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
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The Provocative Abramowitz Keynote And The Computer That Won’t Come On
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…
ILTA EVOLVE: Sometimes Less Is More — A Focus On Leadership
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…
AI And Billing: Flipping The Switch On The Bane Of Lawyers’ Existence
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.
Lawyers Using ChatGPT: Let’s Be Careful
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…
Understanding AI Hallucinations: Making Sure You Don’t End Up At The Wrong Stop
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 In The Age Of AI: Bring Back Walking Around
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…
Deepfakes And The Future Of Litigation: Are We Ready?
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,…
Deepfakes: A Problem In Search Of A Problem?
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…
The Furlong And Patel TECHSHOW Keynote Bookends: Saying The Same Thing, Differently
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.…
Jordan Furlong’s TECHSHOW Keynote: The Lawyers Who Will Thrive In The New World Order Will Be Entrepreneurs — And Humans
Jordan Furlong’s ABA TechShow keynote was one of the best I’ve heard. His thesis: AI will commoditize legal knowledge, mechanize legal work, and reconfigure law firms. The lawyers who suceed won’t necessarily be the ones who know the most, if that was even ever the case. Instead, they will be the ones clients want in…
TECHSHOW 2026: Where The Legal Tech Family Gathers
ABA TechShow 2026 kicks off this Wednesday in Chicago and it’s a little different from every other legal tech conference on the calendar.
Two strong keynotes (Jordan Furlong and Nilay Patel), a genuinely important Saturday session on the rule of law with three ABA presidents, 47 educational sessions, 120+ exhibitors, and the traditional startup pitch…
Law Firm AI Adoption: So Many Choices
When it comes to AI, all to often law firm management freeze up from too many choices and do nothing, or overcorrect and buy everything in sight. 8am’s Legal Industry Report, for example, shows nearly 75% of legal professionals are already using general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude for work, while 71% say their…
It’s Not Legalweek Unless It Snows. Here’s My 2026 Recap
Here’s my 2026 Legalweek recap for Above the Law: good show and good new venue (Javits instead of the Hilton). And the complaints were predictable, especially from the crowd that usually champions change. The exhibit space was a genuine improvement. The judges keynote was outstanding. The commercialization of sessions a little less so.
And btw,…
Lawyers and Cybersecurity: Talk to An Experts. Before It’s Too Late
At Legalweek, while everyone else was talking about AI features, I sat down with Michel Sahyoun of NopalCyber to talk about something the legal profession isn’t paying nearly enough attention to: cybersecurity in the age of GenAI.
Some facts: the average time to exploit a breach is 29 minutes. AI tools can automatically and repeatedly…
Legalweek Final Keynote: An Industry Still Whistling Past the Graveyard?
The final Legalweek keynote made the argument that law firms need to do what Apple and Netflix did in the early 2000s: blow up a their existing business model for a better one. Hard to argue with that. But it’s hard to see that it’s happening in legal.
Here’s the data: only 19% of firms…