Contrapposto — from sateeshnori.substack.com by Sateesh Nori We are losing the war for Access to Justice. And we keep aiming our attacks on our own side. .
“To Public Interest Lawyers of Any Kind:
Only when you have vanquished every eviction notice that shouldn’t have been filed… Only when you have defeated every predatory landlord, every wage thief, every debt collector armed with a default judgment… Only when you have lifted the burden from every tenant who faced Housing Court alone… Only when every family has shelter and every worker has been paid what they’re owed… Only when every immigrant has had someone in their corner and every person in crisis has had a lawyer who showed up… Only when every child aging out of foster care has had counsel, and every survivor of domestic violence has had an advocate who knew the system cold…
Only then — only when you have directed your energy toward the real adversaries: the justice gap, the underfunded courts, the 92% who never get a lawyer at all — only then can you attack another public interest lawyer for the tools they chose to fight with.”
The unbundling of lawyer institutions — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong AI will strip law firms and law schools of their commodity features. Their future depends on whether they can rebuild around their highest-value functions and their trust-bearing core.
Two very different articles — one from a law professor, one from a legal technology analyst — crossed my desk last month. They each say something really important about law schools and law firms, respectively. But taken together, they point us towards what I think is an even more profound reality about lawyer institutions in the post-AI world.
At his eponymous Substack, Professor Michael Plaxton’s “To Our Next Law Dean” is really addressed to every dean of every law school, asking: After AI, how will you justify our existence? His concern is that AI is rapidly learning to perform many of the tasks law schools train students to do, and to deliver much of the general legal knowledge law schools provide at scale, including research, writing, analysis, and explanation.
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At Legal Technology Hub, Nikki Shaver’s “Law Firms Want to Change; They Just Can’t” asks whether law firms are capable of managing the transition to a post-AI legal market.
Law schools and law firms are the legal profession’s most important institutions. But they were built for a world in which legal intelligence was scarce, and that world is rapidly passing away.
The conversation focuses on how modern generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a legal operating system to simplify contract reviews, document drafting, and client intake, while maintaining essential connections to human attorneys.
Just 30% of third-year law students think that their school is preparing them for artificial intelligence in practice, leaving 70% of soon-to-be bar candidates to learn best practices for the emerging technology on their own.
As of Sept. 1, graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools will be allowed to sit for the bar exam in Washington state after a policy change by the state’s bar association.
Law.com reported Thursday that the change had been formally adopted by the Washington State bar Association’s Board of Governors.
Easy to miss: Anthropic named the Justice Technology Association as the access-to-justice partner in the launch. The cost floor just dropped (while the product got better) for consumer legal. Law Firm 2.0 gets the headlines. A2J and direct-to-consumer is the largest white space in legal.
It has been a crazy 48 hours. We released Lavern as open source.
An agentic legal system, six months in the making, 155,000+ lines of code, 67 specialist agents, nine workflows, and at least ten things inside it that you could make as a separate product.
I was a bit anxious, like I was organising a kids’ party with balloons, unsure if anyone would come.
[On May 12, 2026, we introduced] 20+ new MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry already relies on, and 12 new plugins tailored to specific legal work and practice areas. And finally, we’re partnering with the Free Law Project, the Justice Technology Association, and others working to put legal help within reach of people who can’t currently access it. .
We have been building toward this moment, and now it’s finally arrived. Anthropic has formally launched ‘Claude For Legal’, a comprehensive offering that could reshape the legal tech world and places the LLM-maker at the heart of the market. (See below Artificial Lawyer interview with Mark Pike, Anthropic Associate General Counsel.)
Legal tech companies from Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, to Harvey and Legora, are all participants in one way or another, in what is a bold strategic move that changes the legal tech market in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. (Plus, see comments from Harvey and TR below.) And of course, Freshfields has already gone all-in with Claude, while other major firms are also deeply exploring what it can do.
Claude for Legal will manifest itself across four main paths and builds on work that has already been developed:
‘New Legal Plugins: …
New MCP Connectors: …
Open-source Ecosystem: …
Plus, Free Law Project & Justice Technology Association Partnerships: …
The Justice Technology Association (JTA), a nonprofit trade group representing mission-driven companies focused on the access to justice crisis, announced today that it has joined Anthropic as a launch partner in what Anthropic is calling its first comprehensive legal vertical initiative.
