3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Judicaid: Bringing AI Mediation to Everyday Legal Problems

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:24:59 +0000

For millions of people, an everyday legal dispute never justifies the cost of a lawyer or a private mediator, no matter how much the outcome matters to them. Judge Victoria Wood saw that problem over and over during her years on the Napa County Superior Court bench. This week, Wood joins Judicaid Chief Strategy Officer Valerie Clemen to explain how those years led to Judicaid, an AI-assisted mediation platform built to help people resolve everyday disputes before time, expense, and emotion push them deeper into litigation.

Wood traces Judicaid’s origins to two problems she kept running into as a judge and mediator. Traditional settlement conferences arrive late in a case, after the parties have spent real money and dug into their positions. Then there are the lower-value landlord-tenant, contractor, neighbor, probate, and small-claims disputes where professional mediation rarely pencils out at all. Wood puts a number on the access problem. The State Bar of California’s 2024 Justice Gap Study, released in 2025, found that Californians received no legal help, or inadequate help, for 85 percent of their civil legal problems. Judicaid aims at a slice of that gap by giving people an earlier and cheaper chance to communicate and negotiate.

Clemen walks Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer through Judicaid’s “shuttle-style” mediation process. Each participant talks privately with an AI mediator named Jude, so the two sides never have to speak to each other directly. Jude gathers each side’s account of the dispute, identifies priorities and possible settlement terms, and moves between the participants while filtering out insults, anger, and inflammatory language. If the parties find common ground, the platform prepares a proposed settlement for review and electronic signature. Wood is careful about one boundary throughout the conversation. Jude is a facilitative mediator, and it stays away from evaluating legal rights. It will not decide who is legally correct, predict who will win, or give legal advice.

The conversation then turns to Judicaid’s pilot with Napa County Superior Court, and the role courts could play in expanding AI-assisted dispute resolution. In the court model, a court subscribes to the service and hands litigants’ access through a QR code, with no integration into the court’s technology systems. The pilot has already surfaced a behavioral lesson. Offering mediation as an optional service does not mean parties will use it, and Wood and Clemen see more potential where courts actively encourage or require litigants to attempt dispute resolution before proceeding. Language is another piece of the story, since Judicaid lets participants who speak different languages work through the same mediation without arranging multiple interpreters.

Wood and Clemen also see mediation as just the starting point. Wood uses the phrase “intelligent dispute resolution” for a broader category of AI-assisted tools covering mediator proposals, parent coordination, and other structured approaches to conflict. The bigger ambition is a change in habits, where people reach for structured communication and settlement before a disagreement hardens into a lawsuit. Clemen boils that aspiration down to three words she hopes become part of the vocabulary of everyday disputes: “Just Judicate it.”

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[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review, and this week we’re talking with Judge Victoria Wood and Chief Strategy Officer Valerie Clemen from Judicaid. But first up, here’s a word from our great sponsor and partners at Legal Technology Hub.

Marlene Gebauer (00:13)
I have Sam Moore here from Legal Technology Hub. He’s going to tell us about AI governance from the advisory side.

Sam Moore (00:19)
Thank you. Good to see you again. Well, in the advisory team at Legal Tech Hub, we’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients about AI governance. Now, most law firms and departments have at least an AI policy of some kind, and there are some broad standards starting to emerge. A trend we’re seeing at the moment is a shift away from policies written in 2023 and 2024, which largely stated what you couldn’t do, and toward a more informative approach, which

Marlene Gebauer (00:37)
Okay.

Sam Moore (00:47)
defines different risk categories and

Marlene Gebauer (00:48)
You...

Sam Moore (00:49)
makes distinctions between routine, low-risk use of AI and other more substantial use cases. I think that’s appropriate for where we are, and it’s also what clients are coming to expect from their advisors. But one of the bigger challenges we’re seeing right now is how you express an AI use policy in such a way that any member of your legal team could explain it to a client. I think that’s still a big challenge for the industry.

Marlene Gebauer (00:55)
So, okay.

Sam Moore (01:17)
And I don’t think clients are all that happy if their attorney says, “I’ll have to get back to you about that,” because the attorney is probably using AI day-to-day. So they should be able to explain the policy themselves. How else do you know they’re complying with it? We’re doing some interesting work at the moment helping law firms and law departments take those first-version AI use policies that are very much “thou shalt not”

Marlene Gebauer (01:18)
So...

Sam Moore (01:43)
and turn them into more readable, appropriate governance positions that inform the conversation with clients. If anyone wants to find out more about our advisory services, they can find me or Cheryl Wilson Griffin on LinkedIn, or they can visit https://legaltechnologyhub.com.

Marlene Gebauer (02:01)
Thank you, Sam. I mean, it is really important to have AI policy in plain language so people understand it.

Sam Moore (02:07)
Absolutely.

Marlene Gebauer (02:15)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (02:22)
And I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer (02:24)
Today we’re exploring whether artificial intelligence can help address one of the justice system’s most persistent problems, resolving everyday disputes without months of delay, escalating costs, or procedures that ordinary people struggle to navigate.

Greg Lambert (02:39)
Yeah, and to help us do that, our guests today are the Honorable Victoria Wood, a retired judge from Napa County Superior Court and founder and CEO of Judicaid. Joining Judge Wood is Valerie Clemen, Judicaid’s Chief Strategy Officer. Judicaid is an online, AI-assisted mediation platform designed to help people resolve disputes privately, affordably, and without first filing a case.

Marlene Gebauer (03:08)
Judge Wood and Valerie, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Valerie Clemen (03:12)
Thank you for having us.

Vickie Wood (03:12)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Marlene Gebauer (03:16)
Judge Wood, Judicaid grew out of what you witnessed during your years on the bench in Napa County. What recurring problems convinced you that the traditional court and mediation systems were not adequately serving people with everyday disputes, and that technology could provide a better path?

Vickie Wood (03:34)
There were a few things. One of them, I’d say, is that I handled a lot of settlement conferences while I was sitting on the trial court bench, but usually those come very near trial, later in the case, when people are very entrenched.

Marlene Gebauer (03:50)
When the judge says, “You go in the other room and figure it out.”

Vickie Wood (03:54)
Yeah, yeah.

And they’ve already become very angered in their positions. They’ve already invested so much emotionally and financially, usually through attorneys’ fees, and it’s hard to get those settled. Sometimes that’s what it takes because people understand the dynamics and the finances, and they’re finally at their wits’ end and they’ll settle. But it comes at a cost. There may be families that could have had relationships saved if they could have talked earlier on and understood each other’s positions better.

So that’s one thing, the opportunity for earlier mediation or communication facilitation. For example, I handle a fair amount of probate disputes, and some people say probate disputes are essentially family law after someone dies. They’re highly emotional for lots of reasons that go back many years. But what very often happens is it seems like there’s a lot of money at stake, but by the time they go through the process and get to mediation, sometimes the entire amount is spent on fighting. And it’s really sad. People never thought that would be the case.

I often think to myself, boy, if I only could have been with these people earlier in the process and let them know what would likely happen if they continued down the litigation path. So that’s one of the things that inspired it. The other thing is that there is this broad swath of disputes that are lower value and really don’t justify the expense of resources for attorney representation or human mediators. But those disputes still mean a lot to people, even though they’re low-dollar-value. In fact, that’s the reason why I decided to go to law school, being in a very low-dollar-value dispute with a landlord who I felt had done us wrong, and I was gonna

Greg Lambert (05:56)
Ha ha.

Vickie Wood (05:57)
fight it. And we did sort of win, but boy, it took a lot of time.

But these cases mean a lot to people, and they don’t have the same access to alternative dispute resolution as higher-value cases. So that was the other problem I was looking to fix. In fact, there is a State Bar of California justice gap study that was recently released. It was a follow-up study from 2019, then redone in 2024, with those results coming out in 2025. They reflect, let me get this right, that Californians receive no legal help or inadequate legal help for 85% of their disputes.

And I thought that was astonishing.

Marlene Gebauer (06:59)
I wish I thought it was astonishing. It’s like, I...

Greg Lambert (06:59)
Yeah. Yeah. And...

Marlene Gebauer (07:03)
I think...

Greg Lambert (07:03)
I don’t think Californians are unique in this either.

Marlene Gebauer (07:06)
No, no.

Vickie Wood (07:07)
Yeah. So this was a California study, obviously, but that’s 85% of disputes where people don’t have help, don’t have adequate help, or they throw their arms up and say, “The justice system can’t help me.”

After the 2019 study, the California Judicial Council really made efforts to try to close this justice gap. The problem was that the results from 2024 showed things got worse, not better, despite their efforts. So that was striking to me as well.

When I left the bench and started my mediation practice and started studying and using AI, it came to me that there is probably a portion of these cases that could benefit from what AI and LLM technology can do. That’s how Judicaid was born. I came up with the idea and the name, and then I happened to have a family member who is brilliant in the tech world. I mentioned it to him and he said, “I can build that for you.” And he said, “That will be easy.”

So, more than a year later...

Greg Lambert (08:27)
Yeah, I imagine in California...

Marlene Gebauer (08:28)
Words you like...

Greg Lambert (08:29)
Yeah. Well, it’s nice...

Marlene Gebauer (08:29)
to hear when you’re building tech, “It will be easy.”

Vickie Wood (08:32)
Yeah, yeah. “That’d be easy.”

Greg Lambert (08:33)
to be in California where you can’t swing a cat without hitting an engineer.

Vickie Wood (08:39)
Yeah, needless to say, it was not easy. It proved to be much more challenging, but he and the other part of the tech team did it. We’re really proud of the tech product, the rest of our product, and the platform, and excited to be getting it out in the world. So thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

Greg Lambert (09:00)
So, Valerie, I want to jump into what Judicaid does and how it’s set up. But let’s start off with the user experience. Let’s take a typical user of the system, maybe two people having a landlord-tenant, contractor, or small-claims dispute.

What happens from the moment one person opens a matter on Judicaid until the parties either reach a settlement or determine that the mediation won’t resolve it? Can you walk us through the process of Judicaid?

Valerie Clemen (09:37)
Sure. The product just went live, I want to say, like six weeks ago. There are actually two aspects to it. There’s the consumer-facing version, where people can go on, pay $34.99, and start a mediation. But we also have the court-subscription version. Napa Superior Court currently has a pilot in its small-claims cases, so it’s a little different depending on which one we’re talking about.

Essentially, it’s a website, a standalone website. Parties can go there, create their own account, and put in some basic information about who the other side is and what the dispute is about. They never speak directly with the party they’re having a dispute with. An email goes to the other side and says, “We’re sorry you’re in a dispute. The other side would like to try to work this out with you. Please sign up as well.”

Hopefully they sign up if they’re willing to talk. Once they sign up, there’s literally an AI mediator that first goes to the initial party and goes back and forth asking questions like: When did this happen? What occurred? What is owed? Usually it’s over money or property. What attempts have there been to resolve it? What do you want today to resolve it? Once it has this information, it says, “Sit tight,” and then it goes to the other side.

When it says “sit tight,” people can be doing this on their phone, laptop, or tablet, and they don’t have to be online at the same time. It basically sends a message to each side when it’s their turn to speak to the AI mediator. It’s essentially the LLM, the AI engine, asking the questions and doing this.

So it goes to the other side and asks the same kinds of questions. What’s your version of the dispute? How do you feel about it? What’s your bottom line? What do you want? Once it has that, it starts going back and forth and tries to ask questions, get more information, and bring both sides to an agreement, hopefully in the end. It’ll keep going back and forth as long as it takes.

We’ve done a lot of pressure testing. Vickie and I are both attorneys, so we were like, what would a litigant say if you’re really upset? They might tell the AI mediator to F off and say, “You’re an idiot,” or whatever. So we did all of these things, and it’s great. It’ll hear these things and say, “I understand you’re upset, but what is your bottom line?” It’ll never go to the other side and say that this side insulted you. It’s very good at filtering

Marlene Gebauer (12:16)
Yeah.

Valerie Clemen (12:17)
and focusing on the problem and how to resolve it. Once it senses there’s an agreement, maybe there’s a payment plan worked out, it’ll prepare a draft agreement and send it to both sides and say, “Could you live with this? Is this what you want? Is this the agreement you want?” If both sides say yes, it creates an agreement, sends it to both sides through DocuSign, and you have a signed settlement agreement.

Greg Lambert (12:43)
Okay. Well, let me jump in on one question. What incentive does the counterparty have? I can see an incentive where I want to pay the $35 to get the subscription, but what’s the incentive on the other side to join this mediation?

Valerie Clemen (13:08)
Usually there’s a threat of a lawsuit. Like, “I’m gonna take you to small claims. I’m gonna call the Contractors State License Board.” If it’s a home-improvement project, there’s some threat because someone’s upset and wants something. So either you resolve it with that person or they’re gonna take the next step, which could have professional consequences. You might have to deal with litigation. You’re gonna be sued. In the world of Google, if you get sued by someone, somebody Googles your name and that shows up forever.

So the ability to resolve something before it turns into something worse would hopefully be motivation. But, you know, humanity...

Vickie Wood (13:46)
Yeah, but Greg, you ask a really good question because that is a sticking point. The platform generates an automatic email invite to the other side, and it says this person has either filed a lawsuit or is considering filing a lawsuit, but they would like to first try to resolve this peacefully.

You don’t lose any of your rights if you’re not able to resolve it. I personally would be very motivated to try that, knowing what it’s about, but what we’re finding is that a lot of people don’t even know exactly what mediation is, and they don’t know what they’re getting into. We try to highlight that this is completely confidential. The court’s never gonna know anything that is said. You preserve all your rights.

But that is a tricky part of this, and we’re hoping that if it gets out there and becomes more normalized, that’ll take away some of that reluctance. On the other side of the coin, I think people in general would really like to avoid going to court, seeing this person face to face, and talking to a judge. These are scary things. People are getting less used to talking to people face to face, so we’re hoping it’s going to play into the natural progression of how people would rather address conflict.

Marlene Gebauer (15:18)
So I’m curious about how the AI is trained. I’m assuming that it trains on contract law, landlord-tenant law, things that would come up as part of these disputes. I’m also curious, we talk about personas here sometimes in terms of different types of training and things like that. I’m wondering if judge personas were part of the training.

And then how do you keep the system from crossing the line into giving legal advice? I heard a little bit, if we sense there’s an agreement, we’ll start with the decision, but how do you avoid legal advice or saying, okay, right, wrong?

Vickie Wood (16:03)
Mm-hmm. Great questions. First off, no, it’s not trained in the law.

It doesn’t give any legal advice whatsoever. It is essentially a facilitator of the communications. As a mediator, most mediators know there’s a spectrum of how you approach mediation. You can be on one end, mostly facilitative, where you’re exploring people’s values and priorities in trying to get the case resolved, and you’re facilitating communication about how they feel and their thoughts on the case.

On the other end of the spectrum is a mediator who becomes quite evaluative and says to someone, “You’re gonna lose this case,” or, you know, “Here’s...”

Marlene Gebauer (16:48)
You know, “You might want to think about this.”

Greg Lambert (16:50)
Mm-hmm.

Vickie Wood (16:52)
“This is where I’m really concerned. These are your risks.” Generally, at least in how I mediate, and I think it’s one of the better ways to approach mediation, you start out facilitative and then, as the day goes on, you can get a little more evaluative and try to push things toward that end.

Judicaid stays facilitative. So there’s no legal advice. It’s not trying to tell someone, “You’re gonna lose this case,” or, “They’re right on this point and you’re wrong,” or vice versa. It will remind them of the risk and hassle, the time and expense of going to court, and the risk that they may not win their case, encouraging them to continue to think about compromise and keep engaging so they inch their way toward a palatable compromise where eventually they go, “Okay, I can say yes to this and be done and not have to deal with court.”

So that’s the idea, and that’s why we’re able to offer it nationally, because it doesn’t deal with laws that would be individualized to each state.

The training aspect is really, there are two main tech pieces. There’s the application that’s coded, which is our AI engine for the shuttle-style back and forth. That took a really long time to create. Then there is the mediator disposition architecture, and that’s where I had a lot of input as the subject-matter expert. It’s like a 38-page prompt that...

Marlene Gebauer (18:42)
Ha ha ha.

Vickie Wood (18:42)
That...

Greg Lambert (18:42)
How?

Vickie Wood (18:43)
guides Jude, our mediator’s name is Jude, by the way. It tells Jude...

Marlene Gebauer (18:48)
Do you say, “Hey Jude,” when you talk to it?

Vickie Wood (18:51)
Jude. We actually...

Marlene Gebauer (18:53)
I’ll leave now.

Vickie Wood (18:54)
never intended to have a name, and it just sort of came about. Since it’s Judicaid, and Jude’s sort of a gender-neutral name, we thought, why not? We’ll go for it.

But it’s the disposition, sort of prompting architecture, that tells it how to respond and how to continue to inch people toward a compromise. There are lots of guardrails so it’s never giving legal advice. It can suggest, if someone says, “Do you have any ideas on how we might be able to resolve this?” it can say, “Well, one thing you might consider is this,” or, “You could take payments over time,” or, “Maybe take a smaller payment up front and then the balance over time.” It can suggest things like that, but it’s very generalized in that way.

That’s a big part of why it was never intended to replace attorneys or human mediators. As a mediator, I know that most complex cases that go to human mediation are far too complex, both legally and emotionally, for an LLM to manage. So this is not trying to replace that. This is focused on filling the gap for those lower-value cases that are generally fairly simple.

There is emotion involved, and that’s something an LLM is very good at managing in communication. It’ll calm the person down, and they can get as upset as they want. It can be empathetic and say, “I hear you’re feeling really frustrated about that, and that’s understandable. But why don’t you let me go talk to the other person?” It’ll go to the other side, and it’s never gonna convey the anger or the bad words being said in the other room. It’s gonna say, “They’re feeling concerned about this.” So it paraphrases things in a way that makes them far more palatable to hear when you’re the adversary.

That’s a big part of what I do as a human mediator. When somebody is cussing and swearing and saying horrible things about the other side, I go in the other room and say, “Yeah, well, they’re starting to come around.” So...

Greg Lambert (21:17)
Yeah, I was gonna say, do you have it default back to those instructions so it doesn’t get caught up in what each side is feeding it, but rather goes back to its baseline to make sure it stays on the course it needs to stay on?

Vickie Wood (21:40)
Yeah. Like I said, the prompting architecture is vast, and it’s very carefully thought out in phases to guide things through. But it has priorities around guardrails, and if there’s any sort of safety issue, somebody says, “This is terrible. I’m gonna kill myself,” we make sure it’s gonna say, “If you’re struggling with that, then you need to consult resources in your locality. This may not be the place to do this.”

And there’s a button to say, “Stop mediating,” and terminate the mediation at any point in time. So, yeah, a lot of thought went into that...

Marlene Gebauer (22:25)
I have one. I have one.

Vickie Wood (22:27)
Aspect.

Marlene Gebauer (22:29)
Does it learn? I mean, from session to session or are those isolated?

Vickie Wood (22:34)
They’re isolated. We have made the decision at this point that we’re not training the AI model directly in the way that an open-source LLM would be constantly training itself.

Yeah, it’s truly intended to be confidential, just like mediation is confidential. You’re not supposed to go tell a court, “Well, in mediation she said this or that,” or you’re not allowed to, at least in California.

Greg Lambert (23:03)
And that’s when you hold up your hand saying, “I don’t want to hear that. I don’t...”

Vickie Wood (23:06)
Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

Marlene Gebauer (23:08)
No, no.

Vickie Wood (23:09)
Exactly. Privileged. So...

Greg Lambert (23:12)
Well, we talked about the user side, so let’s go over and talk about the court side. Courts appear to be a really important path for Judicaid going forward. Valerie, I’ll start with you, and Judge Wood, if you want to jump in, please do. What would a court-facing model look like in practice, and where do you see it fitting into the life cycle of these disputes?

Is it before the case is filed? Is it after, but before a hearing? Is there someplace else? Where do you see the path of leveraging either the threat of the court or the actions of the court to help Judicaid?

Valerie Clemen (23:55)
Yeah. Initially, it would be good to have it in self-help centers, because a lot of times, especially for small claims, landlord-tenant, or those types of claims, those parties are unrepresented. You just can’t afford to pay an attorney’s hourly rate for a case that’s honestly below $20,000. It doesn’t make any sense to pay an attorney, so they’re trying to figure out the system themselves.

Knowing they have this option to resolve their dispute without going through the paperwork, getting it served, and filing is helpful. So having that information in self-help centers and in the courts pre-filing is helpful. Once a case is filed, it would be helpful for courts to provide that option and, honestly, not make it voluntary. Make it mandatory to give it a try, to talk to the other side using some type of dispute resolution or mediation, but also provide Judicaid as a free resource for litigants to use and try to resolve the dispute.

The information would come at the time of filing. Like, here’s your complaint, you have to serve the other side, and also serve the other side with this dispute-resolution information to see if you can resolve the case before your hearing date comes up. In some courts, when your hearing date is set out six months or a year, being able to resolve it and put the thing behind you before that happens, or before you spend money having the sheriff personally serve it or hiring a process server, is helpful. There are so many costs and so much time associated with litigation.

The hope is that letting litigants know there’s this option would be helpful. Of course, a lot of unrepresented litigants are doing this for the first time. They’ve never filed a small-claims suit. They’ve never been in a legal dispute. A lot of them probably don’t even know what mediation is. I’d say at least 10% get the flyer and are like, “Meditation? I know I’m angry, but I don’t need that.”

