranet platforms out there from which to choose. However, that number shrinks to just a few platforms if you are looking at one designed specifically for the legal industry. So why would you limit the choice when there are dozens of industry agnostic options available?

There are many reasons you might want to choose an industry-specific solution and partner for your project. Every industry has concepts and nuances that impact project strategy. This is especially true in legal. Below are some examples of these nuances:

Organizational hierarchy – Who is typically in charge of technology initiatives, and how are decisions made?
Stakeholders – How do the various groups of stakeholders (KM, IT, finance, marketing, etc.) engage and work together, and which group is responsible for what?
Communication norms – What is the communication protocol between consultants/vendors and relevant parties within the firm?
Firm priorities – What are the output expectations of attorneys, and how do they influence the critical success factors of the project?
Social connections – How do firm employees interact and stay connected with one another as they collaborate on matters and projects?
Strategic role of technology – At what level do law firms invest in technology, and what are their attitudes and preferences toward concepts like cloud computing, etc.?
Systems – What systems are most important to the firm, and where/how are they leveraged by each group of stakeholders?

In addition to understanding the nuances above that really define law firm culture, there are big advantages to leveraging a partner committed to the industry. For example, having a project fail is absolutely not an option at Infodash because the cost of that failure would be very high. Our parent company Acrowire has invested 14 years and millions of dollars establishing its good name within the legal industry, and a failure would put all that brand equity at risk. If a vendor without that sort of investment in the industry fails, there’s much less at risk and they can just move on to the next deal.

Partners that focus on law firms are also typically less expensive. The learning curve is much less steep since they come to the table informed and don’t have to ask as many questions. This reduces the billable time spent on your project as well as the demands on your staff’s time by not requiring them to get the partner up to speed. At Infodash, for example, we work primarily with law firms, so our product is evolving in alignment with industry needs, which further increases ROI.

It’s hard to think of many reasons why you wouldn’t want to partner with an expert in your industry. Legal partners know your systems, how to work with your organization, are more committed to success and their product is built specifically for the use cases your firm needs to accommodate!