The announcement comes as part of a much-broader announcement by Anthropic of its push into the legal industry, as it just released more than 20 MCP connectors to legal tech products and 12 practice-area plugins for Claude.
“Legal services are out of reach for many people and small businesses, and the gap is widening,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “We’re working with the Free Law Project, Justice Technology Association and other legal aid and public service organizations to help make legal services more affordable and available.”
That makes this the first time that a leading AI company is explicitly naming access to justice as a foundational pillar,JTA says, with Anthropic positioning the initiative as “investing in the premise that AI should expand access to justice — making legal services more affordable and available.”
Anthropic today took its biggest step yet into the legal market, releasing more than 20 new MCP connectors linking Claude to the software that law firms and legal departments run on, along with 12 new plugins tailored to specific legal practice areas.
Today’s announcement builds on the legal plugin Anthropic released in early February for Claude Cowork — the agentic desktop tool the company introduced in January as “Claude Code for the rest of your work.”
In the months since that initial release, Anthropic says legal professionals have become the most engaged Cowork users of any knowledge-work function, a statistic that likely accelerated this deeper push.
ANTHROPIC JUST OPEN-SOURCED A COMPLETE AI LEGAL SYSTEM COVERING 10 PRACTICE AREAS. 100% FREE.
80+ NAMED AGENTS handling
– contracts
– employment
– litigation
– privacy, IP
– corporate work. All of it
We welcome back Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, to discuss his recent “Open Letter to Law Firms.” As the legal industry hits a critical inflection point, Sabastian argues that the era of “AI theater” and small-scale pilots is over.
The conversation dives deep into the Innovator’s Dilemma facing law firms, the shift toward agentic AI, and how firms must reimagine their business models to remain competitive. Sabastian highlights that legal professionals are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in trusted AI transformation, provided they embrace transparency, data integration, and shared efficiency gains with their clients.
Three Realities for the Modern Legal Firm To lead in this landscape, there are three realities every firm leader must understand:
Competition is intensifying: …
Client expectations will reshape the market: Clients are no longer asking whether firms use AI. Rather, they’re expecting to see the benefits of that transformation passed directly to them. They expect more for less but are not simply seeking lower costs – they want more insight, more speed, and more value for every dollar of their budget. And law firms, which operate at the center of data, ethics, and risk, have outsized influence over the structure and deployment of trusted AI across all industries. Some clients, like Salesforce, are even creating agentic tools to improve the law firm’s experience when working with clients. …
Unified client intelligence is at the heart of legal strategy: …
Are AI First Firms a Threat To Biglaw? — from legallydisrupted.com by Zach Abramowitz and Logan Brown Episode 49 features AI first law firm founder Logan Brown
Is Big Law about to become the Yellow Pages? Hey, I didn’t say it, but ex-Cooley lawyer turned AI first law firm Logan Brown did. The question is do I agree?
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Instead of the traditional billable hour, they charge flat fees like $100 for a contract review or $50 to ask a lawyer a quick question via chat. She’s already got over 40 attorneys on the platform. And in a departure from the traditional partnership track, she actually chose to raise venture capital so she could scale the firm like a tech company and tackle the access-to-justice gap.
From DSC: LOVE to hear anything and everything regarding efforts to address the access-to-justice gap here in the United States!!! Along these lines, also see:
“Legal services are out of reach for many people and small businesses, and the gap is widening,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “We’re working with the Free Law Project, Justice Technology Association and other legal aid and public service organizations to help make legal services more affordable and available.”
That makes this the first time that a leading AI company is explicitly naming access to justice as a foundational pillar, JTA says, with Anthropic positioning the initiative as “investing in the premise that AI should expand access to justice — making legal services more affordable and available.”
What AI hallucinations in law actually are
In a legal context, AI hallucinations are one of two things. They’re either citations to cases or statutes that don’t exist, or citations to real authorities for propositions those authorities don’t actually support.
The first kind is the one making headlines. A lawyer or pro se litigant uses a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok to help draft a brief. The model, predicting the statistically likely next word, decides a citation belongs in a particular spot, and produces one. The reporter might be real. The volume number might fall within the right range. The Bluebook formatting is often better than what most associates produce. The case itself just doesn’t exist.