Marlene Gebauer (25:48)
Yeah.

Valerie Clemen (25:49)
Like, just not having any idea.

Vickie Wood (25:51)
It should go hand in hand, though.

Greg Lambert (25:51)
I need it, but not in this case.

Valerie Clemen (25:54)
Yeah. Because honestly...

Greg Lambert (25:57)
So are you educating law librarians and self-help centers on this, so they have it as a tool they can point people to as an alternative, or...?

Vickie Wood (26:11)
We’re trying to. We’re trying to. We just...

Marlene Gebauer (26:15)
That’s why they’re on the podcast, Greg.

Vickie Wood (26:18)
But yeah, in Napa County, where we’re running the pilot, we have definitely put it out there to all of the people who might be interested. We’ve got flyers in the law library and in the regular county library. While it’s being offered for free, government agencies have a line where they don’t want to be advertising something that’s for profit.

But while they’re piloting it, or if they were, and actually, let me jump back to one of your questions, Greg, about what this would look like through the court. The platform itself will be identical. The courts would pay for a monthly subscription, and then they would be given a QR code that they could provide to litigants upon filing. They could even put it on their website, in the small-claims area, for people who are thinking of filing a claim to try it before they file.

Those people would enter the site through a landing page for that court with that QR code. There’s a little gateway where they have to say how they got there. If they didn’t get there through that court, we’re going to redirect them to the paid portion. But if they got there through the court through the QR code appropriately, then they bypass the payment piece and jump into the platform exactly the way everybody else does.

So, yeah, we’re trying to get this out there. We’re on social media. We just got back from a national court conference in Delaware. We were having conversations with courts across the U.S., getting them aware. I think the trick in trying to get courts on board with this is that most of the technology out there needs to be integrated into the courts’ networks and processes.

Their first thought, I think, is, “Here’s yet another AI-based app or process that we’re gonna have to implement and then be tied to this company for however long, and tied to their schedule of upgrades and new features and their pricing changes and all of that.” We’re completely different from that. The only thing the court has to do is give that QR code to its litigants or potential litigants, and any questions go through our support page. That’s it. That is it.

I think courts are having a hard time comprehending that it could be that easy. Hopefully we’ll get the message out. What was that, Marlene?

Marlene Gebauer (29:01)
This could be very helpful for them.

Greg Lambert (29:02)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (29:05)
It could be very helpful for them in terms of the docket. So...

Vickie Wood (29:11)
Yeah, that’s the idea. And it’s so affordable that it’s sort of a win-win-win proposition, and it feels like a no-brainer to us. But still, it’s gonna take some time to get people to first be aware of it and then have a true understanding of how simple it is.

Valerie Clemen (29:29)
Yeah. I’ve had clients come to me, we’re in a small town, so I have clients who come to me with certain issues, and sometimes they come with things that are just so minor. They have a dispute with their neighbor and the money involved is so low, and I’m like, “Look, I can’t honestly have you pay me for this, but try this.” I’ve had a couple of clients go try Judicaid, and they were like, “It was easy to sign up and send the invite, but the other side didn’t respond.”

But it was nice. Sometimes clients come to you and they have things that are too minor, and you’re like, “Look, the budget for this doesn’t make sense.” Giving them something, some tool where they might resolve it on their own, was nice instead of saying, “I can’t take this. Good luck.”

Vickie Wood (30:12)
Yeah. So that is another sort of distribution channel, if you will. Exactly what Valerie just said, for attorneys to be able to give something of value to those clients they have to turn away. Say, “There’s another tool here.” We think it’s something attorneys would really like having in their back pocket for that situation. The problem is there is that immediate reaction of, “What is this taking? Is this going to take away our business?” Or, for...

Greg Lambert (30:45)
Yeah.

Vickie Wood (30:45)
mediators, “Is this going to take away our business?”

And I’m saying, no, it’s not that. LLMs are obviously changing the legal scene drastically, but at this level of sophistication, they can’t replace humans. You absolutely need human mediators. So hopefully, if there are attorneys out there listening, this is something for you to have to give to the people who you can’t otherwise help.

Valerie Clemen (31:16)
Yeah. It’s like...

Marlene Gebauer (31:16)
Yeah, I’m kind of looking at it like it’s an initial step because you’re absolutely right. I was very curious, a human mediator can sense when there’s unequal bargaining power or someone’s more legally sophisticated, and they can run their mediation with that in mind. But I’m curious how Judicaid does that as a technology tool.

Vickie Wood (31:43)
Well, in some ways it’s more neutral. Because it’s just going to be kind of...

Marlene Gebauer (31:47)
Yeah. It’s neutral. That’s it.

Vickie Wood (31:54)
Yeah, yeah. It’s not gonna be impressed by the person who is sort of a bully or sounds like they really know what they’re talking about. It’s not gonna be more persuaded by this side or that side. Again, it’s facilitating that conversation in a really neutral way.

And to your point about it being a starting point, yes, I do think cases will get resolved through this. But if they don’t, I also think there’s another value that goes beyond monetary. Let’s talk about this, it isn’t limited to small claims. It could be used for limited civil cases. It could be used for eviction cases. We’re gonna add a feature to try to get this into family law for parent-coordination kinds of things. I have unlimited features in my head, so it’s just a question of getting them to happen.

What I would see with small claims is, like I said in the beginning, people are passionate about these cases and they spend days’ worth of time preparing for them and putting everything into them. Then they get to court and there are 40 cases on the docket for trials. They’re gonna sit there for a long time, their case gets called, and they get maybe 10 minutes. And...

Greg Lambert (33:13)
Yeah.

Vickie Wood (33:14)
even if they win, but especially if they lose, they walk away not feeling good about the process and about the justice system, because many times this is these people’s only real interface with the courts. They walk away not feeling good about it, and that’s not good for any of us. That’s not good for society in general.

So if they start with a product like Judicaid, where they’re able to kind of be “heard,” and I’m putting that in air quotes for anyone who’s only on audio, to air their feelings about it and also hear the other side’s position and thoughts, and then have to think through the potential outcome that it may not go their way and decide they want to take that risk, well, now they’ve had much more participation in the ultimate outcome. I feel like that’s going to be an improvement for everybody across the board.

Greg Lambert (34:12)
Yeah. Well, I want to touch on your pilot with the Napa County Superior Court. Tell us about what you’re piloting. Beyond finding out whether the technology works, what are you hoping the courts will find out, and what are you hoping to find out from this pilot on your side?

Vickie Wood (34:35)
Yeah, so we’re new with the pilot. We’re kind of just starting to get through the period from where we started to where cases would be coming on to trial. We have had people engaging, but we’re not getting the mediations to happen yet.

So we’ve learned one really important thing, which is that people are gonna be reluctant to do this right now if it’s purely voluntary. That was a very valuable thing to learn. We knew there would be reluctance, but there’s significant reluctance.

One note, though, is that Napa County is a tiny county, so the number of filings is a very small sample to be working off of.

Greg Lambert (35:18)
I’m envisioning the mediation being over a glass of wine. That’s all I see.

Vickie Wood (35:22)
Of course, Greg, of course.

Marlene Gebauer (35:22)
Ha ha.

Vickie Wood (35:25)
If they’re not drinking wine, then the dispute is about wine somehow. But yeah...

Greg Lambert (35:30)
Yes.

Vickie Wood (35:32)
It’s a small county. But yeah, once we start getting engagement, and we’re connecting with some larger counties, one in particular is a large county that already mandates mediation for both small claims and unlawful detainers. They offer some human mediation options that are lower-cost than most human mediation, but still significantly more than Judicaid. So this would be another thing to offer people.

One of the greatest features about Judicaid is that it can be done in many different languages. You can have somebody who speaks only Spanish and someone who speaks only Russian mediating together. That would be very expensive to provide with a human mediator because you would probably have to have two interpreters for one mediator, and the cost skyrockets.

So, yeah, we’re hoping to get a bigger sample, especially one where it’s mandated, because we think if it’s mandated, a lot of people will opt for this because it’s so easy. You don’t have to schedule a set time. You can do it literally over your phone, dictating.

Greg Lambert (36:47)
And you mentioned that this isn’t just California, right? You’re looking at going...

Vickie Wood (36:51)
Correct.

Greg Lambert (36:54)
going into other states as well.

Vickie Wood (36:56)
Correct, correct. Yeah. And maybe, I mean, honestly, I don’t know why it couldn’t go outside the U.S. too, because again, it’s not tied to any particular laws. So I don’t know. I don’t want to think too big just yet, but...

Greg Lambert (37:09)
Well, then you have to deal with the EU and GDPR and all that, so, you know...

Valerie Clemen (37:14)
Yeah, yeah.

Vickie Wood (37:15)
Yeah. Well, I’ve been really bored lately, Greg. That would give me something to do with...

Greg Lambert (37:19)
Yeah.

Vickie Wood (37:19)
my time.

Marlene Gebauer (37:19)
Yeah.

So we kind of close the podcast by looking back and then looking forward. This is kind of our “what’s different now” question. If we had spoken with you a year ago, other than the fact that maybe Judicaid didn’t exist, what would you have told us is materially different today? What have users and court partners, or the experience of building the platform, taught you that changed your original assumptions?

Vickie Wood (37:56)
When I conceived of it, which was closer to two years ago, the way ChatGPT or any of these large language model platforms functioned was astonishing. I mean, it still is astonishing, but more people were seeing it for the first time or had not seen it yet. So the concept of what Judicaid does was almost like magic. Now people are aware that having a computer talk to you like it’s a human can be done.

What we have, that I don’t think is done anywhere else, is this shuttle-style approach where it’s truly exchanging the communications. But when my CTO told me, “This will be easy,” I thought we would be launching in like two months. Then all these months later, it’s not quite as novel as it was at the time.

At the same time, there’s also a fair amount of skepticism of AI and concern about AI taking jobs. There are people who might see that it’s an AI-facilitated platform and want nothing to do with it, without considering that this is something trying to provide a positive benefit and fill a gap. Those were unexpected things, but we’re rolling with it because I think it’s gonna require a little bit of awareness about what we’re doing.

Also, AI is becoming so pervasive that I think eventually people are...

Greg Lambert (39:41)
Yeah.

Vickie Wood (39:42)
just gonna get tired of being so against it, I guess. But yeah, I think the other thing is we focused on mediation because that’s the piece we wanted to nail down. Now that we have that core AI engine, we can branch off in so many different dispute-resolution ways, which gets me so excited.

We’re now calling it intelligent dispute resolution because it may not just be mediation. We might start having mediator’s proposals. We might have a parent coordinator to help with little custody disputes.

ODR, online dispute resolution, has been around for quite some time, but I think intelligent dispute resolution is new. So I’m gonna say you heard it here first.

Greg Lambert (40:29)
All right, all right. Well, that leads in perfectly to our crystal ball question. Valerie, I’ll let you start this off if you don’t mind. So...

Valerie Clemen (40:38)
Sure.

Greg Lambert (40:39)
Picking up on Judge Wood’s discussion there about intelligent dispute resolution, in three to five years, where do you see things when it comes to AI-assisted dispute resolution? What’s it gonna look like, and what all do you think it will cover?

Valerie Clemen (40:58)
I mean, our hope is that it would be offered in courts nationwide, because this underserved population doesn’t have access to dispute resolution or mediation, and this would provide that. So we would like to see it used in courts nationwide.

I would also, I mean, this is hopeful, but it would be nice if people just thought to “Judicate it”...

Vickie Wood (41:19)
Yeah.

Valerie Clemen (41:19)
when they have disputes, to go there first. You see people arguing on Nextdoor. Sometimes you think we should have guerrilla marketing and just go in there and say, “Just Judicate it.” Like, there’s so many...

Vickie Wood (41:32)
I don’t know if Nextdoor is national, but it’s this neighborhood platform. And yeah, so...

Greg Lambert (41:35)
It is. You know. No, we all...

Valerie Clemen (41:36)
It is.

Greg Lambert (41:38)
know. “Was that fireworks or gunshots?” is the most popular...

Valerie Clemen (41:41)
Yes, exactly. Exactly. “Does anyone...”

Vickie Wood (41:46)
Yeah.

Valerie Clemen (41:44)
“recognize this car?”

Greg Lambert (41:46)
Ha ha.

Valerie Clemen (41:47)
But people have disputes, and it’s really hard to get people talking to each other. Oftentimes, when people start talking to each other, they resolve things. It’s that initial step, because it’s uncomfortable, it’s adversarial. But once people do it, they can often resolve a lot of issues.

So the idea that people could use this as a tool to help get things started, it’s really hard to walk up to someone...

Marlene Gebauer (42:12)
Okay.

Valerie Clemen (42:13)
and confront them and talk about something, even if you have it simmering. I mean, people have a hard time with that with family members. You’ve had this thing simmering forever, but you can’t address it.

This is a tool that helps you be a little protected but still share your thoughts and feelings and resolve disputes. The idea that people could use it for all kinds of disputes, I mean, it is a very civil way to resolve disputes and quash things, and not have things linger for a long time.

But obviously, in the legal sense, it would be nice when people do have disputes to the level where they’re ready to file a lawsuit or do something more, that they have a way to either solve it beforehand or try to solve it once the lawsuit has started. They don’t have attorneys helping them in a lot of these cases. They’re probably using Claude or ChatGPT to help them with their case. So this is another resource to help them resolve it instead of keep fighting.

Vickie Wood (43:09)
Yeah, or have it escalate to something more than it ever needed to be. And just to tack on to that, I think that’s exactly right. A lot of times it’s barriers to communication, and that’s what Judicaid is trying to resolve. Whether it’s lack of skill with communication, a power dynamic, or a language barrier, that’s really where Judicaid provides this platform at a very base level.

And hopefully, this is my tagline that I have in our little video, my hope is someday that instead of saying, “Let’s take it to court,” we’ll say, “Let’s just Judicate it” instead. So that’s our hope.

Marlene Gebauer (43:49)
I like it. I like it.

Well, Judge Wood and Valerie Clemen, thank you for joining us and giving us a closer look at Judicaid, at both the opportunities and difficult questions that come with using AI and expanding access to dispute resolution. And thanks to all of you for listening to The Geek in Review. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d also love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Greg Lambert (44:17)
And Judge Wood and Valerie, where can listeners go and find out more about Judicaid?

Vickie Wood (44:26)
Judicaid.com. We have a lot of information on there, including an instructional video that’s on YouTube, but you can access it from the homepage, along with how-to instructions. We’re on Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn, but that’s probably the best place to start.

Greg Lambert (44:47)
Soon to be on Nextdoor.

Marlene Gebauer (44:48)
All the places.

Valerie Clemen (44:50)
Yeah.

Vickie Wood (44:51)
I actually am on Nextdoor. That’s true. I haven’t really spent a lot of time on there yet, but yeah...

Marlene Gebauer (44:55)
Ha.

Vickie Wood (44:56)
I’m going there, Greg.

Greg Lambert (44:59)
Awesome, awesome.

Vickie Wood (45:00)
Thank you so much.

Marlene Gebauer (45:02)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry. Goodbye, everybody.

From Search Rankings to Vibe Coding: How Best Lawyers Is Rebuilding for the AI Era

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:06:37 +0000

What happens when a 40-year-old legal data company decides its employees should start building their own software? This week on we talk with Best Lawyers CEO Phillip Greer and Senior Vice President of Research and Product Strategy Elizabeth Petit about an internal AI transformation that reaches far beyond adding ChatGPT to the corporate toolkit. Best Lawyers is experimenting with generative engine optimization, internal agentic systems, vibe coding, and an AI development environment where employees across research, finance, marketing, and other departments build applications around the company’s data.

Greer begins with a challenge facing every law firm marketing team: traditional search is changing. Google AI Overviews and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini increasingly give users answers without sending them to the familiar list of blue links. Greer argues that SEO still matters, but law firms now need to think about Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, and the signals AI systems use when deciding which sources deserve trust. Structured data, schema markup, substantive content, and third-party validation all become part of the equation. For Best Lawyers, its long history of peer-reviewed rankings offers an interesting advantage. The company’s data serves as an independent signal that AI systems might weigh differently from content produced by a firm’s own marketing department.

Petit explains how Best Lawyers is applying the same thinking to legal marketing through Smithy AI, a system designed to help attorneys and law firm marketers develop profile content without endlessly copying the same biography across websites. Smithy draws from Best Lawyers’ structured information and existing lawyer content to produce a starting point that attorneys and marketers then edit. The larger goal is authenticity. As generative systems make producing generic legal content almost effortless, Greer argues that distinctive expertise, voice, and credible third-party signals become more valuable rather than less.

The conversation then moves inside Best Lawyers, where Greer has taken a far more unusual approach to AI adoption. After building a secure data layer connecting systems including SQL databases, HubSpot, Gong, Google Analytics, and accounting data, he created an internal Best Lawyers App Store where employees use natural language to build applications against company data. What began with roughly 30 percent of the workforce vibe coding has grown to around 40 percent, according to Greer. Petit describes building research and KPI dashboards despite coming from a research rather than software engineering background. Projects that once required Excel formulas, Power BI reports, development queues, and weeks of waiting now sometimes move from a question at 9:30 to a working internal application by 10:30.

That shift also changes the role of professional software engineers. Rather than spending their time building another reporting screen or internal form, Best Lawyers’ engineers increasingly concentrate on architecture, data infrastructure, performance, governance, and the guardrails surrounding employee-built applications. Greer describes moving parts of the company’s data architecture toward Elasticsearch and developing “Bestie,” an internal agentic AI team member. Yet speed introduces another problem. Petit and Greer describe an “AI vampire” effect, where instant feedback encourages people to keep working because the machine never gets tired, goes home, or stops responding. Human judgment includes knowing when the human needs to stop.

The discussion closes with what these changes mean for legal practice itself. Best Lawyers introduced Artificial Intelligence Law as a formal practice area in the 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America, reflecting how AI work has spread across technology, intellectual property, privacy, employment, compliance, litigation, and counseling. Looking further ahead, Greer and Petit do not expect AI to erase the billable hour overnight. They do expect clients to ask harder questions about what they are paying for, how legal work was produced, where AI contributed, and where the lawyer’s judgment created value. If AI makes routine production dramatically faster, the economic question for law firms becomes less about how many hours technology saves and more about how firms explain, price, and defend the value of human expertise.

LINKS

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Greg Lambert (00:01)
Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert from The Geek in Review, and this week we are talking with Phillip Greer and Elizabeth Petit from Best Lawyers. But first up, here’s a word from our great sponsor and partners at Legal Technology Hub.

Marlene Gebauer (00:15)
I have Sarah Glassmeyer here from Legal Technology Hub, and since it’s almost time for ILTACON, Sarah’s going to share with us how you can use the Legal Technology Directory to prep for ILTACON.

Sarah Glassmeyer (00:30)
Yeah, so this is probably one of the more exciting times of the year for legal tech, kind of leading into ILTA. Everyone’s excited to see all the new changes, see people we haven’t seen for a year. So Legal Technology Hub can help you pregame and get ready to get the most out of it because, while you’re there, it does seem like you live now in Nashville and you’ve been there your entire life, but it goes fast. You only have two and a half, three days to talk to vendors.

So a couple of things I would suggest you do. One, look at the list of who is exhibiting at ILTACON. If you go to the ILTA website, they have a legal tech directory, but guess what? That is us.

We partner with ILTA. It is a mirror of our directory. You can see the little badges, and that will tell you who is exhibiting at ILTACON. Don’t wander in there. Think ahead and think, what am I looking for this year? Am I looking for a new kind of document automation tool? Am I looking for a new AI legal assistant?

So you do some filtering, make a list, see who’s going to be there, and start thinking ahead. Through the directory, you can see, these people don’t integrate with X tool, so they’re kind of off the list for us. You can do a little pre-filtering, pregaming, and figure out who you want to talk to, who is going to make the most of your time.

And then from there, if you are back on our platform in the Legal Technology Hub directory, if you’re logged in, you can make notes. So as you’re wandering through the exhibit hall visiting the people you want to visit, you can make notes saying, here’s this person’s email address that I spoke to and I want to follow up with them, or maybe show Bob this when I get back to my office, or these people are off the list, forget about them.

And so you keep track of who you’ve talked to, what you’re thinking about things live, and it’s all in one place on the Legal Technology Hub directory, not a swag bag full of business cards and flyers. So that’s how we help you get the most out of what you’re doing.

But also, I do suggest wandering around the exhibit hall, because everyone who’s there does have a listing on Legal Technology Hub, so you can double-check. But I think it’s good to wander, see who catches your eye, have a spontaneous conversation, because you might find a vendor you never considered or something you weren’t thinking about ahead of time. So it is a fun time to get yourself absorbed in what’s happening new in legal tech.

Marlene Gebauer (02:46)
Yeah, serendipity is definitely part of the ILTACON experience, but this is great advice in terms of using the Legal Technology Hub directory because it can be overwhelming, and this will allow you to focus on the vendors and people that you definitely need to talk to before you leave.

Marlene Gebauer (03:14)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (03:21)
And I’m Greg Lambert, and today we are exploring how a legacy data institution is completely rearchitecting itself from the inside out for the generative AI era.

