Legal ops’ biggest annual gathering, CLOC’s Global Institute, is moving to McCormick in Chicago this week and, as can be expected, AI is shaping the agenda. One big question: how will AI reshape legal ops in particular, and how do its practitioners prepare? Not to mention how attendees will deal with the new venue (we…

The Smokeball/Thomson Reuters partnership is the latest effort to better tie the legal research and substantive side of the business to the administrative side. What’s unique about it is that TR and Smokeball both say their partnership is purposefully directed toward the smaller law firms. It’s particularly timely as smaller law firms are struggling to…

Another week. Another law firm caught citing cases that don’t exist. But this time it was Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the most influential firms in the world. 36 errors. Three pages to describe them. Fabricated passages from real cases. S&C said its AI policies weren’t followed. That it had training designed to prevent exactly…

Law firms are panic buying AI to satisfy client demands and it’s backfiring. Clients are making demands that their firms get AI but often don’t know what they really want. Firms don’t know what they need. It ends up being a hot mess of wasted money, unused tools, and unhappy clients. It’s a classic perish…

Here’s my Above the Law post on Zach Abramowitz’s keynote at ILTA’s Evolve conferance. The keynote lived up to its title: Most Law Firms Are Doing AI Wrong. Here’s How to Do It Right.

His argument is that the failures in GenAI adoption from ineffective training to analysis paralysis to hallucination panic, all trace back…

Here’s my preview of ILTA’s Evolve conference that starts today in Denver for Above the Law. This is the thrid year in a row I have attended. I keep coming back for the same reasons: it’s small, focused, and cuts through the noise that dominates many large legal tech conferences.

This year ILTA has added…

Billing. The bane of a lawyer’s existence. The process is clunky, error-prone, and ripe for effective AI disruption. Elite’s new Validate tool could mean more effective billing guideline compliance, better client communications, and, most interestingly, flip the switch on the leverage third party bill reviewers have, reducing write-offs.

My new post for Above the Law.

You’re up against a deadline. You run to ChatGPT. You tell yourself the privacy toggle will protect you and your clients confidential information. Guess what: it may not, at least in ways consistent with the ethical rules.

Lawyers and legal professionals may have gotten a little too lax about putting confidential client information into public-facing…

Despite what seems to be an accepted truism, AI hallucinations aren’t necessarily completely random. That’s the key insight from a new physics-based analysis by a group of scientists and engineers and it may change how we should be using GenAI tools.

The key finding: GenAI systems have a deterministic mechanism that causes output to flip…

Managing by walking around used to be standard practice. But with remote work, Zoom, and billable hour pressure, the concept lost some of its luster .

But with AI we may need it more than ever. When we rely only on LLMs to make decisions and summarize work, we lose something critical: the senior lawyer…

Deep fakes are coming to our courtrooms. They are going to change how we try cases.

Here’s what the rise of deep fakes may mean for judges, juries, and trial lawyers. Along with the impact of the so-called “liar’s dividend”: the risk that repeated exposure to AI-generated fakes causes people to disbelieve all digital evidence,…

asked a room full of lawyers at ABA TechShow how many had encountered deep fake evidence in litigation. Not one hand went up.

Is the deep fake threat a problem in search of a problem? Or are we in the same place we were with AI hallucinations before the first fake citation showed up in…

Two TechShow keynotes. Two very different speakers. But the same conclusion.

Jordan Furlong opened TechShow by talking about the human lawyer: the one who walks through the valley with clients, who has their back, who builds the kind of trust AI can replace.

Nilay Patel by arrived at the same place from a different direction.…