The second kind is older than AI. Lawyers have always occasionally cited a case for a proposition that the case doesn’t stand for. AI has made this kind of error easier to commit and easier to catch.
A dangerous mind — from by Jordan Furlong Generative AI is a tireless genius with no boundaries. Use it carelessly, and it can usurp your voice, overwrite your ideas, and steal your originality. Make sure you safeguard your capacity to think.
Don’t let the genius do the hard work for you. The more incisive and unique your own thinking — the more you battle and struggle and eventually succeed in getting your ideas and insights out — the more you can benefit from the AI’s complementary improvements. The great irony of Gen AI is that it actually makes your own cognitive processes your most valuable asset.
So safeguard your mind. Defend your right to think as only you can. And if you don’t want AI to replace you, then don’t send it a written invitation.
The pilot phase is over. After two years of experimentation for legal departments, 2026 will be the year AI moves from “interesting tool” to “operational infrastructure,” whether they’re ready or not. We surveyed predictions from Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and other leading legal tech analysts to identify where expert consensus is forming. The implications for AI governance, outside counsel relationships, and regulatory compliance are significant.
Nvidia has backed Swedish AI legal tech Legora in a $50 million Series D extension, CNBC can reveal.
The chip giant has been ramping up startup investments in recent years.
Investors have been piling into to promising young AI companies as they bet big on the commercial potential of tech to reshape entire industries and bring big efficiency gains.
Legora is its first bet in the legal tech sector, according to Dealroom data.
… The AI startup is building AI agents and tools to help lawyers automate and streamline workflows.
Recording at LegalWeek in New York, Zach sits down with Shlomo Klapper (founder of Learned Hand) and Bridget McCormack, former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now CEO of the American Arbitration Association, to challenge one of the biggest double standards in legal AI: “AI for me, but not for thee.” Lawyers are now widely using AI like #Harvey and #Legora — and now more than ever #claude — but the moment it touches judges or arbitrators, support drops off.
That hesitation comes as courts are under real strain, with judges handling thousands of cases a year and only minutes to decide each one, and no realistic way to keep up. Shlomo describes Learned Hand’s “AI law clerk,” built to support judicial research, analysis, and drafting, while Bridget brings the perspective of someone who has both made decisions on the bench and has pioneered the American Arbitration Association’s AI Arbitrator, a first of its kind. The conversation moves beyond AI as an assistant and into a harder shift: AI as part of decision-making itself, and whether the system can continue to function without it.
This brings us to an admitted, glaring double standard between lawyers and judges. Lawyers are totally fine with lawyers using AI, but those same lawyers become apoplectic at the thought of judges or arbitrators using AI. It is very much “AI for me, but not for thee.” A survey last year from White & Case and Queen Mary University of London School of Law showed that nearly 90% of lawyers were deeply supportive of AI for their own research and analytics, but that support drops to just 23% when it comes to a judge or arbitrator using it to make a decision.
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Yet, despite that hullabaloo, there is a massive need for alternative forms of intelligence in our courts. Right now, the system is drowning. We have state court trial judges disposing of 2,500 cases a year, meaning they have barely half an hour to spend on a single case. We are simply not going to lawyer our way out of this 50-year backlog. If we just use humans, we have a massive demand for intelligence but a severely limited supply. AI could step in to give these judges the capacity they desperately need for the courts to actually function.
DC: How does this impact judges, lawyers, and law firms? What should law schools be doing?
“The accessibility of sophisticated AI tools has destroyed traditional signals of human legitimacy online. We need a new verification system immediately.”https://t.co/zwUTIrz6GR
Summary:Accessible AI has killed traditional signals of legitimacy.
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Experiments show $20 consumer tools can easily bypass verification. The solution is shifting toward contextual proof that verifies human uniqueness without exposing identity.
After Hours 1: The legal profession’s new value proposition — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong The days of selling legal tasks by the hour are ending. Lawyers’ future value lies in safeguarding clients’ legal journeys by overcoming the most challenging obstacles on the way. Part 1 of 2.