Marlene Gebauer (03:34)
We are thrilled to welcome Phillip Greer, CEO of Best Lawyers, and Elizabeth Petit, Senior Vice President of Research and Product Strategy. Phillip and Elizabeth have been leading a radical internal and external transformation at Best Lawyers, turning the organization into a pioneer for agentic workflows, vibe coding, and generative engine optimization. Elizabeth and Phillip, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Phillip Greer (03:58)
Thank you so much for having us. We’re quite excited to be here today.

Greg Lambert (04:03)
Right. Well, Phillip, I’m excited about this because I think a lot of us have been hearing about SEO for years, and now recently, with all the AI, we’re hearing more about generative engine optimization, or GEO.

Phillip Greer (04:18)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (04:20)
Last year you noticed that there was a massive drop in traditional web traffic due to all of these AI overviews that you see with Google and others, to where people are getting answers rather than getting links out to the websites and then going and finding the answer themselves.

So you talk about your pivot away, or, well, I’m sure you still use SEO, but you’re also having to implement this new generative engine optimization, and that differs a lot from the SEO that a lot of us here at law firms have grown up on and realized, in order for us to get high up on the Google rankings, we need to be good at that.

So how does GEO differ from traditional SEO? And why is it that these third-party reviews or peer reviews are becoming the primary, what you call a trust signal, that keeps firms from being compressed out of the AI search answers that we need to get involved in?

Phillip Greer (05:26)
Yeah, so I think it’s helpful to give a little bit more context. You started that process.

We’ve all been chasing SEO for over two decades, right? Google came out, and then, how do we get to the top of that Google ranking so that our customers and new clients can see the work that we’re doing? And we did that through so many things, backlinking efforts, keywords, thought leadership pieces, marketing associations, marketing partnerships with different types of organizations, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s been popular to say that SEO is dead. So first off, I don’t think SEO is dead. Traditional SEO is still important, and it’s the foundation of AIO.

So a few years ago, Google changed their search engine, and when you started searching, all of a sudden the middle of the funnel, or that blue-links world, started to go away, and you were using that Google Gemini. So you would say, “Hey, I need to find a lawyer for an issue I’m having,” and then it would give you a summary.

And then what was happening was so many law firms, and any type of business, were losing 15, 20, 30 percent of their web traffic because the blue links aren’t being clicked anymore. The users are going in, they’re getting that overview, they’re getting what they need, and they’re kind of moving on.

Well, those original AIO types of overviews were being fed from those SEO efforts.

Marlene Gebauer (06:51)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (06:51)
The shift that we did over the last couple of years is, first, make sure that our content is structured in a way that, when these LLMs such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Claude are coming to our website and looking at our data in traditional SEO forms, we’re tagging it and presenting it in ways that are helpful.

So you think about SEO stuff you used to do. It was all about meta descriptions, keywords, page titles, and then, again, we talked about some of the backlinking techniques. Those things were structuring it so that, when the crawlers are finding your website, they know how to get that data.

Well, that’s kind of amped up with AIO and then eventually what we’ll talk about with GEO. You not only needed the meta descriptions, you needed to have good schema markup. You need to describe sections on the page, to be able to ask questions, answer questions, so that when the AI engines were gathering data, it wasn’t only finding it, they could start to interpret it, because that interpretation is what becomes a little more important when you think of things like ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

It has to take the structured data, and then it has to interpret it and create insights and say, okay, now you can start showing up in these overviews.

The latest shift, and I think it’s the biggest shift, is this GEO, and that was your opening question.

Greg Lambert (08:14)
Right.

Phillip Greer (08:14)
The generative engine optimization approach. And that is making these AI systems not only get your data, but understand that they can trust your data. And so, how do you trust data?

Data has to come from quality places, things that are not produced by a marketing staff. So we’ve all gamed the SEO world. Every year, Google changed the algorithm again. What do we do? How do we get to the top? We spend more dollars. We make sure that we have more content. We flood the internet with it. We do backlink strategies, right?

That would work for SEO, and then it would work until they changed the next algorithm again.

With GEO, you have these AI systems that have some insight and intellect in the sense that it knows whether or not the content is being produced by you, your law firm, putting more information out there, or are you reading a service like Best Lawyers that’s known for producing peer review surveys and, ultimately, lists of lawyers? It’s an annual process. It’s been around for 40 years. It’s got a strong standing, a big domain authority. It is a trusted source. It’s third party to the industry that is putting out their data, right?

So that type of association is important. That’s where GEO plays a role.

So we think about our customers and clients who are part of Best Lawyers, who make those rankings. They get a leg up immediately by making it onto our list because they’re getting a signal, an AI signal in the industry for these LLMs to say, okay, if they’re on Best Lawyers and they’re ranked in corporate law, then their value has a higher weight.

And there are other types of services that you should be paying more attention to, and you want to make sure they’re credible. And so that’s why, when you think about what is your plan going forward, I think for law firms you should continue to think SEO is important, but it’s not the only thing. And that’s the takeaway.

SEO is important. It’s not the only thing. Structuring our data is important, and let’s make sure that we’re also thinking deeper about the schema so that we can have questions asked and answered. And then how are we putting our data in? How are we associating? What are we saying? Go see us on, go connect with, what type of services, and what’s their credibility level?

That’s what is creating the big buzzword for the last year, the AI signals. And all those together create a strong AI signal for your law firm.

Greg Lambert (10:39)
Yeah.

Well, one of the things that I’ve been hearing from marketing folks is much more long-form articles, client alerts, more showing your expertise in an area. Are you also seeing the generative AI or the AIO, and it sounds like a song,

Phillip Greer (10:58)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (11:00)
or the GEO relying upon, instead of straight-out structure and how things are presented, deeper content as well? Are you seeing that?

Marlene Gebauer (10:59)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (11:13)
So first off, I refer to this as the E-I-E-I-O because it is 100 percent that effect. The Old MacDonald version.

Greg Lambert (11:18)
Yeah, there you go. The Old MacDonald version.

Phillip Greer (11:24)
For a new world. Yeah, so I think the goal is not only to have longer content, but it’s authentic content that speaks to your messaging.

Greg Lambert (11:31)
Okay.

Phillip Greer (11:31)
So you can create a lot of long-form content with AI, but the problem, if it’s not authentic to your brand and your expertise, you’re going to lose a lot of credibility.

So, thinking about what is it that makes your lawyer special? What makes them stand out? How do you speak on it? And how do you keep that authentic?

And sometimes it’s not directly in the world of law for the authenticity to stand out. So figuring out what your niche is there and then driving it home. That is what is going to create unique content that gives you that authority and will stand out among these GEO initiatives because they can say, this is not a whitewashed, white-labeled version of the same type of content that continues to be posted online. It’s something unique.

And if you have a series of this type of content, it can create that narrative of, okay, this is the type of lawyer, this is the type of firm, this is the type of credibility, this is the type of messaging that you can expect, and stand out among your peers. So yeah, I definitely agree with the longer-form opportunities there.

Marlene Gebauer (12:39)
So Elizabeth, for law firms trying to adapt to this new AI search environment, creating unique, machine-readable content is a difficult hurdle. Best Lawyers recently launched Smithy AI to help lawyers and marketers scale their profile content. How does this tool solve the duplicate-content penalty while keeping human editorial control firmly in the loop?

Elizabeth Petit (13:05)
Yeah. So first of all, we’ve always viewed ourselves as partners with lawyers and law firms. So the products that we build and deliver, we want to solve your problems. And one of the problems we know that you have is too many things to do and not enough time to do them.

So one of the things that Smithy AI was developed to address is getting lawyers to fill out their profiles.

Have either of you gotten lawyers to fill out their profiles? That’s a tall order.

Greg Lambert (13:35)
Yeah, all the time. All the time.

Phillip Greer (13:37)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Petit (13:41)
So the easiest thing, the old way to do this, the easiest thing to do is that most teams would copy and paste whatever you finally got written on your own website. You’re going to go copy and paste it everywhere else on the internet. And you got penalized for that.

So we wanted to, again, partner with law firms and develop an easier way to assist you with your workload.

So what Smithy AI does is it reads our structured data and the content you’ve already developed on your lawyer profiles on your website, and it makes a recommendation for you. Now, everybody knows that AI is not a replacement, it is an assistant, and you should still use your human judgment.

So it does say, recommended generative content. It pulls in information about the awards, things that it thinks are appropriate. You review it, and then you publish it with the click of a button.

The name for Smithy AI does come from one of our original co-founders, Gregory White Smith, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.

And so we also wanted to name it in his honor for both founding Best Lawyers and as a writer who was a craftsman as well. So Smithy is developed to help you with your mountain of work, both with profiles, but also there are features now to help with press releases, email announcements, social assets. So we’re trying to be your extra hands when you’re looking at the clock, looking at your watch, looking at your calendar, and you don’t have enough hours in the day.

Greg Lambert (15:18)
I’m curious when it comes to that because I know, for example, one of the things that got pushed out on platforms like Substack is there’s kind of that AI content identifier.

Phillip Greer (15:34)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (15:35)
And so is that one of the things that you try to look for with using a tool like Smithy, giving them something to work with, but then, is it a full copy and paste, or is it something that they take and then they kind of do their own smithing on it as well? How do you encourage your clients to use the tool?

Elizabeth Petit (16:00)
Yep, so we envision it to get you like 90 percent of the way. So it’s not a copy and paste. It doesn’t pull exactly what you’ve already written. You can also hit that button a few times and say, slightly rewrite it, slightly rewrite it, polish it for me. So it can iterate a little bit for you.

But as with all wordsmithing through AI that we all do, we all know we do this, you should never take whatever it spits out for you and then publish that. This is where human judgment always needs to be that final set of eyes, that final check before you are comfortable publishing to your website, our website, or anywhere that you publish content.

Phillip Greer (16:44)
Yeah, and I would say also, going back to your point about the long-form content and where I was going with brand authenticity. So one of the great things about Smithy is, as Elizabeth is saying, we’re going to get the way you’re talking about yourself on your profiles, and we’re going to take the data we have on Best Lawyers and put it through our own system to say, how do we think it should build content?

So it’s going to have your unique voice with our data, but you still want to ask yourself, is this me?

If not, you do have the ability to be replacing it with another version of yourself. And I know with AI, it’s a whole different topic where there’s a lot of, what does it mean to clone a lawyer? Well, we don’t want you to clone your brand. We want you to play a role in helping that editing of the brand.

I think back to college, the hardest thing was always to start writing the paper. The first paragraph is always the hardest. The thing about Smithy is it’ll write the first four paragraphs for you, but you should come in with that closer. You should come in with that closer and do a little bit of editing on the first four that it produces for you.

Greg Lambert (17:52)
Phillip, I want to turn to something that you’ve done that I think we’ve seen a few CEOs do, and that was there at Best Lawyers, you kind of famously mandated that your entire team continue doing their job, but also look at becoming essentially software builders.

Phillip Greer (18:13)
Mm.

Greg Lambert (18:14)
Now you’ve got, and I think the last estimate was about 30 percent of the company, vibe coding their own apps. And Elizabeth, I think you’re a prime example of this. You’re a researcher, not an engineer, yet you were involved in building a real-time KPI dashboard there at Best Lawyers.

So it seems like people are taking you up on your challenge, Phillip. So I want you to walk us through something that you’ve built that takes the worst part of your job off the plate. And then, once the repetitive data wrangling is automated, how do managers shift their focus from doing that kind of grunt work to focusing on more of the higher creative work?

Because that’s something that we’re insisting our lawyers do. So I’m hoping you’ve got the secret sauce and can help us on that.

Phillip Greer (19:20)
Yeah, I’ll start here, and then I’ll want to pass it over to Elizabeth. But I’ll start.

So the end of last year, I’ve been playing with a lot of AI and product development for years now. My background is engineering. I used to build a lot of software. I built a lot of the core systems we still use here at Best Lawyers for producing our rankings and doing our survey processes.

And then I’ve been the CEO and running it for quite some time. And when AI came on the scene, I started experimenting. What can we do? What can we do?

And about December of last year, I had the breakthrough. Claude Opus came out, and its coding abilities were far superior to every other AI coding that had existed before.

So I had this wild thought where, what if I build an environment that was safe, that our team could fail fast in and not worry about hurting our data, and it wouldn’t go and be spread out to the outside world? It wouldn’t be trained on outside systems. We wouldn’t have to worry about them doing some shadow IT type environment where they’re taking sensitive data and going straight to ChatGPT and dumping it out there.

So I felt an obligation to create that environment. And it’s an exciting time because it felt possible. So I spent all of the holiday break in December and then all of January building out, first, an environment.

And what I mean by that is a place where all our data connects. So I needed to create this API layer so that all of our data, when I say our data, I mean our SQL data, our accounting data, our HubSpot, Gong, Google Analytics, any type of systems that we are accessing and using on a daily basis, I wanted it all to come to one place and then inform itself and know about its own data.

So I created a data lake, if you will, custom. And ultimately, I don’t know, for those who are a little more technical on these calls, it’s a deep coverage model where the data in Gong understands how it relates to our data inside of HubSpot, and that understands how it relates to our data inside of Google Analytics, and so on.

So when you’re asking questions, it references each of the data sets, and it knows what a firm is or a lawyer is inside of those areas.

That’s a complicated way of saying I made a place where all our data came together safely and made sure it knew how it was associated.

And then I needed to create that safe environment. So I built a system called the Best Lawyers App Store, where you could go in and start vibe coding through our Claude environment.

And when you vibe code, you’re safely in that App Store. It’s using only our data sets, and you can build, eventually, what we now are using as an operating layer for most of our business.

So I did this. I put all this together. I got it in a prototyped form, and I met with the team at the end of January and I said, “All right, all right, I got an idea. Everyone’s going to become a vibe coder. Every department’s going to be a builder. Elizabeth is going to be a builder. Nancy is going to be a builder.”

I went full Oprah Winfrey on, you’re going to, you’re going to, you’re going to.

Greg Lambert (22:25)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (22:26)
And they were all on board. I was like, okay, no convincing needed, you’re totally in for this.

Elizabeth was one of the first people I sat down with. I think I spent all of 30 minutes with you, Elizabeth. It was a short session. I got you set up in the environment. I gave you the tools, told you how the data works and how to connect it, and I said, go and dream and build.

And Elizabeth, I’d love to hear your take on it. That’s my more technical explanation of what happened. I’d love to hear what your side was.

Elizabeth Petit (22:56)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (22:56)
I’d love to hear what your side was.

Elizabeth Petit (22:58)
Yeah. So I knew Phil had been working on this passion project. Phil’s always got multiple passion projects going. So I knew he’d been working on this, and then he made a statement and he’s like, “I’m going to ask you guys to come join me in this.”

And then he did that ping and he’s like, “No, I mean it.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I know. I’m here. I’m ready.”

So my personal mantra has always been, my team knows this, work smarter, not harder. And that doesn’t mean we don’t work hard. I love to work hard. But it means work more efficiently. If there’s a better way to solve your problem, do it the more productive way. Don’t do something the same way over and over again because you’ve always done it that way.

So what vibe coding unlocked for me was this new ability to work smarter and not harder, and take some of the repetitive, mundane parts of everybody’s job and make them more fun, make them more creative, automate them.

Whether it’s through KPI reporting that eats up time every day, or taking some of these important projects or problems we want to solve that sit on that shelf, that you know have value, but you never have the time to take off the shelf.

And say, okay, now that I have optimized some of this basic operational work, I’m not spending all day, two days of the week, pulling together my KPI reports, let’s take a bigger, meatier project off the shelf and let’s go start working on that.

Phillip Greer (24:38)
Yeah.

It’s been exciting watching how everybody came to the table to build.

Elizabeth built research dashboards to monitor the process for Best Lawyers as the nominations were coming in and voting was happening. Nancy, our head of content, developed expense-paid tracking systems for all of our budgets that were going out for paid media, as well as her marketing team developed this marketing dashboard that pulled in our Google Analytics and gave full-funnel conversion visibility.

I mean, we went from, like a lot of companies, working heavily in Excel and Power BI or Tableau. We’ve stopped using Power BI. We don’t use any Tableau. We do everything now inside of our dashboards that are developed independently by departments.

And the only time we’re in Excel these days is when we’re exporting data sets to give to our business partners or if we’ve got to send them out somewhere. But we work primarily now inside of our BL App Store environments.

When you’re asking for data and looking for new trends and analysis, it used to be, okay, we’ll export everything out to Excel. We’ll write a bunch of complicated formulas. I’m Googling how to write that complicated formula.

Greg Lambert (25:55)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (25:55)
My God, why do we have to write these complicated formulas?

Greg Lambert (25:58)
Yeah. How do I do that VLOOKUP table again?

Phillip Greer (26:00)
Yeah, that VLOOKUP table.

Elizabeth Petit (26:01)
Yeah.

Phillip Greer (26:03)
My God. And then you always have the one person in the office who’s your Excel person, and that’s what their life is all about. “Ask me about my sheets,” you know?

But now everyone goes straight into their environment. The data’s all there in our data layer. It’s trained, it’s learned, it knows itself in the deep coverage model.

And you work through our App Store and ask it questions. And instead of developing an Excel sheet, you develop an entire new page that is the best visual representation of your data and answers a question. And you use that to start making decisions.

So our speed to decision is pretty great. A week-long, two-week-long Excel project is now done. We have an idea in a 9:30 meeting. By 10:30, we have a new page that’s been pumped out through our finance team that’s explaining the answer.

And then we need to make that next decision and, okay, how do we execute on this data?

Greg Lambert (27:02)
The follow-up I have on that, and this is something I’ve been writing on, especially since you have so much data that you’re working with, and it sounds like you’ve solved part of the problem through creating these data lakes or this ability to feed information into the right places so that you set up your AI to access clean information in a relatively simplistic way rather than having to go out to 15 different places, some external, some internal. You’ve got it all built.

So the topic that I’ve been writing on a lot, and I think this is going to be, I thought it was going to be 2027 fodder, but it might hit before then, is a lot of us are building these harnesses around both our data and our AI tools with the expectation of a lot of this information.

You don’t need to dump everything into the LLM and get an answer. You need it to be precise, and you need it to be consistently right so that the inputs and the outputs are accurate.

So I know, Phillip, you designed the initial, you vibe coded the system around it. Do you have a technical team now that keeps that up to date, updates or adds new things that come in, or are you still able to use the talent that you have on staff that they build on top of what’s already built?

How do you take that 9:30 question and turn it into a 10:30 report?

Phillip Greer (28:47)
Yeah, so I built all the environment for the initial App Store, and my intention was always to hand off the day-to-day maintenance because adding more data to our data lake or data API library is going to be a constant workflow.

And any company who’s working with any type of data environment, governance, or what have you, whether it’s SharePoint or an actual Azure data lake, et cetera, you’re going to have to have somebody managing that.

So once I got everything built, the initial systems, we found one person internally who had the most interest in the AI infrastructure and the future of AI and how it’s used in programming. He was one of our programmers, and his name’s Seth.

And so I trained him for a week on the system, and he took it over. And now he is running that API library.

And people, all the vibe coders, as they need more data or they need more feature abilities in the App Store, they go through Seth. And it’s been a good system.

Because my original vision was, I knew what Elizabeth and I knew what our research and our finance and our content team would need to get started, but I didn’t know what they were going to build, right? And that’s the wild thing, what they end up building and how they use the data.

I’m watching some of the requests come through and some of the systems they’re building, and I know because I designed the actual data that came together, and I would go, that’s not going to work. They don’t have that data. That’s not going to work. They don’t have that data.

So I had that moment where I was like, I need to hand this off to someone. I’m the CEO of this company. I can’t keep adding to that API layer.

Greg Lambert (30:28)
You don’t want to be the head vibe coder and CEO?

Phillip Greer (30:31)
Head vibe coder and CEO.

So I got Seth involved, and now whenever they start to build with more data, he continues to extend the actual API layer.

But what is great is the actual building is still happening from the non-builders. Well, they used to be non-builders. I’d call them all builders now.

That 30 percent number, as of, I onboarded a few more people this last week, we’re up to 40 percent of our company who are vibe coders now. It’s growing because the mentality is, if you want to do this, we want to help you do it. There’s no reason you have to sit on the sidelines.

So I handed that over, and then what I realized quickly by handing this over is there’s an opportunity to build more things.

So that’s been kind of exciting. And we can get into it. But I built out what we lovingly call here Bestie, which is our first type of AI support team member that uses our different models and data sets.

So yeah, you have to have someone who’s going to own it. You’ve got to have someone who’s going to make sure that they’re adding to it. But that’s the easy part.

The harder part is thinking about what you want to build. Because when you can build endlessly, narrowing that scope down to building things that are functionally helpful is that next muscle you have to start learning how to train.

Greg Lambert (31:55)
Yeah, it’s not asking what do I build, it’s what should I build, right?

Phillip Greer (32:01)
Yeah. One of the opening things you mentioned was about, how do you open up room and bandwidth for creativity?

Well, you have to allow yourself to be creative. And there’s a lot of people who work in an office environment that have not worked that muscle in a long time because you make that Excel report, you put it through Power BI, you drop it out as a PDF, and then you take it to the board. And you do it again, and you give the lawyer the thing.

The creativity is lacking.

And now all of a sudden, all of that administrative burden is done within 9:30, the idea, 10:30, the actual result. Now what’s the creative solution that you move forward and make something functional to execute on?

Marlene Gebauer (32:43)
So transforming a workforce as quickly as you have doesn’t happen without some friction. Phillip, you’ve spoken about the AI vampire effect causing extreme decision fatigue.

Phillip Greer (32:52)
Mm-hmm.

