It is undeniable that this moment is being shaped by people who marinated for years in an informational environment where reality was not only demoted but actively disdained. It took a while for that bubble to become impermeable but it did and now we have a chunk of people who know nothing but.

"Full-service" law firms that handle both commercial and litigation matters can work, up to a certain size anyway. But as this article suggests, "BigLaw" is really only corporate law firms now; litigation is a secondary distraction. Look for this divergence to continue. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

There are clear cases of AI's applicability to legal tasks, there are edge cases, and there are "of course not" cases. Letting AI anywhere near the drafting of court judgments is squarely in the third category - if for no other reason than public confidence in the courts. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

I don't like this new version of the TARDIS.

Me, whenever the Harvey AI Discourse Machine powers up:

Sincere thanks to @stephenpoor.bsky.social and his "PIoneers and Pathfinders" team for inviting me back to their terrific podcast! I was surprisingly (even to me) blunt about the mid-term prospects for law firms, but hopeful for the future of lawyers after AI. www.seyfarth.com/news-insight...

Now it's getting fascinating: bsky.app/profile/chad...

Who in the hell got to Trump following his speech at the UN? Who was the last person he spoke with before dictating this? 👇

Scenario: AI makes legal knowledge/tools near-ubiquitous, leading to surge in demand for dispute resolution, commercial transactions, and growth facilitation that the extant legal system (courts, regulators, agencies, lawyers) can't manage, so new private legal systems emerge to handle the overflow.

Terrific and thought-provoking article about how improv -- yes, improv -- can help create a more human-oriented legal education system: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... I'd add: Training future lawyers to collaborate towards a common goal, rather than compete with each other, would be invaluable.

Largest US law firms see slower growth in hours billed than less sizeable firms below them. But top firms do more complex work and charge higher rates: www.law360.com/pulse/modern... Volume of demand won't matter as much post-AI. Firms focusing on specialized/expert work are getting this right.

There's enormous demand for dispute resolution that's both expert AND efficient. The court system only delivers the first of these; the same is true for a lot of arbitration. So an AI-powered arbitrator is exactly as important and impactful as it sounds. Track this. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

Canada's top-ranked law school (University of Toronto) is renamed for Ontario's former lieutenant-governor after he makes an $80 million donation. Which, in fairness, is a huge amount of money for a Canadian law school. www.utoronto.ca/news/univers...

“In its latest five-year outlook this week, Robeco assigned a decent probability — 35 per cent — to a total unravelling in the global financial order, a ‘self-inflicted, preventable’ sidelining of multilateral bodies and national central banks, ushered in by the US.” Happy weekend!

The more I use ChatGPT, the more familiar I become with the structure and cadence of its "speech" -- and the more I start noticing the same patterns in many blog posts, press releases, even LinkedIn comments. I'd hate for us all to end up sounding the same -- especially if it sounds like *that*.

The only question about the outcome here is whether the majority ruling will be 6-3 or 5-4.

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

The fascists can easily be defeated, like it’s so fucking easy to beat them. But you need some kind of leadership focused on helping people and there’s just hardly anyone with power willing to do the bare minimum to keep these monsters in check

I'm enough of a geopolitics nerd to find this a fascinating development as well as a rather worrisome one.

And yet, we must reject the projections of inevitability and strength coming from the Trumpists. Being lawless doesn’t make them omnipotent. America is now existing somewhere between democracy and fully established autocracy. Preemptive obedience and surrender is the fastest way to dictatorship.

In order to be effective, every lie must be heard by someone who needs to believe it's the truth. And the more fervent and desperate that need, the more ludicrous and outrageous -- and dangerous -- the lie can be. Ask the people believing all these lies why they want so badly for them to be true.

My newest Substack forecasts the imminent divergence of law firms from lawyers, with firms heading toward techno-commoditization and lawyers ascending to unique law-infused client guidance -- if we give lawyers the tools to make the transition successfully. jordanfurlong.substack.com/p/the-diverg...

The last movie star before the franchise era. And the end of old Hollywood. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...

TLDR: Make racism shameful again. While you’re at it add fascism too.

The catastrophic failure of elite institutions and power-holding individuals in the United States to honour or even nod towards the principles of their Constitution and the rule of law when challenged is what I'll remember after this whole thing collapses.

