Ted Theodoropoulos

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There are 87 posts. These are the ones I would hand someone first, grouped by the argument they belong to rather than by date.

The economics 4 posts

Why the billable hour decides what gets adopted, and what happens to the partnership when it stops.

  1. The 11 Big Law sacred cows AI slaughters:
  2. A paper written by a Yale Law School professor in 2019 tells us how AI will kill law firms.
  3. Everyone keeps asking whether outside investors can “own” a law firm.
  4. Law firms spent 2.4% of revenue on technology in 2024 but still FAR less than their knowledge industry peers.

Building it, not buying it 5 posts

The case for owning the capability inside the firm rather than renting it from a vendor.

  1. I talk a lot about the skill layer being THE most important asset and why the firm must own where it lives.
  2. The biggest legal AI risk isn’t vendor selection.
  3. 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.
  4. Writing an AI policy is the easiest part of AI governance.
  5. Your legal AI is flying partially blind.

Reading the market 5 posts

What the valuations, funding rounds and vendor moves actually tell you.

  1. Airtable just sold for 2.7x revenue.
  2. Harvey is the fastest growing legal tech company in history.
  3. Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude, and $285 billion in market value disappeared in 48 hours.
  4. Harvey pays its legal engineers up to $320K.
  5. 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.

Who actually does the work 5 posts

The people AI adoption runs through, and why it stalls when nobody has a mandate.

  1. The most important job in the AI-era law firm might be one that a third of firms have never written down.
  2. Lawyers don't resist change because they're stubborn.
  3. In 2011, Harvard's Michael Norton ran a study where people paid 63% more for furniture they assembled themselves.
  4. Ford's General Counsel just told law firms they're losing the AI race...to their own clients.
  5. Only 7% of legal tech jobs are pure AI roles.
All 87 posts, newest first