Marlene Gebauer (32:53)
And Elizabeth, you’ve had to manage an existential crisis among your software engineers. How did you help these technical engineers transition to feeling like they’re authoritative system architects rather than feeling displaced?

And how are you managing that cognitive burnout when AI offers answers in seconds instead of in weeks?

Elizabeth Petit (33:20)
Yeah. So first of all, the existential crisis is understandable.

These team members of ours, many of whom Phil and I have worked with for over 10 years, went to school to be experts in these fields. They are craftsmen. They are builders. This is their superpower.

And then seemingly overnight, IKEA came to town, and no longer is the craftsman superpower the same. And that’s hard. And I understand that, and we did understand that.

And it helped that Phil was a developer and came from that background, so he understood that as well.

And it was always our goal, continues to be our goal, to use AI to upskill our team members as an opportunity for professional development, whether you are an engineer or another member of the business team. It is not to replace anybody’s job.

And so while the business team is learning a superpower they never thought they would have, they never thought that they were going to be this type of craftsman, and they’re not going to be this technical craftsman, they do some things.

What it has done for our engineers is it has allowed them to also build faster, solve more complex problems. All the things that AI does. It allows for better debugging, it allows for better regression testing, it removes some of that mundane work that they were doing.

So we went into this as, we are all going to learn this together. This is new emerging technology. We don’t have all the answers, and we want to figure out how this makes the most sense for you and your roles, and us within our business.

Phillip Greer (35:16)
Yeah. At the end of January, at the same time I was meeting with the executive team, Elizabeth pulled all of our engineers together in an in-person meeting, and we had a Q1 huddle.

And I sat there and explained to them that I’ve built this App Store. I’ve got this huge data layer. All our data comes together nice and clean. It’s learning off of each other. And now everyone’s going to become builders.

And it was a lot of disbelief because, again, craftsmen, like, okay, I make quality code. There’s no way a machine’s going to do it.

And so there was a lot of disbelief.

After that, I met with Elizabeth and team and taught them how to vibe code, and they started building apps.

We brought everyone back together again and showed them what these non-builders were putting together and how it was pulling data from all of our systems.

And then even our engineers were in the mindset of, my God, this is a real thing. This is not some fancy fad happening, Phil says everyone’s going to be doing this. They’re building financial systems. They’re building research systems, marketing systems, sales systems.

And it was clear that they wanted to be part of it too.

And so Elizabeth put on, I thought it was an intelligent thing, as we had the adoption, every two weeks we’d have sessions where we’d encourage the engineers to show, in a safe space, the other engineers what they’d been vibe coding.

Because there’s also this stigma, like, I’m an engineer. I don’t vibe code. I know how to code.

But that’s not what vibe coding is. Vibe coding is not a replacement for, I don’t know, a good analogy. Here’s a good analogy.

I play guitar. But when someone says, “I play Guitar Hero,” and they’re pushing those buttons on the little plastic machines,

Marlene Gebauer (37:02)
Ha ha ha.

Phillip Greer (37:03)
I would go, “Ha, you don’t play guitar. I play.”

It’s not that. It’s a completely different thing. It’s not analogous to Guitar Hero versus playing guitar.

Both people are coding. Both people are building. It’s only one person’s doing it craftsman style, line by line. The other person is effectively doing it through a learned generative system that knows how to put all the pieces together, and you get to be that creative fountainhead.

So watching them come along the journey, it took a little while. We had to walk with them. We had to have these sessions where they would show what’s possible.

And the way it’s aha moments. After you start to realize, I made my day a little less boring, or I removed this ridiculous, redundant task that I have to do over and over, you start to go, now what do I do?

So that’s been a fun thing to watch. And I’m using the word fun because everything’s hindsight. In the moment, it was like, come on, guys, you don’t understand. I promise we’re not playing Guitar Hero. This is real. We’re producing real things.

Greg Lambert (38:06)
Yeah. I can’t imagine the eye strain from the eye rolling from your engineers when you first announced this.

Phillip Greer (38:16)
Yeah. Yeah, it was significant.

Marlene Gebauer (38:16)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (38:20)
But I’m wondering, Phillip, how do you leverage the intelligence and the experience of your engineers? Is there anything that they help people like Elizabeth better understand about structure and what the end results are and how you want to get there?

How do you leverage that expertise to help the non-engineers?

Phillip Greer (38:50)
So Elizabeth made the comment that our goal was not to reduce our engineering staff in this process. We wanted to support and invest more.

And they ultimately have, to the point you’re making, this understanding of our data.

No matter how much we bring it together and add to our API and have it learning on itself, they understand the repository, where it comes from, how it was put there, how it’s designed, the schema markup, how you scale it, and when you’re having more and more people access it, how much you pull on those data sets.

I’ll give you an example.

One person was writing an analytics system as a builder, and they were saying, give me all of our analytics in our BL App Store. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of data points, and they couldn’t get their app to do it. It was crashing constantly.

And so we had to have one of our architects come in and go, let’s walk through this.

And what they built, you’re using the word harness or harnesses earlier, or guardrails, they decided to change our API layer to understand that the user doesn’t understand the data when they say, give me all of our analytical data, give me all of our financial data.

So it’s my job to create ways that I feed it to them in an appropriate way.

Because when you have access to all of this and you don’t know how it’s formed, functioned, and put together, you create a lot of overly inefficient, heavy systems.

So what we’ve been doing is we’ve opened up the doorway and the communication to say, go talk initially to Seth. He’s in charge of the App Store. And then from there, you spend some time meeting with one of the engineers and asking questions about, how do I make my app do something a little faster? It’s getting stuck here.

And they walk you through their why and the how.

Because what they’re doing is they’re not only in charge of where the data is coming from, they understand it, and they’re building better ways to feed it.

So we had a big session with our engineers where we’re saying, how do we feed things even faster to our API layer?

So we had an architectural meeting where we’re trying to understand, if things are coming from SQL and those are our bottlenecks, it’s single-server environments, how do we extend that further? Let’s have a stopgap where it feeds into a system like Elasticsearch.

I’m so sorry for all the technicality here. Let’s have it feeding to a faster system.

Greg Lambert (41:11)
I think a lot of people that listen to this have heard Elasticsearch before.

Phillip Greer (41:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we decided to move our API model from SQL to Elasticsearch, so the first read comes from a faster environment.

And these are the new types of things that our programmers get to think about. No longer are they creating forms on an intranet to feed data back to an end user in an Excel environment.

Now our engineers are freed up thinking, okay, if I restructure my data and take it from a single-server environment to a multi-server replica environment where I feed it faster, what do we accomplish?

How do I create a harness that feeds this data in a way that has nice guardrails, and they don’t have to think about ruining the data, over-encumbering the server? We’re not going to have server crashes.

And those are the projects.

Engineers always talk about, Elizabeth made the comment, taking that hard project off the shelf. That’s what the engineers want to do. They don’t want to have to write one more page on the intranet. They don’t want to write one more page that tells you what your voting reports are.

They will do it because that’s their job.

What they want to work on is making our server faster, building a better backend system, creating a new way to isolate our data and feed it in a multi-tenant scenario.

So that’s when their aha moments and their expertise start to be able to work on those types of systems.

For the first time, those are the types of things where we go, okay, you get the last two weeks of December. This is what you get. Build whatever you want in two weeks.

And now you have more opportunity to start thinking about that longer-term pipeline because each department, they’re servicing their own needs with the data.

Greg Lambert (42:59)
That sounds good, and I think it’s something that we all kind of face for how we transition into whatever the new version of, whether you’re a manager or an engineer, it seems like we’re all taking on more.

And I’ve noticed I’ve not seen people go home earlier on Fridays for some reason.

Phillip Greer (43:23)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (43:24)
So I’m still waiting for my, it’s time for me to be rolling in income and sitting on the beach the whole time. So perhaps that’s a 2028 goal.

Elizabeth Petit (43:33)
Well,

Greg Lambert (43:34)
2028 goal.

Elizabeth Petit (43:35)
I think one of the reasons for that is because you move so much faster with AI, and specifically with vibe coding, it has unlocked all of this creativity and opportunity that, for those of you who’ve done it, is quite addictive.

Greg Lambert (43:55)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Petit (43:55)
Once you get in there and you start building, whatever you are, you’re prototyping something, you’re building something you’ve been wanting for years.

That used to be this cumbersome process of meetings, requirements, design, getting in the development queue. Three years later, you get something you asked for that you don’t need anymore.

You now all of a sudden get it quickly.

Okay, that’s great. But also, the feedback loop comes immediately. So instead of Friday morning you send off your information and think, I’ll get something on Monday to address, it comes right back to you.

Phillip Greer (44:32)
Mm.

Elizabeth Petit (44:33)
So now we have this cognitive fatigue concern because you are engaging so rapidly that the machine will never get tired. It will never go to dinner with its family. It will never log off for the weekend.

So at a certain point, you have to have the critical judgment to say, I am exhausted. You will never be exhausted, but I am.

And Phil shared this story that he found himself at one point being so in the go, and Phil and I are the same in that way. Once we get on that path, we are running.

And then he realized that he was not making the same little decisions that he would make. And not big, impactful things, but things that usually he would make a decision about.

He had that aha moment that he was having cognitive fatigue. And you don’t want AI to make those decisions for you.

So that’s when,

Phillip Greer (45:33)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Petit (45:34)
you have to remind yourself, AI will never say, go spend time with your kids, you know, go home early on a Friday.

Marlene Gebauer (45:41)
Not unless you

Phillip Greer (45:42)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (45:42)
create an agent to remind you.

Greg Lambert (45:44)
Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth Petit (45:44)
Yeah, exactly.

Phillip Greer (45:45)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (45:45)
Exactly.

Phillip Greer (45:46)
And that runs into, you mentioned earlier, the AI vampire. That’s what it is. It’s feeding off of you, you’re feeding off of it, and you have to recognize, okay, I get to walk out in the sunlight. So I need to go do that some.

Marlene Gebauer (46:01)
Tear my eyes away from the screen, yes.

Greg Lambert (46:04)
Yeah, well, I always say when somebody asks me what’s the addictive game that I’m playing on my phone, I say it’s my $200-a-month Claude account. I’m on it all the time.

Phillip Greer (46:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth Petit (46:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (46:18)
So yeah, you’re right.

Elizabeth, before we start wrapping up, I know that AI, of course, isn’t only affecting how we manage engineers, how we manage managers, and how we all become vibe coders. It’s becoming a part of Best Lawyers content as well.

And one of the things that you oversaw was the introduction of Artificial Intelligence Law as a formal recognition category in the 2026 edition.

Do you mind talking about what that encompasses, how you came up with it, and what you found?

Elizabeth Petit (47:00)
Yep. So, you know, it is always our goal to help connect clients in need of legal services, whether that’s professional or personal, with the right attorney for their case.

And so we always keep our eyes and ears open for developments in the legal industry to add new practice areas as they emerge over time.

So cannabis law, that was one that we added a few years ago because that was bubbling up.

And so about three years ago, we started to see that law firms were adding AI practice groups. And so we added this and started researching AI as its own practice area.

Now, when this first started, I envisioned this would be sort of a subset of emerging tech.

And we have technology law, and that this would kind of,

Greg Lambert (47:51)
This is what the blockchain lawyers morphed into, right?

Elizabeth Petit (47:54)
Yeah, exactly. This is sort of what I thought this would evolve into.

Phillip Greer (47:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (47:54)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Petit (47:57)
But as AI is so dynamic and evolving so quickly, the definition of an AI lawyer is quite nebulous.

Are you counseling AI corporations? Are you focused on data privacy? Are you looking at government issues? Even labor and employment. I mean, AI is truly touching everything.

And so because of that, it started off more as a subset of technology. But we will have to evolve with AI in our awards as this industry evolves so rapidly to make sure that it is reflective of how legal is addressing AI and the needs of clients.

Greg Lambert (48:49)
Are you thinking about

Phillip Greer (48:49)
We didn’t even get it.

Greg Lambert (48:52)
an AI-native law firm category? That seems to be the big buzz phrase these days.

Elizabeth Petit (49:01)
Yeah. We are getting ready to evaluate adding new practice areas for next year. So look for that webinar series coming up soon.

Phillip Greer (49:10)
Yeah, and whether or not we have AI law firms that we recognize, that’s currently not on the horizon.

But it is the question, when do I have my work done by AI and AI Inc.?

Greg Lambert (49:27)
Yes.

Marlene Gebauer (49:27)
Ha ha.

Greg Lambert (49:29)
All right. Well, before we get to our crystal ball question and we start looking at the future, I want to ask you guys to look back in the past. And I think I know where this is going based on our conversation.

Phillip and Elizabeth, what’s something that’s true today that wasn’t necessarily true for you and Best Lawyers a year ago? What’s changed in that year?

Phillip Greer (49:52)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (49:52)
What’s changed in that year?

Phillip Greer (49:53)
I mean, the biggest thing, it’s everything we talked about, that we have non-builders, and they’re taking their data and they’re solving their own problems.

We have a decent engineering team as far as size because our company is research and tech. We use a lot of tech to build rankings and recognitions in over 76 countries.

And so we always built a lot of custom software, and we’ve always been able to do dynamic things for each department. But there was always a process. You got in line, got queued up, and then it handed off to the engineering team.

Greg Lambert (50:28)
Q3. Q3.

Phillip Greer (50:30)
And now that’s changed greatly because everybody is handling the majority of their own needs internally.

We’re still externally using our engineers. We’re not developing any software. All software that’s hitting our customers is still handled by our engineering team because that’s the right way to handle it.

But for all our internal needs, everyone’s a builder. So that was a big change I’ve seen. That is different now.

What about you, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Petit (50:59)
I think the surprise that has come out of this is, I’ve been with Best Lawyers for over 15 years now, and I did not expect this career development opportunity.

Phillip Greer (51:14)
Mm.

Elizabeth Petit (51:15)
So I thought that I would continue to grow in leadership or other traditional career development paths, but all of a sudden to have an entire skill set that I did not have last year, that’s pretty amazing.

And I’m grateful to have been given that opportunity.

Marlene Gebauer (51:37)
All right, we’ve looked a little bit at the past, and now it’s time to look in the future.

If you would gaze into your crystal ball and look ahead a few years, as autonomous agents and vibe coding become standard inside both data organizations and law firms, what’s the single biggest shift you see coming for the legal profession’s economic model, specifically regarding the billable hour?

Phillip Greer (52:03)
Hmm. So I don’t think the billable hour is going to disappear overnight, right? But it will shift.

People are going to have more scrutiny of how you’re backing up the value of what’s coming from the work product.

And there’ll be more questions about how did you derive that actual result set.

It was already the question, you hire the partner and you ask yourself, am I getting the partner’s hours or am I getting the junior associate? That’s already been on the table for a long time. And some clients have been wanting to know that. And they want to know, I am paying for the partner’s time.

I think there’s going to be a lot of questions that more clients are going to be asking. I want you to break down the justification. Am I paying for the senior partner’s time, or how much am I paying for the AI’s time?

I don’t know what that’s going to look like as far as how it wants to be shown in transparency, but I think that’s going to be a big question.

Marlene Gebauer (53:01)
How about Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Petit (53:04)
I agree. I don’t think that this is, legal doesn’t revolutionize overnight. We’ve all been in this industry for a minute.

But a lawyer is not going to become twice as productive with AI. They’re not going to bill twice as many hours a day. That’s not possible.

But they’re expected to still bring in that same amount of revenue for the firm.

And so figuring out that balance between what is the appropriate use for AI, but still what requires that human judgment that AI will never replace.

And that’s ultimately what a client comes to a law firm for, not the administrative work that AI assists with. It is the human judgment.

That’s where I feel like, if firms tell their story to clients successfully, they sort of balance that out, get that efficiency that they need, but still have the confidence of their clients.

Greg Lambert (54:04)
Mm-hmm. All right. Well, I think that’s a good spot to end on.

So Phillip Greer and Elizabeth Petit, thank you so much for joining us and breaking down what it looks like behind the walls there at Best Lawyers. Appreciate it.

Marlene Gebauer (54:18)
Yeah, thank you.

Phillip Greer (54:18)
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

Elizabeth Petit (54:19)
Thank you for having us.

Marlene Gebauer (54:21)
And thanks to all of you for listening to The Geek in Review. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Substack.

Greg Lambert (54:30)
And Phillip and Elizabeth, where’s the best place for listeners to learn more about you, more about Smithy AI, Best Lawyers, Bestie, all those things?

Phillip Greer (54:40)
So first off, for more information, go to bestlawyers.com. Also look us up on LinkedIn.

I’m posting a lot of videos about some of the AI work that I’m doing, some of the apps we’ve been building. And yeah, feel free to follow us there and check out what we’re doing.

Marlene Gebauer (54:56)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry, and goodbye, everybody.

Patrick Forquer on Legora’s Agentic AI, Legal Engineering, and Consumption-Based Pricing

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:42:25 +0000

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we talk with Patrick Forquer, Chief Revenue Officer at Legora, about legal AI’s move from experimentation into daily legal work. Forquer explains why Legora has invested heavily in legal engineers, lawyers with practice experience who work alongside clients on adoption, workflow design, prompt and context engineering, and change management. The conversation also explores an emerging career path for lawyers who pair substantive legal knowledge with AI fluency, especially as firms search for people able to translate practice needs into working systems.

Legora’s acquisition strategy provides another lens on the company’s ambitions. Forquer describes a strategy aimed at building breadth across legal work while adding depth in litigation, commercial real estate, regulatory monitoring, and legal research. Recent acquisitions such as Wexler, Cadastral, and Graceview bring specialized capabilities into a broader agentic platform. Legora’s own 13-day acquisition process also serves as an example of how M&A diligence, document review, drafting, and analysis are beginning to move through shared AI environments.

A major portion of the discussion focuses on the difference between traditional workflow automation and agentic AI for legal work. Forquer draws a line between prebuilt automation and agentic systems: workflows follow predetermined steps, while agents receive a goal, gather context, form a plan, call tools, and work across longer tasks with human review. Context engineering therefore becomes increasingly important. Matter data, firm knowledge, permissions, legal skills, and connections to systems through tools such as MCP all shape the quality of agentic work. M&A due diligence already represents one area where longer-horizon agentic processes are gaining traction. Legora describes the same architecture through its agentic operating system, or aOS.

The discussion then turns to economics, pricing, and proof of adoption. Greg points to Crowell & Moring’s reported 91 percent attorney adoption and nearly 70 percent weekly usage, while Forquer argues login counts and activated licenses tell only part of the story. Legora tracks daily activity and depth of feature use, including tools such as Tabular Review, skills, playbooks, and extraction templates. Agent Pro’s shift to consumption-based pricing introduces another measurement challenge, with credits tied to usage alongside dashboards, spending controls, and project-level attribution. For law firms, a broader question follows: when AI compresses hours while increasing speed, scope, and output quality, traditional measures of efficiency and value start pulling in different directions.

The episode closes with a look at what law firm innovation leaders should prepare for next. Forquer identifies the data layer as one of the central issues behind successful agentic AI. Secure access to documents, matter-level permissions, governance, firm knowledge, and well-structured context determines how far agents progress into complex legal work. Talent matters alongside infrastructure, which brings the conversation back to legal engineers and new hybrid roles spanning law, AI, knowledge management, and data governance. The episode leaves innovation and KM leaders with a practical agenda: improve data governance, build legal engineering skills, align stakeholders around risk and outcomes, and measure value through work product, adoption depth, and client impact.

LINKS

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review. I have Sarah Glassmeyer here from Legaltech Hub. Sarah’s going to share with us how you can use the Legal Technology Directory to prep for ILTACON.

Sarah Glassmeyer (00:12)
Yeah, so this is probably one of the more exciting times of the year for legal tech kind of leading into ILTACON. Everyone’s excited to see all the new changes, see people we haven’t seen for a year. So Legaltech Hub can really help you pre-game and get ready to get the most out of it because while you’re there, it does seem like you live in Nashville and you’ve been there your entire life, but it goes really fast. You really only have like two and a half, three days to talk to vendors. So a couple of things I would suggest you do.

One, look at the list of who is exhibiting at ILTACON. So if you go to the ILTA website, they have a legal tech directory but guess what? That is us. We partner with ILTA. It is a mirror of our directory.

You can see the little badges, and that will tell you who’s exhibiting at ILTACON. Don’t just wander in there. Think ahead and think like, what am I looking for this year? Am I looking for a new kind of document automation tool? Am I looking for a new AI legal assistant?

So you do some filtering, make a list to see who’s going to be there, and start thinking ahead. And through the directory, you can see, for example, that some companies don’t integrate with X tool, so they’re off the list for us. So you can kind of do a little pre-filtering, pre-gaming, and figure out who you want to talk to, who’s going to make the most of your time. And then from there, if you’re back on our platform in the Legaltech Hub directory and you’re logged in, you can make notes. So as you’re wandering through the exhibit hall, visiting the people you want to visit, you can kind of make notes saying, “Here’s this person’s email address that I spoke to and I want to follow up with them,” or, “Maybe show Bob this when I get back to my office,” or, “These people are off the list.

Forget about them.” And so you just kind of keep track of who you’ve talked to, what you’re thinking about things live, and it’s all in one place on the Legaltech Hub directory, not just a swag bag full of business cards and flyers. So that’s how we can help you get the most out of what you’re doing. But also, I do suggest just wandering around the exhibit hall because everyone who’s there does have a listing on Legaltech Hub. So you can kind of double-check it. But I think it’s really good just to kind of wander, see who catches your eye, have a spontaneous conversation because you might find a vendor that you never considered or something you weren’t really thinking about ahead of time.

