More than 60% of lawyers now use AI.
Almost none of their firms have changed how the work actually gets done.
Writing
No. 87 Since February 2024 Updated August 25, 2026
How law firms actually adopt AI, and the economics that decide whether it sticks. Newest first.
2026 82 notes
This is how I prepare for ILTACON.
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.
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.
Last month I published the nine objectives Big Law leaders say they're prioritizing in their AI transformations. Our team took that framework and re-sorted the entire KM&I track against it.
A 1990 paper by economist Paul David explains why many law firms will get AI wrong.
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?
The corporate legal department of the AI era will look like a Gazelle-phant.
That was one of my favorite concepts from this week's podcast with Bjarne Philip Tellmann.
Airtable just sold for 2.7x revenue.
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.
The most important job in the AI-era law firm might be one that a third of firms have never written down.
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%.
In 2011, Harvard's Michael Norton ran a study where people paid 63% more for furniture they assembled themselves.
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.
The 11 Big Law sacred cows AI slaughters:
1. Performance metrics: Traditional top-line metrics become less useful as AFAs displace hours. 2. The billable hour: It is more than pricing.
Harvey pays its legal engineers up to $320K.
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.
ILTACON is three weeks out and my session calendar is already a mess.
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.
If law firms want to understand how they will be impacted by AI they should understand their customers' expectations.
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.
The biggest legal AI risk isn’t vendor selection.
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.
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.
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.
Firms who decided to wait to migrate to Microsoft 365 are now at risk.
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.
I talk a lot about the skill layer being THE most important asset and why the firm must own where it lives.
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.
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.
In 1982, Harvard Law School banned computers from exams.
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.
OpenAI shipped GPT-Live, GPT-5.6, and ChatGPT Work in two days.
The feature that matters most got almost no airtime. ChatGPT Work is the headline product.
Rockefeller did not win the oil age by drilling the most wells.
He won by controlling the pipelines, the refineries, and the distribution. The wells were interchangeable. The rails were not.
Alex Karp went on CNBC and called token-based AI pricing a "wealth tax on enterprise America."
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.
Satya Nadella just described the biggest risk facing law firms.
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.
Happy 250th birthday, America!
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.
Ford's General Counsel just told law firms they're losing the AI race...to their own clients.
Steven Croley runs legal at Ford. Former Latham partner. He made the case in Bloomberg Law.
The Financial Times Law 50 on Thursday and four days later inducted as a Fellow into the College of Law Practice Management.
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.
A paper written by a Yale Law School professor in 2019 tells us how AI will kill law firms.
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.
Named to the Financial Times Law 50.
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.
Everyone keeps asking whether outside investors can “own” a law firm.
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 uncomfortable truth about AI: You are never going to be “done” learning it...Ever.
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.
My 13 year old son spent $60 on a birthday gift that AI could have faked for free.
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.
The top 10 tells that your post/comment is AI slop:
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."
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.
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.
Three days at the first annual OpenClaw conference and my mind is officially blown.
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.
Gartner says legal tech budgets will DOUBLE by 2028.
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.
Law firms aren't technology companies....yet.
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.
Guess whose flight had ZERO air rage issues?
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.
Spent the day in Fort Lauderdale with Zach Posner and Tanner Rogers, JD, MBA from The LegalTech Fund.
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.
The verdict's in. Sam Altman won the Musk vs OpenAI trial.
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.
Vibe Coding is all the rage in legal tech right now, and rightly so.
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.
We were finalists for two ILTA awards this year.
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?
The biggest threat to BigLaw isn't AI.
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.
Everyone's talking about the AI agent that deleted a production-level database and its backups.
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.
What if your intranet could build itself?
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.
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.
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.
Different niche, same principles: what sales leadership taught me about legal innovation content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Henry Ford would have called much of what we're doing in legal tech right now "building a faster horse."
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.
Today at Noon CT, Harvey Cofounder and President Gabe Pereyra joins me live to break down what that actually means.
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.
Harvey is processing 400,000+ agentic queries a day and just launched Agent Builder.
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.
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.
Does your law firm have permission gaps in M365 or ANY clients who restrict AI?
<<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.
Excited for this one!
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.
They published that on March 13th. Thirteen days later, Anthropic accidentally leaked Mythos. Anthropic confirmed it's real.
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.
These people have been underpaid and in many cases under empowered in law firms for many years.
Lawyers don't resist change because they're stubborn.
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.
Only 7% of legal tech jobs are pure AI roles.
The other 93% should make you rethink your career plan. Hundreds of legal tech job postings were analyzed on Reddit.
Nobody reads the privacy policy.
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.
We are literally always hiring and I don't post about job openings often.
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.
Over 50 AmLaw firms trust Infodash to be the connective tissue between their lawyers, their clients, and their AI tools.
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.
AI didn’t break here.
It did what it’s optimized to do: make something that sounds right.
Conference session review is a tedious process.
I just let AI do it for me. ILTACON has 96 sessions and Claude picked the right ones for me.
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.
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.
Anthropic's Claude legal plugin triggered a $285 billion market selloff and panic across legal tech.
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.
A post about AI wiping out all knowledge work just hit 60 million views on X.
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.
"It's the end of knowing as a differentiator."
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.
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.
Register below!
This week was one of the most turbulent weeks in legal tech history.
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.
Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude, and $285 billion in market value disappeared in 48 hours.
Bloomberg is calling it the "SaaSpocalypse." Is this real disruption or market panic?
Today legal tech got wiped out.
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%.
Dry January ends tonight but here's what a month of not drinking taught me:
Nothing. Dry January sucks. Worst month ever.
Most people train their GPTs on business content.
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.
Law firms spent 2.4% of revenue on technology in 2024 but still FAR less than their knowledge industry peers.
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.
In 2006, non-coders taught themselves HTML.
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.
Harvey is the fastest growing legal tech company in history.
Winston Weinberg joins me on this week's Legal Innovation Spotlight and shared Harvey's origin story and lessons learned long the way.
Your legal AI is flying partially blind.
New research tested RAG systems on complex documents. Every legal professional using AI should be aware of these results.
A lawyer in Hong Kong vibe coded a working version of Harvery and Legora's tabular review feature.
It took him an afternoon. He also built a Spellbook alternative using Google AI Studio and Gemini.
If your legal AI makes a “judgment,” it’s not just following rules.
It’s expressing a worldview. Most software operates on if/then logic. Input X produces Output Y. Every time. Deterministic. LLMs are fundamentally different.
Everyone's asking how AI will change legal work which is the wrong angle on the question.
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.
Less than 3 years ago Goldman Sachs said 44% of legal work could be automated by AI.
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.
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.
I tested ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 and Grok 4.1 Thinking and redacted my name from the image.
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