As a result, legal work is dividing into two spheres, the first larger than the second: what Gen AI can satisfactorily address, and what it can’t.
Sphere 1: Legal Production. This is all the specialized intellectual work involved in generating legal solutions: researching, issue-spotting, summarizing, synthesizing, drafting, revising, reasoning, and analyzing. This is the bulk of lawyers’ traditional activity and billed hours. In future, it will be done faster, cheaper, and increasingly better with machines — either by clients themselves, or embedded in systems and platforms that reduce the need for lawyer involvement.
Sphere 2: Legal Judgment. This is higher-value work defined by the unpredictability, complexity, and impact of its challenges. In this sphere, you’ll find hard-decision advice, guidance under uncertainty, systematic dispute avoidance, strategic counsel, critical advocacy, risk prioritization, and high-stakes accountability. It’s likely (but far from certain) that this work will remain outside the reach of Gen AI. This is the sphere that holds the potential to support a future legal profession.
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But not every legal journey is so simple or safe that the client can go it alone. Many times, Point B is more like Point F or Point R: a long and tortuous distance away. Many AI-generated maps will suggest a clear and direct route that bears little resemblance to the messy tangles of reality. On even moderately complex legal journeys, the unwelcome and the unexpected are always lurking. Something arises that was nowhere on the map, and until it gets resolved, the client can’t move any further towards their destination.
Below are some items from Jordan’s article — or by following a rabbit trail from his posting:
The emergence of AI-native law firms reveals the limits of a fixed binary that has characterized the legal market over the last year.
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The straightest path to AI law firms isn’t innovation within the legacy model, or capital investing around it, but external capital being deployed to build competitors to legacy firms. These firms use AI and narrow regulatory openings to create from scratch tech-enabled law firms.
While rates at the top continue climbing, the operational foundation of legal work is being rebuilt.
… Its pricing reflects that structure. Contract review between three and 50 pages costs $500. Short agreements are $250. Longer contracts are billed per page. Drafting from scratch is offered at a fixed fee.
There is no running clock.
The premise is straightforward. If generative AI materially reduces the time required for standardized work, the cost base changes. And when the cost base changes, pricing models eventually follow.
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Autonomous agents have already transformed engineering. Legal is next.
Agents are moving beyond assisting individuals to operating across entire workflows. This isn’t just a productivity shift, it’s an organizational one. pic.twitter.com/mMOBmJTfIA
In Episode 45 of Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted, Kyle and dive into why building tech workflows and writing AI prompts should absolutely be considered billable work. We also explore why AI commoditizing the legal “grinders” and “minders” means old-school social skills are about to become your single biggest competitive advantage. Finally, Kyle goes into great detail about how exactly how he landed a top role at Legora and how others can do the same (hint: merely dropping your resume into a web portal is not enough).
A new survey of over 200 inhouse and law firm leaders provides solid evidence that while AI tools are now ‘standard’ across our sector, that trust in AI outputs fundamentally drives usage, along with ROI – and vice versa.
The data, from ALSP Factor, shows that 83% had ‘broad AI access’, which is up from 61% in 2025, and in itself is a very positive development that tells us legal AI is now becoming ubiquitous for commercial lawyers, with around 54% using such tools ‘often’.
Law Firm AI Adoption: So Many Choices — from abovethelaw.com by Stephen Embry Firms need to recognize reality, define what their legal professionals need, and then determine how to adopt and govern the use of AI tools.
It’s tough to be a law firm managing partner in the age of AI. So many choices, so little time. It’s like the proverbial kid in the candy store who has so many choices that they either can’t pick out anything or reach for too much. We see evidence of the first option in 8am’s recent outstanding Legal Industry Report, authored by Niki Black.
8am’s Legal Industry Report One thing that stood out in the report was the discrepancy between use of AI by individual legal professionals and what firms are doing when it comes to AI adoption and guidance. Almost 75% of those who responded said they were using general purpose AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude for work purposes. That’s pretty significant.
AI for good While focusing on the risks of AI going wrong, it is only fair to mention the conversations I had around using AI for good. Two in particular stand out.
The first is the news from Everlaw that its Everlaw for Good Program has, over the past year, supported more than 675 active cases across 235 organisations, and expanded its support to a growing network of non-profit organisations.