So it is kind of a fun time to get yourself absorbed in what’s happening in legal tech.

Marlene Gebauer (02:27)
Yeah, serendipity is definitely part of the ILTACON experience, but this is great advice in terms of using the Legaltech Hub directory because it can be overwhelming and this will allow you to focus on the vendors and people that you definitely need to talk to before you leave. Thank you.

Marlene Gebauer (02:54)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (03:00)
And I’m Greg Lambert And today we are going to be looking at the next phase of legal AI work where vendors are moving beyond, or perhaps more accurately, adding to assistants and isolated pilots, toward more agentic work, more firmwide deployment and new pricing models.

Marlene Gebauer (03:20)
And our guest sits at the center of those commercial and operational questions. Patrick Forquer is Chief Revenue Officer at Legora, where he leads the company’s global go-to-market strategy and works with law firms and legal teams moving AI from experimentation into daily legal work. Patrick, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Patrick Forquer (03:40)
Hey, Marlene. Hey, Greg., thanks so much for having me.

Marlene Gebauer (03:43)
So one thing caught my eye recently. Legora is hiring a significant number of attorneys, not just software engineers. I heard Max on a podcast saying that you guys may have more lawyers than engineers, and that’s kind of unique in the industry. So you’re hiring legal engineers, legal associates, and lawyers with practice experience. What do those lawyers actually do day-to-day?

What skills make someone successful in those roles? And what does that tell you about where the profession’s headed?

Patrick Forquer (04:15)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I get this question all the time. And I think legal engineering is like one of the most exciting roles in technology now, just generally, because they’re on the front lines of AI and the AI revolution, doing the hard work of change management and adoption in firms. And so I think if you wind all the way back, I mean Legora was founded by engineers, right? One of the founding principles of the company is that we want to build with lawyers, not simply for lawyers.

That means taking their feedback and understanding the deep levels of requirements and subject matter expertise needed to build a successful legal AI platform. For us, that’s always been a founding principle, having lawyers in the business helping guide the direction of the product. More importantly these days, there’s this idea of transformation. We’re fortunate that Legora is popular right now. We get to have lots of conversations with many great firms and great companies out there in the market.

But at the end of the day, we have to help lawyers adapt AI into their ways of working, into their workflows. And candidly, you can’t just do that with standard consulting practices. You have to have deep levels of subject matter expertise. So, for example, people from an M&A background understand how an M&A deal gets run and the due diligence process. The same applies to litigation and the different aspects and practice areas of legal work.

And so our lawyers predominantly work in our legal engineering function. They embed with our sales and post-sales teams. First, they have deep levels of practice-area expertise. So they bring credibility to our clients: we understand your business, and we understand the types of deals, cases, and matters you’re working on. And then they have high levels of technology and AI proficiency, meaning they understand how to do things like prompt and context engineering.

They understand how agentic workflows work and how to build them. And they’re highly curious and adaptive in a client-facing environment where you can go in and work on a live deal or a live matter and help build sort of long-horizon workflows within Legora to help our clients deliver faster and better work. It’s really exciting, and I love spending time with our legal engineers. They’re some of the smartest, best people I’ve ever worked with.

Marlene Gebauer (06:36)
That’s a great endorsement.

Greg Lambert (06:36)
See Marlene, this is why we’re having a hard time finding these people. They’re taking them from us.

Marlene Gebauer (06:39)
That’s what I was going to say. I’m seeing discussions about what’s going to happen to our junior people, and those are all legitimate questions. I’m glad we’re having these discussions about other job opportunities that may be out there for people.

Patrick Forquer (06:58)
Yeah, and we definitely think that, Marlene. We think legal engineering is a new career path. It has always existed in different forms at different companies, and Greg and I were talking about that earlier. But the current form of building these bespoke workflows, skills, and capabilities within tools like Legora is not something that was done as commonly as it is now. And they’re making a meaningful impact on the client work that’s getting delivered.

And it’s showing up for our clients in their work with their clients. And I think that’s the most exciting part. I definitely think it’s a new career path that’s opening up a ton of opportunity for the folks that work for us. And we’re really excited about that.

Greg Lambert (07:45)
Just curious, Patrick, about the types of talent that you’re looking for. Is there a certain practice range? Are they, say, seventh-year or tenth-year lawyers? What’s the sweet spot you tend to look for in the talent?

Patrick Forquer (08:02)
We actually hire across the entire spectrum. We have everything from folks who’ve done a couple of years as an associate through partners who work with us and they tend to focus on obviously solving different problems. Especially within BigLaw, there’s so many different types of transactions and deals and matters and cases that are happening on a day-to-day basis and there are different needs, and how you train and enable a partner is very different from how you train and enable a first-year. And we just try to map practice area and sort of seniority to help solve the different problems we’re looking at so we can add the most value to the firms that we work with.

Greg Lambert (08:44)
You’re the revenue guy, so let’s talk a little money now.

Patrick Forquer (08:49)
Okay.

Greg Lambert (08:50)
I know that you guys have raised significant capital. I think I was looking at Series D so far. And you’ve gotten busy on the acquisition side including a recent acquisition of Wexler, which I think is like the fifth

Patrick Forquer (09:03)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (09:04)
or sixth acquisition. So, instead of asking you specifically about the individual acquisitions, what’s kind of the strategy that you have when you’re looking at acquiring and building through the acquisition process?

Patrick Forquer (09:21)
Yeah, for sure. It’s a couple of different things. First and foremost, we’re hiring amazing talent. And so the folks that are coming into the business through this acquisition are high-slope, highly intelligent, hardworking folks that we want to work with. And they’ve built platforms that are solving big problems that are relevant to our customers and the firms we work with.

In this world, as you know, there’s so much going on in legal tech. There’s so much noise and so much chatter. A lot of times when you’re comparing sort of legal AI platform A to legal platform B, you’re looking at it in terms of like apples and apples, right? It’s like you’ve got drafting, we’ve got drafting, how are we doing it? How are they doing it?

And so on and so forth. So part of the strategy also is we want to be a wide application layer for the firms we work with and a platform that any practice area could work within, but we also want to be really deep. The deeper the capabilities we add, for example the litigation capabilities Wexler provides, the more we can be both wide and deep and that sort of keeps the comparison from an apples-to-apples comparison. So Max likes to make the comparison of apples to fruit salad. And so we want to add more of these bespoke, deep levels of capabilities.

We bought Cadastral for real estate work. We’ve got Wexler for litigation work. We brought a company called Graceview that we integrated into the platform in under 60 days for regulatory horizon scanning as an example. So not only do we want to be able to work with every type of lawyer, we don’t want to just do surface-level work. We want to go deep within each practice area and within each area.

So it’s really important to us that we provide the highest level of value possible. And we’re able to do that through our M&A strategy. And so we’re trying to provide more value and more bang for your buck when you work with Legora.

Greg Lambert (11:12)
Yeah. And when you’re doing these acquisitions, you talked about making it both wide and deep. Are you really looking at kind of becoming almost like a matter management platform where the attorneys are constantly working within the Legora platform over a wide range of activities? It’s not just legal research or document drafting. It may be directly accessing your document management system and bringing things in and working with them there or maybe even the accounting system.

How wide and deep are you going to go?

Patrick Forquer (11:49)
Yeah. With any type of work that you do, no one likes bouncing around to different systems to do different things. And insofar as we can add capabilities to our platform that make sense for the type of work that we’re doing, we’re going to look at it. And certainly for us, we want to look at M&A as an accelerant to adding value and keeping folks spending more time in the platform. So yeah, we’d love for you to be able to do an end-to-end M&A due diligence process, for example, in Legora.

Many firms are doing that today. And actually, that was our fifth acquisition of the year. And we’ve run all those acquisitions on Legora. And we did one of those acquisitions in 13 days, using our product to run the M&A due diligence. Obviously, we work with some amazing law firms on that as well.

So it’s been really fun to see it in action. The more capabilities that we have, the longer folks are going to spend in Legora, and that’s good for them and good for us.

Marlene Gebauer (12:46)
So let’s keep talking a bit about the workflows. We’ve certainly moved from asking, “Can AI draft or summarize?” And now we’re really talking more about these agents that can execute multi-step automated legal work. We hear a lot about it, and I’m sure that there are pockets where it’s done. Which legal workflows are genuinely ready for that sort of next step today, and where do you think it’s still a little bit of theater?

Patrick Forquer (13:22)
Yeah. Well, it’s a great call out, Marlene. From my perspective, you hear a lot about agents out in the market. Everyone’s got an agent doing X, Y, or Z. But if you really look under the hood, a common pitch is, “We have this number of agents.” Anyone who tells you they have like hundreds of agents, I think is perhaps misdirecting a bit.

So, is it a repackaged workflow? Workflows have existed for a long time. n8n technology has existed for a long time. And then there’s lots of different workflow tools that you can buy that have if-then logic. Are you buying something that’s a repackaged workflow or are you buying something that’s truly agentic? And for us, the way to think about it would be

Marlene Gebauer (14:04)
And maybe explain what’s truly agentic versus not.

Patrick Forquer (14:08)
Yeah, so the agent in Legora, like the Agent OS that we launched earlier this year, it can click every button you can click in the platform. So it’s not just a set of rules that it’s following, like “if this, then do this; if that, then do that,” which you have to then go in and like edit those rules or that logic within a particular pre-baked package. With the agent, the big difference is you’re sort of moving from prompt engineering to context engineering, right? So with agentic work, you want to give it a definable scope. You also want to have the data and the sources made available within the project in Legora.

So everything that you’re going to be doing is grounded in source and truth. And then you also want to have a human in the loop at each step to customize and make sure everything is working like you want it to. So if you give the agent a goal in our system, and then you give it some context of that goal around like what it is you’re trying to do, sort of guardrails and things to watch for, then our agent is going to come back and it’s going to ask you some questions, some clarifying questions around the scope, around the goal. It’s going to look through the documents and make sure it has all the context it needs to achieve the goal. Then it’s going to present you with a bespoke plan for that particular goal that you’ve outlined and you can layer in skills, tools, and resources within Legora to make it even more bespoke and more granular to improve the work product.

The plan that it’s showing you is then the prompt. So in the old school world, the “Improve Your Prompt” button was a big feature that we still have that people like, but with an agent, you don’t really need the “Improve Your Prompt” button as long as you give it enough context with a very well-defined goal and all the resources that it needs. It’ll create the plan. And the plan is in many cases a long-horizon task that can run for 20, 30, 60, 120 minutes in one go to solve these increasingly complex problems. As long as as it has access to all the legal skills that we provide it in the tool, all the context you give from the firm or from your client documents, the agent can then go run these long-horizon tasks and solve increasingly complex problems instead of saying, “Go run this four-step workflow” that was pre-baked when I logged in.

And so it’s quite different and it’s extremely flexible and bespoke to the particular problem that you’re working on. That education, though, and that sort of change have been a journey. These are new capabilities that only really emerged as the new models came out around Christmas and the beginning of this year. And so we’ve had to educate our teams on what they can do, what they can’t do. M&A due diligence, Marlene, to answer your question specifically, is an area where we’re seeing an increasing amount of that work being able to get done with the agentic work.

And we’re hoping there are increased capabilities with Wexler as we sort of bake their capabilities in the platform over time that you’ll be able to do that in the long run. But yeah, we’re still working on this together and figuring it out with our customers.

Marlene Gebauer (17:22)
Thanks for thinking of the litigators.

Patrick Forquer (17:24)
Yes, of course. Always thinking of the litigators.

Greg Lambert (17:28)
You were speaking about things coming out over the Christmas break. It was kind of funny because I was talking with one of our AI-forward partners that had developed a process earlier in the year, and he was sending an update and then one of the other partners was like, “Do you realize it’s only been six months since you created this?” And we were all

Patrick Forquer (17:49)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (17:49)
like, “Holy smokes, is that all it’s been? It feels like forever ago.” I’m wondering, sticking with the agents, and especially with all the transformation we’re seeing, I have a two-sided question. What are you finding that law firms may be a little slow on when it comes to putting an agent to work? And then for those that may be overachievers, what are some things they think it can do that it’s not ready for yet?

Patrick Forquer (18:21)
Yeah, that’s a great question, Greg. I think one thing is to be transparent. The rate of change in AI capabilities, in some cases, outstrips what the organizations we work with are able to absorb. The change is happening so fast. We all have to be transparent and honest about the fact that these things are changing.

What you could do six months ago or the thing you designed six months ago may not work the same way. There are all kinds of organizational questions around that, like approvals to use different capabilities and all the risk and the training and the change management. So I always tell folks, if you’re using AI today only to summarize documents and draft emails, you’re probably not doing enough, right? But in

Greg Lambert (19:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Forquer (19:10)
many ways, the question is: Does the agent have access to all the context and data and resources that it needs to complete the task? We’re seeing an increase in requests for things like MCP builds. So we have a team of folks, for example, that can build secure MCP access to different systems that’ll enable multi-system execution across a number of different areas, but you have to have the right security and guardrails around data governance in place before you can do that. I think a lot of folks think, “I can eventually just tell the agent, go do this thing, and it’ll figure it out.” And the agents, in theory, have the capability to do that. But do you have that sort of matter-level isolation?

Do you have the document-level permissioning structure down? Have you given it enough context and enabled it with your firm’s embedded skills and context so it knows, “This is how we do this particular piece of legal research,” or, “This is how we do this particular type of drafting,” so it can produce content that’s in line with your expectations? And that’s a journey. Again, going back to our legal engineers, that’s why we have so many legal engineers, so that we can work with our clients in a more embedded way and help them develop those more complex use cases. Does it have access to all the skills and content that it needs to produce the output at the quality that you want?

Marlene Gebauer (20:34)
We’ve heard in the past that a lot of AI companies are saying lawyers are saving time using the tools. But we’re also starting to hear, because of that, how are we sort of looking at the economics of legal services? Danielle Benecke, on the podcast Max was on, was saying that they do this by outcome. There are a lot of different ways to do this. Her team works directly with clients.

So, when are we going to start talking about how to measure the changing economics of legal services and how are we going to price things when using AI? I think people want to talk about it, but I don’t know that people are ready to do anything about it. So I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.

Patrick Forquer (21:27)
Yeah, well, look, we could spend the whole podcast talking about this. We could probably spend all dinner

Marlene Gebauer (21:31)
True.

Patrick Forquer (21:31)
and all night talking about all that stuff too. And certainly I’m not here to tell lawyers how to price and package their work. But I have some thoughts on what you were going through. First, I think it’s a misnomer just to think about AI in terms of efficiency, right? If you’re using AI only to save time on things, I think that’s mostly the way the first wave of AI worked.

People are doing that sort of look back, right? I used to do this thing this way and it took me 10 hours, and now I do it with AI and it took me 30 minutes. That type of stuff has existed for a while. And I don’t think that’s particularly exciting to the market anymore. What we try to look at in terms of a look forward is, okay, if you’re commoditizing certain types of work product that used to take you 10 hours and now it takes you 30 minutes in terms of time, then what does that enable in terms of quality of output?

What does that enable in terms of adding new features or new services that maybe you couldn’t have done previously? What can you package or repackage as part of new work product that wasn’t available? So there are all kinds of 50-state surveys and all these different examples of things that would have been too onerous in a world pre-AI that you can now deliver in a really effective way using platforms like Legora. And when we think about value, anytime you’re looking at an economic system more broadly, if certain pieces of the inputs into that system are getting commoditized in terms of time, then what you typically see in other industries is that the ecosystem and the economy itself gets bigger. So we think there’ll be more legal work, that there will be more legal services, that this is accretive to the overall market.

And it’s a really exciting time to be a lawyer and be working in legal services. And, as I’m sure you both know, like if you talk to any litigation partner, like they’re busier than ever, right? There are more cases coming in, there’s more work to do. People talk about time as it relates to you know the billable hour. But I was talking to a CLO of a big company a few weeks ago and he was mentioning, if we were working with an external counsel and they used to say, “Hey, if we can do this M&A deal in six months,” today they might say, “Maybe we can do it in three or four months.” Is it more or less valuable to do it in three months than six months?

Again, I’m not here to answer that question for folks or tell people how to price things, but I certainly think there’s an interesting conversation to be had around value. And if you’ve got an amazing attorney today who’s working just with Microsoft Word and Outlook, and you give them a platform like Legora, is that attorney more or less valuable to their clients? And what are the economics of that work? Certainly I have every confidence that legal research went from analog to online, data rooms went from banker boxes in a conference room to platforms like Intralinks and Datasite, and paper moved to email. There’s been all kinds of these examples over time and legal services has only grown and thrived.

We fully expect that to be the case with AI. How that looks and the shape of it between lawyers and their clients, things will change and evolve for sure, but we think it’ll be very positive and that there’ll be a lot of opportunity.

Greg Lambert (24:56)
Before I go further into the economics, there was something that you mentioned in your last answer where you talked about change management being one of the hardest parts of the deployment. I read something earlier where I think Crowell & Moring was talking about how they had a 91 percent attorney adoption rate. A year ago, we were fighting to tell people whether it was safe to use these tools or not, and now we’re

Patrick Forquer (25:23)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (25:25)
looking at 91 percent adoption. And I think they said they also had 70 percent-plus weekly usage within like six months of deployment. So I’m curious when you do these types of rollouts, what are the success metrics Legora has? I can look at metrics and I can see people have logged in or people have run prompts, but I don’t necessarily see

Marlene Gebauer (25:52)
Or the skills they’ve used. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (25:54)
Yeah, I don’t necessarily see some of the details. So what are you looking at on your side as far as success and how your users are using the product?

Patrick Forquer (26:05)
It’s a great question. And this is an area where we’ve evolved and grown so much over the past few years. And it’s a huge emphasis for me. It’s one of the top three things that I focus on every day when I go to work. How are we doing on the implementations that we have active?

And we actually have an entire team dedicated to this particular piece of our customer engagement. So this isn’t something that’s done by sales or our post-sales engagement team. We have a team that’s dedicated and focused on this. We’re continuing to evolve our strategies as we learn. We’ve done thousands of these now, so there are a couple of areas to think about.

For us, the speed and quality of implementation is the number one leading indicator of client satisfaction and overall renewal metrics. So we look at whether we got it done in the timeline we had agreed to with the client, right? So we look at speed. Did we get it done on time? And that time varies by client, by size, by the type of implementation.

We have different implementation options. We run through those and collaborate with our clients to create bespoke plans for all these big rollouts that we do. And then, of course, we look at a ton of data. And as you mentioned, Greg, for us, we don’t look much at activated licenses or number of logins. What we really look for is deeper than that.

Greg Lambert (27:32)
Those vanity metrics are really nice.

Marlene Gebauer (27:36)
Love it.

Patrick Forquer (27:36)
Of course, monthly active usage is nice. But we want daily active usage. And we don’t only want daily active users. Going back to my earlier sort of anecdote. If folks are coming in and only summarizing documents or saying, “Respond to this email for me,” that’s relatively shallow usage, and it’s easily commodified across other platforms.

We know that if folks are using more of our products and doing more complex tasks in Legora, and, as Marlene mentioned, are they using skills? Are they using playbooks? Are they using extraction templates? How many parts of the product are they using? What parts of the product are they using?

So we have a product called Tabular Review. Tabular Review gives us the ability to do bulk document review and extraction. When I first saw Tabular Review and met Max, I thought, “My gosh, this is amazing, and this is going to change the way work gets done. Period. The end.” If people use Tabular Review, they have their light bulb moment with AI.

It’s like, “My gosh, I can get all this data out of this big document set and then turn that into a RAG that I can draft, review, research, and so on, on top of with the agent.” And it unlocks an incredible amount of complexity in terms of the things that you can do. Those are the types of things we look at. Of course, we look at monthly and daily active usage, but we also look at quality of usage. So we have a number of different mechanisms and nomenclature we use internally. We might see that Marlene logged in a certain number of times this week and used a certain number of tools within the platform.

We can’t see the data or prompts, but we can see the tools she’s using. That’s the deeper level of analysis that we look at. And typically when we see certain feature usage, we know that we’re going to have a happy customer who’s solving big problems and getting great results from Legora.

Greg Lambert (29:31)
Now I’m going to hit you with the hard questions so...

Patrick Forquer (29:34)
Great.

Greg Lambert (29:35)
Yeah, butter you up.

Marlene Gebauer (29:35)
We save them for the end. We butter you up, and then we save them for the end.

Patrick Forquer (29:37)
[Laughs]

Greg Lambert (29:41)
and then hit you.

Marlene Gebauer (29:42)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (29:43)
So a few weeks ago you announced that Agent Pro, which is one of the high-end tools in Legora, is moving to consumption-based pricing. The more tokens you use, the more it’s going to cost. And I think this was not a surprise to the industry that this was coming, but you were one of the first to move to this. So as a customer of Legora, what should people be thinking about as far as planning? It’s easy to plan per-seat pricing because you know what the cost is going to be.

When you start thinking about tokens, credits, or consumption-based pricing, how are you coaching your clients on how to approach that?