This will be one of those charts that appears in a future book on economic history, much like today's textbooks feature stock market highs from the summer of 1929.

The recruiter "is seeing a marked softening of the job market for early-career in-house lawyers. The weakness stems from companies' discovering that for lower-level legal work, one lawyer using AI can do the volume of work that used to require three or four lawyers." www.law.com/legaltechnew...

Law firm acquires legal tech startup ... [puts hand to earpiece] Sorry, that should read: Legal tech startup acquires law firm. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

This is an excellent, well-sourced explanation of who Charlie Kirk was, the nature of his relationship with Nick Fuentes, and why his murder is going to lead to very bad things. Highly recommended: www.bugeyedandshameless.com/p/who-was-ch...

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was presenting as an Internet bulletin board.

The inner-circle Hall of Fame of Law Blogs is incredibly exclusive, with no more than 5 to 10 members maximum. The TaxProf Blog is part of that Inner Circle, and it published its final post this week, 21 years after its launch. Respect and gratitude to Paul Caron. taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog...

I don't know why people are worried about World War III when the US and Russia are basically allies.

Invaluable contribution to understanding what LLMs can and can't do in the law; I'd love to see more research like this. My takeaways: Law-specific LLMs tended to lag the frontier models on legal issues, and no LLM does as well as a good lawyer/law librarian: www.ailawlibrarians.com/2025/09/05/b...

"Artificial intelligence is ... increasingly embedded in core M&A deal processes that help attorneys manage due diligence, draft agreements, and assess risk." www.law360.com/pulse/modern... Gen AI is going to become the equivalent of the wiring inside your walls: Never thought of, but indispensable.

Using Gen AI to decide cases? Nope. But I can absolutely see AI as a kind of "pre-trial judge" that hears each side's basic case and makes an assessment of the likely outcome, in order to guide negotiations and settlements. Whether public or private, that's coming our way. www.ft.com/content/d193...

Within 10 years, all law firms will be "AI-powered" to some extent, so we're going to need more precise definitions of what a law firm "powered" or "driven" or whatever by AI actually means. Or maybe not: In 10 years, law firms probably won't bother mentioning AI at all. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

The real question here is: Who'll pay for associates if AI takes over the work they used to bill? The partners? Not at many of the firms I've seen. If you're expecting firms to "invest in their future" by subsidizing unprofitable junior lawyers, you'll be waiting awhile. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

Your regular reminder that "recruiting from the top 20 law schools" and "recruiting elite talent" are not the same thing. Lazy talent strategies rely on rankings to choose their targets. Smart firms understand that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. www.law360.com/pulse/modern...

61% of lawyers surveyed by Lexis UK use Gen AI for work. What's really eye-catching, though, is that that number was 46% in January. In-house, small-firm, and academia lawyers use AI the most; midsize and BigLaw lawyers the least. www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/...

Remarkable both how thin-skinned are some of the most profitable law firms in the world, as well as clueless about the inappropriateness of editing their their Wikipedia pages to remove negative information (including about deals with Trump). Pretty pathetic. www.law.com/legaltechnew...

After many years of intensely analyzing political philosophies and party policy platforms, I believe I've formulated an accessible all-purpose framework for expressing the essential difference between The Left and The Right. The Left: Give people a break. The Right: No.

It's very cool to have something I wrote translated and published in German: legal-tech-verzeichnis.de/fachartikel/...

Summer traffic lasts just long enough for you to forget what normal traffic is like.

An A2J AI in North Carolina is audited, and the results are published below. The assessment is not positive, and it's fair to say the first iteration of this technology has a long way to go before it's viable. Full marks to the administrators for the transparency shown here.

"Powerful AI is cheap enough to give away, easy enough that you don't need a manual, and capable enough to outperform humans at a range of intellectual tasks. A flood of opportunities and problems are about to show up in classrooms, courtrooms and boardrooms." www.oneusefulthing.org/p/mass-intel...

My take on the biggest #legaltech story of the year

Dictated "law school" into my voice recognition system and it came up as "lol school," and that works too.

"People are starting to ask about the ROI [of Gen AI]… there are no good answers, money is being spent, time, resources, while the ROI so far has not been very clear.” Rant incoming. Gen AI isn't going to produce "ROI." That's not how you should think about it. www.law.com/legaltechnew...