The program extends Everlaw’s technology to organisations working to advance access to justice.In a recent survey by Everlaw, 88% of legal aid professionals said they are optimistic about AI’s potential to help narrow the justice gap.
“Mission-driven organizations are increasingly handling complex investigations and litigation with limited resources,” said Joanne Sprague, head of Everlaw for Good. “Expanding access to powerful, easy-to-use technology helps level the playing field so these teams can uncover critical evidence, take on more complex matters, and yield stronger results for the communities they serve.”
The bulk of our conversation focuses on generative AI, and how Everlaw has approached it differently than much of the market. Rather than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI deliberately throughout the platform — document summarization, coding suggestions, deposition analysis, fact extraction — always grounding responses in the actual documents at hand and citing sources so users can verify the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a question and get a synthesized, cited answer drawn from an entire document corpus in about a minute, is the feature AJ calls a “new era” for discovery — one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift.
Generative AI vendor Anthropic has unveiled a legal plugin that helps customise its large language model Claude for legal tasks such as document review, sending public legal software stocks into an ensuing spin today (3 February).
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Anthropic entering the legal tech fray comes as part of the launch of a number of different plugins that help users instruct Claude on how to get work done and what tools and data to pull from. A sales plugin, for example could connect Claude to your CRM and knowledge base to help with prospect research and follow ups. The legal plug-in is described as being capable of, for example, reviewing documents, flagging risks, NDA triage, and tracking compliance. The significance is that Anthropic is shifting from model supplier to the application layer and workflow owner.
The announcement is hitting public publishing and legal software companies hard.
Two weeks after introducing a new general-purpose “agentic” work mode called Claude Cowork, Anthropic has now rolled out a legal plugin aimed squarely at the legal workflows of in-house counsel, including contract review, NDA triage, compliance checks, briefings and templated responses.
It is configurable to an organization’s own playbook and risk tolerances, and Anthropic explicitly frames it as assistance, not advice, cautioning that outputs should be reviewed by licensed attorneys.
It may sound like just another feature drop in a crowded AI market. But for legal tech, it is landing more like a tsunami than a drop. For the first time, a foundation-model company is packaging a legal workflow product directly into its platform, rather than merely supplying an API to legal-tech vendors.
Selecting AI tools for legal teams is no longer about novelty or experimentation. It is about aligning technology with judgment, workflows, and risk tolerance. Teams that approach AI with specificity, skepticism, and operational discipline place themselves in a far stronger position to capture real value and avoid unwelcome surprises once the demo environment disappears.
Compliance As Part Of The Everyday Automation Fabric
According to the Thomson Reuters Future Of Professionalsreport, most experts already expect AI to transform their work within five years, with many viewing it as a positive force. The challenge now is clear: legal and compliance leaders must understand the tools reshaping their field and prepare their teams for a very different way of working in 2026.
Addendum on 12/17/25:
Top 10 legal tech episodes in 2025 — from lawyersweekly.com.au With AI and legal technology at the forefront of the profession’s mind now more than ever, The Lawyers Weekly Show and our special series LawTech Talks delivered in-depth explorations of these game-changing topics. Now, we’re highlighting the 10 most downloaded episodes that sparked conversation across the legal tech community.
This episode features a conversation with Cecilia Ziniti, Co-Founder and CEO of GC.AI. Cecilia traces her career from the early days of the internet to founding an AI-driven legal platform for in-house counsel.
Cecilia shares her journey, starting as a paralegal at Yahoo in the early 2000s, working on nascent legal issues related to the internet. She discusses her time at Morrison & Foerster and her role at Amazon, where she was an early member of the Alexa team, gaining deep insight into AI’s potential before the rise of modern large language models (LLMs).
The core discussion centers on the creation of GC AI, a legal AI tool specifically designed for in-house counsel. Cecilia explains why general LLMs like ChatGPT are insufficient for professional legal work—lacking proper citation, context, and security/privilege protections. She highlights the app’s features, including enhanced document analysis (RAG implementation), a Word Add-in, and workflow-based playbooks to deliver accurate, client-forward legal analysis. The episode also touches on the current state of legal tech, the growing trend of bringing legal work in-house, and the potential for AI to shift the dynamics of the billable hour.