Patrick Forquer (30:27)
Yeah, it’s definitely a model from a technology provider that’s newer for legal tech. It’s used very heavily in other databases and technology systems, as you know. So for us, there are pros and cons to every pricing model. So on a per-seat model, the question we used to get was, “Okay, if you buy 1,000 seats from Legora, but what if these people don’t use it? What if Marlene goes on vacation and it’s sitting there?”

Greg Lambert (30:52)
Can I get a refund on that?

Patrick Forquer (30:54)
Yeah. “Do I get credit back if she doesn’t use it or something like that?” I can tell you that there’s no perfect pricing model. There are pros and cons to everything. The second thing is, look, this is new, this is a journey that we’re all on together. We try to lead with a bunch of empathy and understanding and try to be extremely collaborative and transparent with our clients as we work through this together.

I’ve worked at companies that sold consumption before. There are some key tenets I like to think about. First, we have to be able to predict consumption across various scenarios pretty well. The example I always use is: if we’re going to sell you 100 licenses, sorry, 100 credits of Legora. And to be clear, we’re not simply taking the tokens we use and just adding a margin on that and doing cost-plus pricing.

The credits are an amalgamation of different document API and token usage in the platform. So we don’t simply take the number of tokens that you used on a given day and add some money on top of that. But if I sell you 100 credits of Legora and then three months in you use 1,000 and I send you a surprise bill for 900 tokens, sorry, 900 credits, guess what? You’re going to get super pissed and you’ll probably churn, right? That’s an easy way to lose a customer.

That’s not a good scenario to be in. On the flip side of that, if I sell you 1,000 credits and you’re very happy, and then you use 100, and then you renew your contract at 100 credits. If we take a 900-credit churn, that’s bad for us. And then our investors are like, “What the heck? You just took a 90 percent churn on this very happy customer.

What’s going on?” So it aligns incentives in a really nice way. It aligns incentives around whether you’re using the product and whether we’re able to accurately predict that. Does the usage account for experimentation and different usage patterns? And do certain user types use the product differently than others? Are we able to report on that?

Are we providing visibility and governance? So, can we do user-level caps? In our case, you can put usage metrics against a particular project or matter in Legora. So you have governance and control you can put in place to make everyone comfortable and prevent certain situations from happening. But at the end of the day, it aligns incentives in a really nice way.

And if we’re able to predict the way we should, and communicate your consumption on a weekly, monthly, and real-time basis, so you know exactly how much you’re using and the patterns we’ve laid out hold, then you typically get to a good outcome. At the end of the day, I always ask our teams: for every dollar of Legora you buy, like what do our clients get? For every credit of Legora you use, what do you get in the outcome? Is it only efficiency, or do we deliver the other value-added benefits that we were talking about? And one of the more exciting things for the second half of this year is that we’ve hired a value engineering team who are working with our customers on what is the ROI of working with a platform like Legora.

And it can’t simply be, “It saved Greg some time on something.” It’s got to be more robust. We’ve done some work with Ari Kaplan on this and published some reports, but this is really the first inning on this stuff. But if we can help our customers tell a narrative, tell a story with data showing that for every dollar of Legora we put in, this is what we get out, and we can do that in a way where we’re communicating and executing on the consumption pricing as I described, then I think it’ll be fine. But it’s new, and we’re working through it with our clients in a really collaborative way. I think we’ll be in a good place.

And like you say, this is the direction of travel for the industry more broadly and I think we’ll be in a good space.

Greg Lambert (34:57)
I think one of the questions I hear the most as we start looking at this, because it’s not just going to be Legora, there are going to be other

Patrick Forquer (35:06)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (35:06)
AI companies that we work with that aren’t necessarily going to use credits and consumption, but instead use a pure model where if you use a million output tokens, you’re going to get charged a million output tokens. And if you let an inefficient process go awry, that’s on you because they’re not upcharging you, they’re charging for what you use. Are you guys thinking about safeguards so that, if somebody sets up an inefficient agent that runs into a loop and can’t get out of it, it breaks, or are there some kind of safeguards that you set up?

Patrick Forquer (35:45)
Yeah, a hundred percent. We already have a lot of these in place and we’re continuing to invest in this area around model selection, model routing, right? You don’t need to use whatever the latest model is for every single task in Legora, right? So model selection, model routing, guardrails against everything from prompt injection, matter-level isolation, all these different things. We we have to have a lot of guardrails in place in the product which we already have, and then we’re continuing to build what we need to make our clients feel more comfortable using Agent Pro in particular.

Marlene Gebauer (36:22)
So Patrick, we have a new question. We sort of look backward to the present and then for our crystal ball, we look for the future. So this is sort of looking backward and looking to the present. What’s one thing that strikes you that’s different today than last year in our industry?

Patrick Forquer (36:43)
I’m glad you asked because I was actually looking back on Max’s interview with you guys last year, and he made the prediction about these long-horizon agents. He said, “They’re coming. It’s going to come faster than you think.” Before we had the agent, we had the assistant. And the assistant could do a couple of steps of a workflow. I think our workflow builder capped out at about five steps because the prior models would run out of gas.

They get what they call context anxiety, right? And wrap something up before getting to the end. The ability for the agents to do increasingly complex long-horizon tasks is here. And it’s something that we were working toward last year, but the reality was we were still in workflow mode. Last summer we were in workflow mode, whereas this summer we’re in Agent OS, with all the things we were just talking about.

So that’s been really exciting to see that come to life. More importantly, we’re seeing our clients use it. And I hear from clients every day about something cool they did with Agent that they never would have been able to do. I was with a client yesterday down in Atlanta. He was talking to me about some exciting work he was doing for a business development use case.

It generated a deck he was excited to use in a pitch meeting. I think the agentic revolution, so to speak, is here and it’s all new and we’re figuring out new applications, new use cases for it every day, even those of us who work at Legora. I was in a demo the other day and one of our legal engineers asked the agent to not only redline a document, but create an HTML page of the issues list based on the redline. That way, the lawyer could have a visual representation they could share with their client based on the redline it had generated for the customer. I honestly didn’t know Legora could generate HTML like that.

I thought, “That’s so cool. I didn’t know

Marlene Gebauer (38:41)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Forquer (38:41)
that.” And so there are all these things that we’re uncovering and, as you can tell, I get excited about it. Our team does too.

Greg Lambert (38:49)
Yeah, I heard someone say HTML is now the new markdown for agentic AI tools especially.

Patrick Forquer (38:58)
Yeah, for sure.

Greg Lambert (39:00)
So let’s jump to the crystal ball question and as we told you in prepping for the interview, you can answer this however you want, but I’m going to phrase it a little bit differently this time because I think this is an interesting and a little bit selfish of me to do this. Let’s say you and I swapped roles. You came in as a chief innovation officer in an AmLaw firm. What’s something that you think someone like me should prepare for over the next few months or a few years?

Patrick Forquer (39:36)
Well, I mean, I think your jobs will be increasingly essential to the success of the firms that you work with. And we think it’s really exciting. Yes, more money. More money. Well,

Greg Lambert (39:46)
So you’re saying we’ll make more money, right?

Marlene Gebauer (39:48)
[Laughs]

Patrick Forquer (39:50)
Hey, man, I read LinkedIn too. There’s a lot of stuff going on in knowledge management these days.

Marlene Gebauer (39:53)
Send that out to the...

Greg Lambert (39:57)
Yeah, we will neither confirm nor deny that we’ve passed that around to...

Patrick Forquer (40:02)
Yeah. It’s a talent war out there right now. But we might have to talk afterwards, Greg. I think the first thing is, and we’ve encountered this because we use Legora internally as well, and we use a number of AI tools. But the layer that gets often overlooked is the data layer.

And with all the talk about agents and all these different things, as we were discussing earlier in response to Marlene’s question, where does the data sit that you need to go execute these long-horizon tasks? And how do we teach systems thinking and design thinking to our internal teams? And maybe that’s the lawyers, or maybe that’s part of the KM function around how we think in terms of these step-by-step workflows that need access to specific pieces of context. The more context you give agents, the better they do, right? But accessing that context within the firm, for many reasons, is such a challenge.

We talk to firms all the time about this. It’s about getting the data in a way that’s secure within the right governance frameworks, but also understanding what your risk tolerance is for the different use cases that you want to do with different agents. That data layer is more important than ever. And that’s an area where our legal engineers are constantly collaborating and working with our customers to understand how it exists today and what we can change to make the agent more powerful. So the data layer is definitely an area that I would look at.

And I do think, going back to the legal engineering sort of type of conversation, that there are all kinds of new roles and new capabilities within those roles that are going to be available. So making sure you have the right team in place probably means I would ask for a bunch more headcount, Greg and Marlene, as I’m

Greg Lambert (41:54)
Mm.

Patrick Forquer (41:55)
sure you’re always doing yourselves and all the knowledge management leaders we work with, doing the same. There are new skills and new capabilities around AI specifically, data governance specifically, that I would want to hire for and make sure that we had that in-house so we could move faster on the AI adoption curve. Without this sort of data layer and without the talent in place, you’re going to be limited in the complexity of the tasks that you can do. And again, we’re all on this journey together as we sort of try to adapt these increasingly advanced capabilities and technologies into our platforms. And I think from our side, one thing that Legora wants to do a much better job of is to leverage the collective knowledge from our peers.

And that’s why I love this podcast and what you guys are doing because there’s so many smart people out there trying to solve these problems. But it can’t be KM or innovation alone. You need partners, customers, KM, innovation, and you need everyone on the same page. Can we align on what the goals and intentions are of the firm as it relates to AI? What are your expectations from us?

We need to make that alignment clear. For the people I talk to who do what you guys do, getting stakeholder alignment is difficult. Everyone has a perspective. People come from different places and may have higher or lower risk tolerance. But at the end of the day, you’re held to a standard, right?

You’re held to a level of expectation. And sometimes you have a great opportunity to go hit that expectation, and sometimes you’re limited because of the constraints put on you by the business. But I’m not sure everyone always appreciates that. From Legora’s side, our job is to try to bring those folks together so people have a deeper understanding of the challenges so that we can unlock the true potential here. Those are some things I would think about.

And you’re probably thinking, “I’ve already thought of all those things. This guy.”

Greg Lambert (43:50)
All right. Nope, I’m writing them all down. That’ll go in my monthly report now.

Marlene Gebauer (43:53)
We’re taking notes, man.

Patrick Forquer (43:59)
I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but just to reinforce, as I’m sure you guys have talked about many times.

Greg Lambert (44:06)
Well, I appreciate that. And Patrick Forquer, CRO at Legora, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today. We’ve covered a lot of ground here and it’s been a lot of fun. Thanks.

Marlene Gebauer (44:19)
Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Forquer (44:19)
Thanks, Marlene. Thanks, Greg.

Marlene Gebauer (44:21)
And thanks to all our listeners for listening to The Geek in Review. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a friend, share it with a colleague, and we’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Greg Lambert (44:32)
And Patrick, where’s the best place for listeners to reach out and learn more about you and Legora?

Patrick Forquer (44:38)
So you can send me an email anytime, patrick@legora.com. We’ve got an amazing website, https://legora.com, and our LinkedIn page has all the latest announcements from the company. So give us a follow. Send me a LinkedIn connection or an email. We’d love to chat with your listeners, and I appreciate everyone listening today.

Marlene Gebauer (44:55)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you so much, Jerry, and goodbye, everybody.

Patrick Forquer (45:02)
See you.

Who Governs Big Tech? Hannah Bloch-Wehba on AI Regulation, Police Surveillance, and Public Accountability

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:28:26 +0000

It turns out that tech companies don’t sit outside of government as just ordinary vendors. This week on The Geek in Review podcast, we welcome back Texas A&M University School of Law professor Hannah Bloch-Wehba to talk about accountability of Big Tech, AI regulations, government surveillance, and the intertwining of public authority and private tech infrastructure. Bloch-Wehba traced the dependency between the two powers all the way back to the 1930s in her article “How Tech Took Over,” in how the tech sector became a foundation for national security and economic growth.

Today’s hybrid form of governance, where Bloch-Wehba explains how a handful of private companies supply data and cloud systems, along with decision-making infrastructures across multiple governmental agencies. It is a struggle for traditional constitutional doctrines to adjust to the modern technology and the operations provided by contractors that are providing their core foundational operations.

The issues also enter into the criminal law enforcement areas and Bloch-Wehba’s “Rights, Knowledge, and Capture in the Datafied State,” discusses how trade-secret claims are throwing a barrier between proprietary data systems and criminal defendant’s ability to examine the systems that are being used to convict them in the courts. There is a strangeness in the judicial systems where corporate choices are shaping the legal process being followed, rather than corporate governance following established legal norms.

Bloch-Wehba’s “Information Law Pluralism” covers how privacy rules, audits, impact assessments, disclosure duties, researcher access, and independent review as parts of a broader system governing exactly how knowledge is shared, validated, and even produced. There seems to be no single device that transparently provides accountability. In addition, she lists how a political campaign program against states attempting to regulate AI companies and products is weakening state transparency even further.

Finally, we cover Bloch-Wehba’s “Rethinking Federal Support for Journalism” where she argues that platform payments give rise to the risk of replacing a governmental dependency gets switched for journalist and new organizations being financially tied to companies they must scrutinize. Ideas floated like an AI tax provide some alternative funding possibilities for supporting local and public-interest journalists.

LINKS

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer (00:01)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review. I have Sam Moore here from Legal Technology Hub. He’s going to tell us about AI governance from the advisory side.

Sam Moore (00:10)
Thank you. Good to see you again. In the advisory team at Legal Technology Hub, we’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients about AI governance. Most law firms and law departments have at least an AI policy of some kind, and some broad standards are starting to emerge. A trend we’re seeing at the moment is a shift away from policies written in 2023 and 2024, which largely stated what you couldn’t do, and toward a more informative approach that defines different risk categories and makes distinctions between routine, low-risk uses of AI and other, more substantial use cases. I think that’s appropriate for where we are, and it’s also what clients are coming to expect from their advisors. One of the bigger challenges we’re seeing right now is how to express an AI use policy in such a way that any member of your legal team could explain it to a client. I think that’s still a big challenge for the industry.

I don’t think clients are all that happy if their attorney says, “I’ll have to get back to you about that,” because the attorney is using AI day to day, so they should be able to explain the policy themselves. How else do you know they’re complying with it? We’re doing some interesting work at the moment, helping law firms and law departments take those first-version AI use policies that are very much “thou shalt not” and turn them into more readable, appropriate governance positions that inform the conversation with clients. If anyone wants to find out more about our advisory services, they can find me or Cheryl Wilson Griffin on LinkedIn, or they can visit legaltechnologyhub.com.

Marlene Gebauer (01:50)
Thank you, Sam. It is important for AI policy to be in plain language so people understand it.

Sam Moore (01:58)
Absolutely.

Marlene Gebauer (02:07)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (02:14)
And I’m Greg Lambert. Today we welcome back Hannah Bloch-Wehba, the law professor at Texas A&M and a leading scholar on law and technology. Hannah writes about how tech can be used to conceal power and evade accountability. Hannah, welcome back to The Geek in Review. We were just looking at the date. It’s only been seven years and two children.

Marlene Gebauer (02:34)
Ha ha.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (02:37)
Thank you so much for having me back after seven years and two children.

Greg Lambert (02:42)
Ha ha ha.

Marlene Gebauer (02:44)
We are absolutely happy to have you, and you have been busy in your role at A&M. So we’re going to dive in.

Greg Lambert (02:51)
Yeah, well A&M’s been busy.

Congrats. What are you guys, like 22nd now in U.S. News & World Report and all the good stuff?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (03:00)
Something like that. We have a new building, a new campus coming up. It’s a pretty exciting time at A&M.

Marlene Gebauer (03:07)
Terrific. Well, I want to dig into some of the things you’ve been writing about. In “How Tech Took Over,” you argue that the government didn’t merely fail to regulate Silicon Valley; it affirmatively helped make technology companies essential to public governance. What legal and policy choices were most responsible for creating that dependence?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (03:30)
So in law and tech circles, we often talk about deregulation and hands-off methods of regulation that started when the internet was commercialized in the mid-’90s. But in “How Tech Took Over,” I go way back to the 1930s and ’40s, and I look at choices that were made in science policy and innovation policy then. Essentially, the government knew that technology and innovation were going to be critical both to economic progress and to safeguarding national security. So they built institutions that promoted both scientific research and technological innovation. Once that ball started rolling, the government became a primary consumer of those innovations. From almost a century back at this point, the government has been making legal and policy choices around science policy and tech policy, like the National Science Foundation Act and military funding of basic research, which were intended to cultivate this industry for public benefit. I think that set the stage for tech’s expansion, but not in a predictable or linear way. So over time those policy choices have changed and we’ve had these different political moments where, for example, the balance between economic progress and national security needs has shifted somewhat. But overall, I think this is a really important sort of reservoir of federal support for the tech industry that tech law scholarship hasn’t really explored. And so that’s why I was interested in digging into this history and seeing why this happened and how.

Marlene Gebauer (05:25)
What was the response to the article?

Greg Lambert (05:28)
Everyone came out and said It’s all lies. It’s all lies, Hannah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (05:33)
You know, I think people have been interested in it in this moment when it’s clear that the relationship between the federal government and tech companies is not an arm’s-length regulatory relationship. We see CEOs at the inauguration lining up to support the president. We have press conferences about the urgent need for federal funding to help build data centers. The U.S. government is intervening in a permitting lawsuit in Mississippi against xAI. We are seeing a lot of weird dynamics in the last couple of years that we haven’t seen before. The conventional narrative that the federal government has deregulated doesn’t capture what’s going on. So I think people are aware and hungry for a better explanation of this relationship. The response has been interested and supportive. I will say, people are like, “This isn’t an article, this is a book,” which is true. It will eventually be a book, but right now it’s one article at a time.

Marlene Gebauer (06:44)
And we’ll have you back for the book.

Greg Lambert (06:45)
Yeah, definitely. It’s

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (06:47)
Well, that’ll help me finish it.

Greg Lambert (06:50)
Well,

Marlene Gebauer (06:50)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (06:51)
it’s definitely interesting times. You started talking about this almost commingling of tech and government. I think we’ve always assumed that the traditional assumptions of constitutional accountability attach to the government.

But we’re almost seeing this blending of authority between the private sector in Silicon Valley and the government. So how are you viewing that in your now article, but soon-to-be book, and explaining this blending between private and public accountability?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (07:34)
So I think this, what I call the emergence of a hybrid form of governance, that intentionally takes advantage of relationships between private actors and public entities, is complicated for conventional approaches to constitutional law. We’ve always had this problem to some degree.

There have always been efforts to extend constitutional accountability to contractors, for example. We have a complicated body of doctrine about how and when that is and isn’t appropriate. We have state action doctrine that limits the application of the Constitution in general. Then we have little exceptions around the edges of the state action doctrine. The problem here, I think, is that the kinds of functions that many tech companies are performing don’t look that familiar. So one of the arguments I make in the paper is that tech companies are really enmeshed in providing the informational infrastructure for government decision making. So take an example like cloud infrastructure for federal government agencies.

A huge amount of that infrastructure is provided by a handful of tech companies. Is that a government function? It’s hard to analogize that kind of function to something that would have happened even 20 or 30 years ago. So we don’t have a lot of good comparisons to say, okay, well, this looks like this other form of public-private cooperation, so here’s how we should think about it.

So I think we’re feeling around in the dark for the kinds of principles that we ought to apply. It’s much easier to apply the traditional state action doctrine when you have a traditional government contractor relationship than when the contractors are providing the thing that makes the government run, and that is, to a significant extent, what’s happening right now. So I think it’s getting much harder to pull them apart. At the same time, a lot of those infrastructural activities are hard for normal people to see and understand. An ordinary person doesn’t care whether the informational infrastructure for a federal agency is provided by Google or Oracle or the government itself. We don’t have a lot of insight into what’s going on. So it’s something that I think is important and yet overlooked in constitutional doctrine and in scholarship, frankly.

Greg Lambert (10:30)
One of the things this brings to mind as you’re talking is, typically, we have a transfer of power, different administrations, different Congresses, but the underlying structure is consistent. Do you see this as causing an inconsistency as we transfer power from one administration to another, or when a new Congress comes in, that we’re kind of the...

Marlene Gebauer (10:58)
We’re looking short-term. We’re looking in eight-year segments as opposed to long-term.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (11:04)
I guess I see it as related, but a little bit different. It’s never been the case that when a president enters into a long-term contract with an outside party, you’re going to redo that contract every Congress, right? Or with the changeover of every presidential administration.

So the system of contracting has always been, in some way, vulnerable to the accusation that it’s not sufficiently politically accountable because the people who made the agreement long predated the current administration. I think this introduces an interesting wrinkle, right? This is not a Trump administration problem. This is a problem that has been occurring and building, as I argue, over decades, right? But if you enter into a long-duration contract with a tech company to provide something like cloud infrastructure for the Department of the Interior, I’m making this example up, but you enter into that contract with Google, you are not going to then cancel it and enter into a different contract with a different vendor for the next administration because everybody knows it’s too much trouble and cost to switch from one vendor to the other. It’s enough trouble to switch from Gmail to Outlook. Nobody does that in their personal lives. Now imagine the entire informational infrastructure of a federal government agency is locked into one provider. It’s hard to destabilize that relationship. Regardless of what elected officials might want to do, there are serious switching costs and serious anti-competitive effects.

Marlene Gebauer (13:08)
I’m curious if there’s another model out there that perhaps clarifies the relationship that we could consider.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (13:18)
I’m curious if you have one in mind.

Marlene Gebauer (13:21)
I don’t have one in mind. I just...

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (13:23)
I can’t.

Marlene Gebauer (13:23)
I’m just, I mean, I realize this is all...

Greg Lambert (13:27)
Are you talking about another government, another country or state?

Marlene Gebauer (13:30)
Perhaps in another country or another government, or something that someone has surfaced as a potential model, if there’s any work being done in that space.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (13:43)
So I’m not a comparativist, but I do think when I’ve talked about this issue in front of European audiences, they’ve been baffled. They’re like, “We don’t have this problem.” There are a couple of reasons why they don’t have that problem. One is that I think they do a lot more public provision than the United States tends to do. So one model is for the government to build it themselves or to recognize that government investments give rise to a certain degree of state control. Historically, the United States has not taken that approach, but I could see a parallel universe where we might take that approach of public provision. I also think that the U.S. constitutional doctrine of state action is not one that I’ve seen in robust form in most European constitutional democracies. So there’s no reason why you have to have that doctrine as the delineator of what’s subject to constitutional constraint and what’s not. You could wish away some of these features of our order, but in the real world where we live and work, these are the constraints we’re operating within.

Greg Lambert (15:17)
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of like Sean West, someone who’s been on the show before, said, Europe’s superpower is its regulation. I think part of the traditional American superpower has been its somewhat hands-off approach to regulation. I can see how everything we do baffles the Europeans, so that doesn’t surprise me.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (15:41)
Yeah, but I think they also, the last time I gave this kind of paper, I gave an early version of this paper in Berlin in 2022. I think it was before the Europeans had turned away from American tech platforms as reliable partners. So I think now that the Ukraine war has been dragging on for so long, and we see that the Europeans are trying to make this pivot away from partnering too closely with U.S.-based tech companies, they’re more attuned to these kinds of problems of capture and enmeshment and the risks they might cause for Europe.

Right. It’s one set of risks when it’s U.S. companies within the U.S. government. It’s a totally different situation when we’re talking about U.S. companies providing the infrastructure for a foreign government, right? I think that illustrates what the structural problems might be, even though the risks themselves look different.

Marlene Gebauer (16:56)
All right, I’m going to pivot a little bit in terms of our questions. I mean...

Greg Lambert (17:01)
We could stay on this topic all hour.

Marlene Gebauer (17:03)
We really could. I am fascinated.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (17:05)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (17:08)
But when the book comes out, Hannah Bloch-Wehba (17:11)
No.

Marlene Gebauer (17:11)
we’re going to talk all about it. So in “Rights, Knowledge, and Capture in the Datafied State,” you examine government use of privately developed data and algorithmic tools, particularly in criminal law enforcement. What happens to due process when someone can’t examine or challenge a system because a vendor claims trade secret protection?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (17:33)
Yeah, I mean, this is an emerging problem for criminal law enforcement, and it’s been emerging for several years now. I’m definitely not the first person to write about it, but it’s not going away. The problem is that when a vendor claims trade secrecy to conceal information about how a product works, a product that was used to produce evidence used to arrest or convict somebody, then the defense has a right to challenge, to confront the evidence against them. They can’t do that because the trade secrecy claim stands in their way. So I think it undermines people’s ability to access sufficient information to exercise their rights.

It undermines their ability to challenge the evidence against them, but it also creates a bigger, more systemic problem, which is that a lot of these tools aren’t tested or validated in a meaningful way before they get used. The process of confrontation between the defense and the prosecution is the way the public gets information about whether this tool works or not.

If you can’t confront it, then you can’t produce that information. Then we don’t know whether it works or not. That seems to me a problem that has social effects beyond the individual defendant in an individual case. We’re using technologies that haven’t been tested or validated, and then, in the course of these individual confrontations, undermining the ability to produce evidence about their validity.

Marlene Gebauer (19:25)
Your Tech Policy Press article shows Google effectively determining whether and how police could conduct geofence investigations. What does that example reveal about capture when a company controls the relevant data, the investigative possibilities available to police, and the information available to the courts?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (19:49)
Yeah, so this is an example of the broader dynamic, which is that these companies wield control over the government’s ability to engage in certain courses of action, and that control isn’t always visible or checkable. Google is a great example. For many years, they kept individuals’ location information by default in something they called the Sensorvault, which is kind of creepy and not what

Marlene Gebauer (20:25)
Yikes.

Greg Lambert (20:26)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (20:29)
I would have called it if I had known that name would have gotten into the public domain.

Marlene Gebauer (20:31)
They needed a PR person on that one. They did not have one.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (20:35)
They didn’t anticipate that becoming public, but they kept everybody’s location information by default in the Sensorvault. That made it possible for law enforcement to go to Google and say, “Hey, we want to know everybody who was in this location at this particular time.” Only because Google had made that choice was it possible for government to do. So, starting several years ago, once law enforcement figured out they could make this kind of request, they started doing it again and again. This is a geofence warrant, and it quickly became the most frequent form of judicial warrant Google was receiving. It became an appealing tool for law enforcement. Strikingly, Google was the only company that would comply with these warrants.

So it’s not that other companies didn’t have the data, but Google was the one that would give the data to law enforcement. To their credit, they said, “Well, we’re not going to give it to you willy-nilly. Our corporate policy is that you need to get a warrant rather than a subpoena or a court order. If you get a warrant based on probable cause, we will work with you.” Then they created this elaborate process by which they worked with law enforcement to deliver this information. It’s a striking example of the law of Google. This is not the law that was developed by

Greg Lambert (22:04)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (22:05)
a legislature or a court. This is not Google trying to apply a ruling that was already made. It’s Google saying, “This is what we want you to do.” Law enforcement is so eager to get this data that they do what Google wants them to do.

And I think Google was right that a warrant is required, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s not their job to decide. Right.

Marlene Gebauer (22:32)
They’re making the call.

Greg Lambert (22:34)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (22:35)
So I think this is a clear way in which it’s corporate policy that law enforcement has to get a warrant. It’s also the data infrastructure or the data governance choices Google is making internally, the collection by default, the indefinite storage, right? Those are the things that make it possible for law enforcement to get this information. So I think, in a clear way, it was Google that shaped the geofence warrant.

Then, in 2023, Google decided, “You know what? We aren’t going to do this anymore. It’s incredibly burdensome for us.” They turned off default storage of location information in the Sensorvault. That’s another example of Google determining whether this is okay or not.

Marlene Gebauer (23:32)
Their choice, yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (23:33)
Like, okay, after several years of complying, now we’re going to change our data governance practices, and this isn’t going to be possible anymore. Again, I think that was a win for privacy. I don’t think it’s a win for democratic control to have individual tech companies determining, based on what’s convenient for them, whether they’re going to comply with a warrant, what legal standards should apply, and whether the government should be able to get this data. That makes me uncomfortable.

Greg Lambert (24:12)
Well, we talked recently about the OpenAI and Hugging Face situation, and one of the comments we made was, if this were an individual, this would be a crime.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (24:24)
Absolutely.

Greg Lambert (24:25)
So this situation where Google decided, “Okay, I’m going to turn this off.” There was a situation, and it’s a little apples and oranges here, but where someone, I think, was coming back into the country and tricked the government official into wiping the data from his phone.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (24:43)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (24:44)
Now he’s charged with a felony for doing this. So, individual crime. If the company did that, it would be a policy change, a change in internal policy.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (24:57)
Right.

Greg Lambert (24:58)
So, yeah, it seems like we’re almost a little upside down.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (25:04)
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I don’t think that should be a crime. I don’t think it should be a crime to decide you’re going to delete your information. But I definitely don’t think we should have one set of rules that apply to big tech companies and a different set of rules entirely that apply to individuals. That seems bad to me, and I don’t think we’ve appreciated the extent to which that’s the case.

But it is true that these companies are making decisions about, you know, how to test their products that may end up violating the law and they’re not being held to account the way that an individual might be. And I think we should conceive of that as a potential problem, right? That the law might not be applied evenly.

Marlene Gebauer (25:56)
Then it’s about the data they collect and how they choose to use it, and there’s no oversight on that.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (26:03)
Well, I think that, to the extent oversight exists, for a long time we’ve assumed that we’ve opted to comply with the terms of service as they’re delivered to us, right? So if the

Marlene Gebauer (26:16)
Yes, our click agreements. Yeah, because everybody reads those.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (26:22)
thing that makes the difference is whether I’m an individual or a company that produced 40-page terms of service. That seems obviously laughable, but I think that is part of what’s going on.

Greg Lambert (26:37)
Well, again, another one we could have a complete show on. As if you haven’t done enough writing, one of the other papers you wrote was...

Marlene Gebauer (26:46)
There’s more. There’s a couple more.

Greg Lambert (26:50)
information. Okay. Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (26:50)
To be fair, it’s been seven years since you had me on the podcast.

Marlene Gebauer (26:54)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (26:55)
So one of the other papers you wrote was “Information Law Pluralism.” First, do you mind defining what you mean by information law here?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (27:06)
Yeah, so by information law, I mean the body of legal structures that governs how knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated. A lot of the time when we talk about information law, people mean one part of it, like privacy law or public disclosure law. I’m trying to bring that all together and say these are all ways in which we govern flows of knowledge.

Greg Lambert (27:38)
Well, in that, you talk about emerging tools, audits, impact assessments, document requirements, and independent assessment. Which of these has the greatest potential for producing meaningful accountability at the end of the day?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (28:02)
Yeah, so part of the impetus for writing this paper was that I took a step back. I decided to do a project where I looked at every piece of proposed and enacted state legislation about AI. This was a stupid project. It was a couple of years ago.

Greg Lambert (28:18)
So small, just a little weekend project.

Marlene Gebauer (28:21)
Well, a fun little thing to do, yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (28:24)
It was a couple of years ago. It wasn’t quite as crazy as it would be to try that project now. But I thought, what are they trying to do? My sense was that there were some broad-stroke similarities and some important differences, and I wanted to capture those. As I looked at these laws, I realized they’re all trying to do the same thing, which is, in different ways and for different audiences, force the AI providers, right? Whether that’s a company, an individual, or a system is often unclear in the legislation, but force these providers to generate and share certain kinds of information about their products. It might be shared with individuals who are affected by those products, like when you apply for a job and have to use an AI interviewing system.

It might be shared with the public, lawmakers, or regulators. We have all these different audiences for all these different kinds of information. So what are they trying to do? That’s the thing I think lawmakers were genuinely uncertain about. I wrote the paper to explain that these different ways of producing information serve different purposes and should be used in complementary ways. So I’m going to avoid your question entirely and say, I don’t think there

Greg Lambert (29:49)
Well done.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (29:50)
is one tool that will be the silver bullet for accountability. Luckily, I didn’t think until pretty recently that we had to choose one tool because I thought it would be up to the states to regulate AI as they saw fit, so we were going to have federalist experimentation. Little did I know.

Greg Lambert (30:13)
I think I found the flaw in your logic.

Marlene Gebauer (30:15)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (30:19)
I might still be right about that. I think the claim to state capacity to regulate AI is strong, and that, but for threats to preempt that experimentation through litigation and threats of cutting off different kinds of aid to the states, we would be seeing a lot of that experimentation in action. The last couple of years have tried to deter it from happening. I don’t think you have to choose one of these tools. They all need to work together. I think the public needs a certain degree of information about how these systems operate in practice.

We need expert insight into how they’re working. That’s researcher access to the under-the-hood data a lot of the time. I think it’s important for these companies to produce information directly to the regulators charged with overseeing their operations. Unfortunately, I also believe there’s a successful political campaign against these laws, and that’s going to stymie the development of legislation in this area. So this is a paper that got...

Greg Lambert (31:44)
Is that argument about national security? Because we’re hearing, well, if we regulate our AI companies, China and Russia are not going to regulate, and we’re going to lose the advantage. Is that the sole argument, or is there something more nuanced in that?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (32:04)
I think there are two related arguments, and they’re familiar instances of this debate. One, AI is essential to national security. We shouldn’t do anything that’s bad for national security. Therefore, we shouldn’t do anything that might be bad for AI development because we need to win the arms race.

Greg Lambert (32:26)
Seems super logical.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (32:27)
It’s super logical at a high level. The problem is that, first, China does regulate AI, so the whole idea that they have hands-off development and we need it too doesn’t work. Second, it’s this assumption that you need a totally deregulatory environment to safeguard national security, but we would never have said that about nuclear weapons, for example. So it seems like a strange leap. I’m also not sure you can win an arms race, but that’s neither here nor there. The other part is about the federal role. Having failed to pass AI legislation in the U.S. Congress that would preempt state legislation, we’ve instead had a series of threats by the president to convene a litigation task force to sue states that regulate AI in an overly burdensome way. We haven’t seen that happen yet, but many states recognize that the threat is real. We also have a litigation campaign dedicated to undermining these laws. So xAI has been suing in California and Colorado to undermine AI transparency rules, and they’ve been pretty successful. Colorado revisited and substantially weakened its laws partly in response to these threats. I think they all hang together as one ball of wax. Whether you call it national security or something else, it’s a successful campaign to get states to change their positions.

Marlene Gebauer (34:16)
Okay. One last pivot.

Greg Lambert (34:19)
Yeah, and you said it’s been seven years, but I looked at the dates. All of these are 2026 articles, so...

Marlene Gebauer (34:25)
Well, we’re trying...

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (34:25)
I had a good year.

Marlene Gebauer (34:27)
We’re trying to keep it fresh. You have definitely been busy. So in “Rethinking Federal Support for Journalism,” you argue that requiring platforms to compensate news organizations might deepen journalism’s dependence on tech companies. And you propose a national journalism foundation. How would you design something like that to support knowledge production while protecting editorial independence, resisting political interference, and ensuring that funding reaches public-interest and local journalism rather than primarily benefiting established media owners? This is an important question in my mind. I Hannah Bloch-Wehba (35:09)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (35:10)
think our whole information and news dissemination platforms are struggling right now.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (35:18)
Yes, and I think they’re going to struggle even more in the year to come. I came up as a press freedom lawyer. I spent four years litigating on behalf of journalists and media organizations, so this is an issue that’s important to me. I think a lot of news organizations are intuitively worried about taking money from the federal government, understandably, because they feel like it might compromise their independence. These proposals are floating around to enable news organizations to bargain with platforms for a share of the money they’ve been losing based on platform competition with their products.

I don’t think that solves the independence problem. I think you’re no more independent

Marlene Gebauer (36:14)
Just trading.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (36:15)
if you take your money from Google than if you take your money from the government. Google is an extremely influential company, and we should want independent news organizations to report on influential actors, whether they are private or public. Right? So I think this is a bad structure, and I think it’s better to have a structure that’s public but independent in a meaningful way. What I’m thinking about is modeled on the National Science Foundation, which tried to thread some of these conflicts when it began funding university research and basic science.

Similarly, researchers were worried that if they took federal money, they would be captured by a federal policy agenda. The National Science Foundation dealt with that through institutions of independent peer review, essentially. Now, all of that is contested. I don’t mean to say it’s easy, make a National Science Foundation and call it the National Journalism Foundation.

But I think it speaks to the fact that these are issues we’ve dealt with before, conflicts between independence and federal support that we’ve been dealing with since 1952, when the NSF was first stood up. We’re revisiting them today with contemporary debates about science policy and research funding. I don’t think it’s impossible to manage. I think it’s important to direct federal funding and support to the kinds of news organizations producing news of genuine civic value, particularly in underserved areas. We have a lot of news deserts in this country. It’s hard for many Americans to access high-quality news. My first order of business would be geographically underserved communities.

Greg Lambert (38:29)
Yeah, that got me thinking, and this might be a little far-fetched, but you have the National Science Foundation that you talked about. Then there are other, not agencies, but other ways of distributing licensing, like ASCAP for the music industry.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (38:49)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (38:50)
Do you see there being some type of underlying control over how information gets distributed and then reimbursed?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (39:04)
Yeah, I mean, I haven’t thought about that end of it. ASCAP is an interesting corollary that I hadn’t considered. The two poles I have thought about are the NSF on one side and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which no longer exists, on the other.

Greg Lambert (39:23)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (39:25)
One of the things they have in common is that both have turned into significant political footballs because their budgets are appropriated by Congress. At the beginning of debates about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they considered an alternative, which was to fund CPB through an excise tax on television sets instead of through the appropriations process.

And that would

Greg Lambert (39:57)
Mm.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (39:57)
have been the funding. I think about this because there are so many proposals to tax AI or take a golden share of AI, and then what do you do with that money? The conversation about supporting an ecosystem that includes journalism should be part of the question of how you tax AI and what you do with that fund. I could see a revenue source that comes from some kind of AI tax and removes at least some of the levers political actors have to bully these agencies or force them to adopt a political agenda that would compromise the integrity and independence of journalistic institutions.

So I think that’s one big question I have. Where do you get the money to support such an institution, and how do you make sure it’s not captured by political interests trying to strong-arm news coverage? I think that’s an important question.

Greg Lambert (41:12)
Whew. Well, on that happy note, let’s wind this down. We’ve started asking a new question before we jump into the crystal ball question. Hannah, you get to be one of the first people we ask this. What’s something that’s true for you today that wasn’t true one year ago?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (41:39)
Well, I was going to say that a year ago we weren’t at war with Iran, and that’s true, but I don’t think it’s that interesting. I do think it’s important for the overall

Greg Lambert (41:50)
Right.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (41:51)
question of how the relationship between tech companies and national security is changing based on the nation’s foreign policy. The thing that I think is interesting and emerging quite quickly is that there is a popular movement mobilizing around two things. One is data centers. Opposition to data centers is becoming a high-profile grassroots issue that I didn’t expect or see a year ago today, although I think the ball was rolling. The other thing is Flock surveillance cameras, which

Greg Lambert (42:33)
yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (42:35)
are everywhere and have been for several years, and are also galvanizing a wave of popular opposition. So the thing I would say, which is a positive spin on it, is that issues related to tech accountability and tech’s enmeshment in the state are much more visible to people than they were a year ago. That means the political conversation about these things is changing quite quickly, especially because it’s an election year.

Greg Lambert (43:08)
Yeah. I saw a story this morning where this guy sat underneath one of the Flock cameras and had his computer set up. The police kept coming by and checking on him because they thought he was trying to hack into the Flock camera. He’s like, “So I’m the problem, right? Not this?”

Marlene Gebauer (43:26)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (43:28)
Yeah. I mean, I do think Greg Lambert (43:30)
Yeah.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (43:31)
it can be a huge diversion of resources. Do you want the police going by to check on that guy again and again? Don’t they have something better they could be doing? That’s the question I ask about Flock.

Greg Lambert (43:43)
Apparently not.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (43:45)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (43:48)
Well, Hannah, it’s time for the crystal ball question. I like this new combo because Greg’s question is looking back to the present, and now we’re looking forward. What is the single biggest change you see coming that you think we need to prepare for in the next few years?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (44:07)
Ugh, I am so bad at predicting the future, you guys.

Greg Lambert (44:11)
Everybody is.

Marlene Gebauer (44:12)
Everybody is.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (44:15)
I hate being on record.

Marlene Gebauer (44:18)
The good thing is, if we wait another seven years, we don’t have to hold you accountable for it. But hopefully

Greg Lambert (44:24)
Ha.

Marlene Gebauer (44:25)
it won’t be another

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (44:24)
True.

Marlene Gebauer (44:25)
seven years.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (44:26)
I mean, I think that from where I sit in higher ed, there are significant changes coming to higher education. I don’t know what they are. If you talk to my husband, he thinks our kids aren’t going to go to college because higher ed will have changed that dramatically in the next 20 years. I’m not sure whether he’s right or wrong because I hate to predict the future. I do think we have certain core assumptions about the kinds of things higher ed does that are going to be different. That’s partly because of technological change in AI. I think there are going to be questions about the role of higher education as the workforce changes, which I think is going to happen fast. I also think a lot of higher education institutions are changing from within. I do wonder what universities and research are going to look like in the next few years. For people who have kids in college, going to college in the future, or going to graduate school or law school, these are going to be different places than they are right now.

Marlene Gebauer (45:53)
Yeah, I agree with that. I saw something not too long ago. My alma mater dropped a number of degree programs and is narrowing its focus to certain ones. That could be a problem. We’re training people for their professions as opposed to broadening their education.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (46:20)
Right. We’re doing that at the same time as, as you said, journalism is starting to collapse. Book publishing is collapsing. Search engines don’t serve the functions they used to serve. So the whole information ecosystem, how people learn, is changing quickly.

Greg Lambert (46:40)
Yeah. Well, again, on that happy note,

Marlene Gebauer (46:45)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (46:47)
Hannah, I want to thank you for coming in and talking with us. This has been fascinating. If I had predicted how well Texas A&M Law School would do in its first 15 years, it’s skyrocketed, and I’m sure you have contributed to that as well. So thank you for coming in.

Marlene Gebauer (47:09)
Definitely.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (47:10)
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Marlene Gebauer (47:14)
Thanks to all of you for listening, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Greg Lambert (47:18)
Yeah. Hannah, what’s the best place for people to find more of your content and learn more about your work?

Hannah Bloch-Wehba (47:30)
You can find my content on my website, hannahbw.com, or the Texas A&M website, and on SSRN, the Social Science Research Network.

Marlene Gebauer (47:43)
As always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you so much, Jerry, and bye, everybody.

Brad Blickstein on Private Equity Thinking, AI Pricing, and the Law Firm Business Model

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:41:21 +0000

We welcome back Brad Blickstein, CEO at Blickstein Group, to discuss how private equity principles may provide law firms with an alternative approach to profitability, governance, and even long-term growth. Blickstein’s new book, WWPED: What Would Private Equity Do? was written to walk firms through how treating topics like pricing, technology, talent, and client relationships as part of the enterprise value instead of overhead expenses after year-end partnership distributions.

Pulling from Jae Um’s topics of Cream, Core, and Commodity framework, Blickstein talks about the legal work as the primary competitive battleground. Much like businesses that provide baked goods, firms have to separate the customized legal judgment from the repeatable legal processes, technology, and what alternative legal services providers offer. Law firm leaders should understand what scalable work is, begin building consistent systems to deliver that work, and truly professionalize pricing over relying upon what a partner’s gut tells them.

We also cover the Blickstein Group’s 2026 Law Firm COO Survey where technology adoption and investment ranks as the leading strategic initiative with 38.1% identified practice silos as the largest structural issue and 27% of COOs listed lack of operational authority as another prime issue. COOs are struggling with being tasked with modernizing law firms, but not given the authority to actually overcome the base issues of decentralized partnerships, competing incentives, and overall firm political structures.

Add AI into the mix, and the pricing question becomes even more important. Some two-thirds of the COOs surveyed confessed that they were not formally measuring any return on investment (ROI) in which they could later measure any law productivity or direct revenue increases. Blickstein points out that faster work in a billable hour model is not the type of math that law firms want to calculate, and that firms have to address this directly and redesign their overall pricing model on value received by the client, not hours worked by the lawyers. We all discuss the issues of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) have face in the more than 30 years since Blickstein originally published an article titled “Alternative Billing Making a Comeback.” AFAs bring with it issues of shadow billing, client trust factors, and the need to express value not tied to the amount to time spent on the work.

We also break down the corporate buyer side and address the Blickstein Group’s 18th Annual Law Department Operations Survey which identifies AI pilot projects in corporate legal departments, but very few operational deployments. These may be tied to the long running issue of poor data hygiene along with business objectives that are not clearly tied to overall corporate strategy.

Brad gets to be one of the first to answer our new question of “what’s true today that wasn’t true a year ago?” A nice lead in to our Crystal Ball question. We cover AI token pricing and having to compete with the new “AI native firms” that are spinning up from former BigLaw partners.

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

LINKS

Transcript:

Stephanie Wilkins (00:01)
The GenAI conversation has been advancing faster than a lot of people can keep up with lately, but some new developments have brought older concepts like prompting back into the spotlight, thanks to a trending new topic: token cost. Token cost moved into the spotlight recently as tools like Claude gained traction in legal because most plans come with token limits, as well as the ability to request limit increases, which has resulted in tales of astronomical bills for some users. Recently, Legora also announced that it’s moving its Agent Pro offering to consumption-based pricing, which means it’s billing by what the agent does rather than by a flat-seat license. And what agents do is consume tokens. Eventually, other providers are sure to follow suit. What many don’t fully understand is just how quickly token usage can add up. A few extra follow-up questions, a document pasted in twice, a chat continuing long after it should have been reset. If that sounds familiar, token consumption compounds faster than you might expect, and you might be looking at higher token usage than you think.

And you might not even realize it until you’ve hit your usage limit or, worse, seen the bill. This is a blind spot we’ve been unpacking in one of our latest article series on Legaltech Hub: how to get more out of tools like Claude without burning time, decreasing accuracy, or racking up unnecessary bills. We’ve covered topics like what tokens are and why they function as a hidden meter running behind every chat, when to reset a conversation versus continue in the same chat, and what everyday prompting habits, from repasting whole documents to burying five questions in one prompt, might be driving up both cost and inaccuracy without you knowing it. Head over to legaltechnologyhub.com to read the full series and learn more about how to get the most out of your token limits and your use of tools like Claude.

Marlene Gebauer (01:51)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (01:57)
And I’m Greg Lambert. Today, we’re exploring the modern legal services market through a value-focused operational lens. We’re looking at what happens when you apply the strategic rigor of private equity to law firms, and how that intersects with the ground truth of legal operations on both the law firm and client sides.

Marlene Gebauer (02:24)
Yeah, we are absolutely thrilled to welcome back a frequent and favorite guest of the show, Brad Blickstein. Brad is the chief executive officer of Blickstein Group. He’s widely recognized in the legal industry as a futurist who’s spent nearly three decades analyzing how legal services are purchased and delivered.

Greg Lambert (02:42)
And, like us, he started when he was 12.

Marlene Gebauer (02:45)
That’s right.

Greg Lambert (02:46)
Brad, we’re going to talk about this, but you’ve been pretty busy lately. This past April, you published your new book, WWPED, which is What Would Private Equity Do?: Unlocking Value in the Law Firm You Already Own. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, you also released two massive benchmark studies: the 2026 Law Firm COO Survey Report in July and the 18th Annual Law Department Operations Survey. So you’ve been busy.

Marlene Gebauer (03:15)
Yeah, Brad the underachiever. Welcome back to The Geek in Review.

Greg Lambert (03:18)
[Laughs.]

Brad Blickstein (03:20)
I have been busy, and I do like to try new things, but I have to push back a little bit at the use of the second-person singular there. I have a great team at Blickstein Group, and they did most of the work that I get the credit for. So I’ve been busy, but they’ve been busy too, and it makes a big difference.

Greg Lambert (03:41)
That’s a good leader that gives credit where credit’s due.

Marlene Gebauer (03:44)
Absolutely.

Brad Blickstein (03:45)
Well, yeah. I mean, it is my name on the door, so...

Marlene Gebauer (03:48)
[Laughs.]

Brad Blickstein (03:48)
But we do what we can.

Marlene Gebauer (03:51)
So, Brad, in your new book, WWPED, you challenge law firm leaders to stop treating their firms purely as cash-flow vehicles for year-end partner distributions and start focusing on enterprise value. You use a great bakery analogy to explain Jae Um’s cream, core, and commodity market segmentation. Can you walk us through the difference between an artisanal legal bakery and a Crumbl Cookies-style system, and why the core segment, representing 70% of the market, is the ultimate battleground for law firms today?

Brad Blickstein (04:27)
Sure. Let’s start with cream, core, and commodity. The idea is that it’s a pyramid. The cream work is at the top. That’s what you think it is: the work where you need a seriously good lawyer to give you seriously good advice or provide seriously good work product. This is where we think about things artisanally. That work needs to be done artisanally. Then, at the bottom of the pyramid, skipping ahead a little bit, we have the commodity work.

Much of that is already not being done by law firms, or is in their captive ALSPs. That work has largely become systematized or scaled. But there’s tons of work in the middle. Jae calls it core work. Sometimes I prefer “run-the-company work.” The work, as you point out, Marlene, that we say is 70% of the market. To be honest with you, that’s a Fermi number, or really just a guess.

But it’s something like that. It’s a big chunk of the market. This is what law departments spend most of their money on and, frankly, where law firms earn most of their profits. This is where the leverage model plays in for law firms. Much of that work shouldn’t be done artisanally. It can be done differently than it is today, and it can be scaled. That’s where the bakery analysis comes in.

If you’re going to the bakery and it’s your 25th wedding anniversary, you’re throwing a big party, all your friends are going to be there, and you want the best cake you can find. You want something special for your spouse. You want to make it a big deal. You want to go to an artisanal bakery where an actual baker with skills is going to bake your cake because that’s appropriate for that situation.

On the other hand, your kid got a couple of B-pluses in school and you want to bring home some cookies to celebrate. That’s nice too, right? But you don’t need to go to that length for that. You can go to a more scaled bakery, something like Crumbl. And what’s the other one? The overnight cookie, the sleepy-time cookie. There’s something else like that. Insomnia Cookies, sorry. The opposite of sleepy time. You can go there and pick up a bundle. Think about how those different types of entities work.

At Crumbl Cookies, there’s likely not even a baker within 100 miles of the store. There’s a formula, a recipe, and technology that makes sure it goes right. They put out a fine product that works for most instances where you want cookies or a cake. I don’t think we always do a terribly good job in legal of differentiating between the two. There’s a lot of work that can be done with technology and different resources in a scaled way.

That work can be more profitable for firms if it’s done right, and it needs to be differentiated from the artisanal cream work, which shouldn’t be scaled. What we’re arguing for in the book, more than almost anything, is that you should figure out what that work is and scale appropriately for your firm.

Greg Lambert (07:26)
Yeah. I was afraid, Brad, that instead of saying the kid got a couple of B’s on the report card, you were going to say, “On your 24th wedding anniversary, you don’t go get a fancy cake,” and I was going to have to make sure

Marlene Gebauer (07:37)
[Laughs.]

Brad Blickstein (07:37)
Well

Greg Lambert (07:38)
my wife didn’t listen to this episode.

Brad Blickstein (07:40)
Well, I’ve been married more than 24 years, and I’ve learned a few things along the way, so you were at no risk of me stepping in that little pile.

Greg Lambert (07:50)
Well, I think that’s a pretty good argument. Part of the issue is firms trying to determine what falls into those categories. But one of the other issues we run into a lot, and we’re seeing it now around AI infrastructure, is the fact that, as partnerships, these firms are designed to distribute their profits at the end of the year and not have anything roll over. So when you see things like Kirkland announcing that they’re going to put $500 million into AI infrastructure over the next few years, one, not every firm can do that. And two, I laugh because I remember talking with a partner who said his wife remembers the one month he didn’t take a draw because they were putting some funds into the future. He said that was 10 years ago, and she still remembers it. It’s outside the norm. How do you convince firms that aren’t used to doing this to figure out a way to build for the future?

Brad Blickstein (09:08)
Yeah, that’s a great question. Not everything is for everyone, right? Not every strategy you might deploy here is for every firm. But it is one of the advantages of taking outside investment. That’s where you can smooth that over. You can use PE funds, or funds from whomever, for some original payout to your partners, to smooth that over time, or to make the investment. That’s one way to do it.

The other way, and I just alluded to it, is to pick your spots. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money for everybody. But over three years, which I believe is the period, it’s not that much money. I can’t believe I used those two things in the same sentence, but it’s not that much money for Kirkland partners, because they have

Marlene Gebauer (09:55)
[Laughs.]

Brad Blickstein (09:56)
enough partners to spread that out nicely, right? One thing I wonder about the partner you mentioned: did he tell his wife three years in advance that one month’s draw might not be coming? There are expectations that need to be set.

Greg Lambert (10:10)
No, I guarantee you he told her the month it happened.

Brad Blickstein (10:14)
Right. So there’s some of that too. But one of the book’s big arguments is that you don’t need to take outside investment to do some of the things a PE fund would say a firm should be doing. I list about 10 different things, but you don’t have to do them all at once. One thing I believe in is that law firms should professionalize pricing.

If I were a PE fund investing in law firms, one of the first things I would suggest is bringing on a serious, professional pricing operation to fix that. I’m not even talking about alternative fee arrangements or flat fees. That’s exactly what I mean by professionalizing.

Marlene Gebauer (10:50)
What does professionalizing pricing mean? Firms have pricing groups, so what are you saying that’s different?

Brad Blickstein (10:58)
Well, some firms have pricing groups. Some large firms have pricing groups. Most firms do not, and most midsized firms do not. In a lot of cases, those pricing groups have been neutered or aren’t listened to. At most firms, it’s still often a partner’s gut feeling about whether they have to discount or whether they can pass through a price increase. In many cases, the engagement partner feels they can’t get that across. They can’t sell that to clients right now without the right data to back it up.

Again, not everything is for every firm. But for many firms, it’s easy to see a couple, three, or five points across the board if you bring in the right type of pricing function. That goes right to the bottom line. Pick your spots. Don’t do everything we’re suggesting here at once. Where can some of this PE thinking truly affect value? Start there, with a bite your partners can digest.

Marlene Gebauer (12:03)
Let’s look at the findings from the July 2026 Law Firm COO Survey. A historic shift occurred this year. For the first time, technology investment and adoption surpassed talent acquisition as the top strategic initiative for law firms. Yet 38.1% of the COOs identified practice silos as the number-one structural issue they would fix, and 27% cited a lack of operational authority. Why is there such a persistent authority gap for professional managers tasked with executing these high-stakes technology strategies?

Brad Blickstein (12:39)
Yeah, I think there are two answers. One is the relative power of the people expected to do that work. At a midsized firm, the COO might have had a title like administrator a couple of years ago, perhaps even the same person. To what extent do the partners empower that person to run a firm the way a serious businessperson would be allowed to?

You hear a lot of this from COO-type folks: “This is what I’d like to do, but the partners won’t let me.” So there’s that. I guess there are three issues. There’s also a big delta between their opinion of leadership and their opinion of partners. Leadership is often more supportive of COOs’ business initiatives than the partners are. There’s that disconnect: “The managing partner is totally behind me, but then when I try to roll it out through the partnership...” You guys live and breathe this every day, right?

Greg Lambert (13:41)
No, I’ve never seen that. Never.

Brad Blickstein (13:44)
I do think, and this is evolved thinking for me, that practice silos are an underrated problem, especially at big firms. Different partners think differently, and different practice areas are built differently and designed to do different things. We understand why they’re put together in a firm, but in many ways they’re not alike enough for some of these systemic changes to be achieved entirely firmwide. The IP practice and the M&A practice, for example, are run and built quite differently.

Greg Lambert (14:23)
When Marlene was giving you that question, I was thinking that one of the worst things you can have in a position of authority is all the responsibility and none of the authority to do what you’re assigned to do. One thing you pointed out in the survey was a rise in COOs coming from outside legal to take over those roles, which makes sense. A lot of us want to run things more like a business, so we bring in businesspeople. But then we throw them into legacy law firm environments. How do you avoid bringing someone in and giving them all the responsibility and none of the authority?

Brad Blickstein (15:16)
That’s such a... Yeah, maybe.

Greg Lambert (15:18)
That’s another book, huh?

Marlene Gebauer (15:19)
Yeah.

Brad Blickstein (15:21)
That might be an encyclopedia. I think a lot of it comes down to where power is consolidated within the firm. If you’re talking about a small or midsized firm where leadership has consolidated a lot of the power, it’s easier. When the job becomes a consensus-building job, it’s difficult. Frankly, if you came from outside legal, that might be an impediment. If you come from corporate America, where it’s hierarchical, what the boss says goes, and people generally stay in line, working at a law firm where that’s inherently not the case is problematic.

One instructive example, and I’m oversimplifying, is that plaintiffs’ firms don’t have this problem as often. There’s usually one or two people’s names on the door. There’s a big boss who is the big boss of the firm, whether their name is on the door or it’s “Tiger Law” or something like that. They tend to row in the same direction, with fewer practice areas. They’ve been able to bring in a lot of talent and innovative business strategies that people on the corporate and defense side struggle to bring in. So it can be done. It takes a consolidation of power, or you need to be a world-class consensus builder, or there has to be some consolidation of power above you within the firm.

Greg Lambert (16:51)
Yeah.

I was going to ask: what advice would you give a COO coming in from outside legal?

Brad Blickstein (16:57)
A little patience, a little Zen. Make sure you re-up your blood pressure medication before you start. It takes the right kind of person.

Greg Lambert (17:09)
Enroll in some yoga and meditation.

Marlene Gebauer (17:11)
Breathing exercises.

Brad Blickstein (17:13)
And fight the battles you can win.

Greg Lambert (17:16)
Yeah.

Brad Blickstein (17:17)
But if you pick the battle, you have to win it. You can’t lose the ones you’ve decided to fight. That’s a good lesson for COOs too. Think carefully about how badly you need something to happen and how important it is. If you’re going to use a lot of political capital and possibly burn your reputation when you lose that battle, think about how badly you need to fight it.

Marlene Gebauer (17:44)
Makes sense.

One of the most striking statistics in the COO Survey is that 66% of COOs report their firms do not formally measure or document AI-related efficiency gains. And 39% of those same COOs expect AI to increase revenue through greater lawyer productivity. If firms are saving time but aren’t measuring it, are they actively devaluing their services? How can a firm defend pricing under a billable-hour model when AI is compressing those timelines and the firm has no baseline data for pricing alternative fee arrangements?

Brad Blickstein (18:33)
It’s a conundrum. It’s a problem. First, I think the number of people who are formally measuring or documenting is going to go up, right? There’s no way we’re going to continue

Marlene Gebauer (18:45)
Has to.

Brad Blickstein (18:46)
not documenting anything. And let’s be honest, while it can be hard to analyze and use, the data is there. These are people who measure everything they do in six-minute increments, right? We can talk about this later, but it’s going to be a much bigger problem in-house, where they don’t track what people do daily. At law firms, they do, so that number is going to change.

I’m fascinated by this AFA question because I’ve been tracking it for so long. You guys know I was one of the founders of Corporate Legal Times magazine, and in the fourth issue we published, in 1992, we ran an article with the headline, “Alternative Billing Making a Comeback.” So 30 years ago, Jesus, 35 years ago now, it was already making a comeback. This idea that...

Greg Lambert (19:36)
Any day now.

Brad Blickstein (19:37)
And we’re almost...

Marlene Gebauer (19:38)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Blickstein (19:38)
here. I think the idea that clients are going to make firms do this has largely been disproven. It’s true around the edges, and there’s 15% or whatever that do it, but the hypothesis that firms will adopt AFAs because clients will make them has been disproven over the last 30-plus years.

Now we’re getting to a point where it might be the firms that need to do this. It won’t be only for client satisfaction, because they think clients want it. It might become the only way to make money. So I’m not as concerned about the 66% that, in my mind, aren’t yet tracking. I’m much more concerned about the 39% who say they’re going to increase revenue through greater lawyer productivity. How? Under what model does that happen? Better productivity should decrease revenue. Perhaps it lets you bring on more clients and make enough of it back that way, but that’s a nuanced issue. I’m not sure the market sees it yet. People are starting to get their arms around it, but I don’t think anyone has solved it.

Firms are going to have to measure productivity better and understand it better. They’ll have to go to clients and say, “Look, these projects that used to take 10 hours, we can’t bill you for one hour. I guess we could bill you $7,000 for that hour, but that doesn’t work. How can we bill you in a way that gives you value and allows us to capture some of the efficiency gains?” To me, that’s

Greg Lambert (21:19)
Right.

Brad Blickstein (21:19)
the battleground. Like that’s what we’re looking at.

Greg Lambert (21:22)
Right. I’m going to switch up my question a little after hearing your answer. I heard this at a conference earlier this year: why would clients want AFAs now, when they think it takes only one hour instead of 10? Where’s the motivation? But my question is more about how we get past the trust factor and move to something beneficial for both sides. We tried this in 2008 and 2012. It was like, “Hey, we’re going to do alternative fees,” and clients responded, “Yeah, I don’t trust you. I want the alternative fee, but I also want you to tell me how many hours it took so you’re not getting one over on me,” to put it politely. How do we get past that?

Brad Blickstein (22:19)
That’s a great question, and it’s an underrated issue. People love to blame firms for the fact that AFAs largely haven’t been implemented, but clients don’t trust their own firms. That’s a big issue. The shadow-billing issue you mentioned is huge. If you’re a firm, you’re effectively putting a cap on the amount you can bill without putting a floor on the amount you could bill. It doesn’t work for firms. I think we’re approaching a crossroads.

The first thing to remember is that clients like sending work to their law firms. They like working with their firms. Despite all the talk about bringing work in-house, and I know that’s a giant trend, all things being equal, most general counsel would prefer to keep sending work to their firms. Now, all things aren’t equal, and they’re less equal than they used to be.

First, firms will have to be more transparent without going all the way to a specific number of hours. Firms have to do a better job, and this is hard, of articulating the value of their work in some way other than the number of hours it takes.

Frankly, I think firms need to stand up a little more. If you’re a firm and a client asks for shadow billing, the proper answer is no. “We won’t share the number of hours this work takes. Either you feel you’re getting a fair amount of value for the work we’re doing or you don’t. And if you don’t, we have a problem, and we’ll talk about that. But the hours we put in aren’t your business.” You have to say it much more nicely than I just did.

I don’t think firms push back enough when clients ask that. The whole point of an AFA is valuing the work rather than the time. And, by the way, the amount of time it takes to do the work is not the same as the value of the work. We have to figure out a way to work together to provide good work for good value, rather than go to work for a certain amount of time. I’m preaching at this point, though. I don’t know how to do that.

Marlene Gebauer (24:37)
It’s a good point, but it’s interesting because you’re getting that level of detail in pitches and RFPs. Clients want to know exactly how much time things take and how much time you’re saving. It’s difficult to respond the way you’re suggesting when they’re specifically asking for this information.

Brad Blickstein (25:08)
It’s hard to pivot that conversation. When they ask that question, the way to pivot is to say, “Let’s not talk about how much time we’re saving. Let’s talk about how much money we’re saving. Here’s what we used to bill you for this type of work, and here’s what we’ll bill you now.” You can ask how long it’s going to take, but what does it matter?

It’s easy for me to sit here on your podcast and say, “Go tell your clients we’re not going to answer your questions.” It’s hard to do, and it takes fortitude. But if you establish the value and build trust with clients over time, I think it works.

The other thing you might do, especially when talking about AI, is think about the other value propositions. Can you get the work done faster? I don’t mean in less time. I mean finished sooner. Can the deal close faster? Can the litigation be settled sooner? In due diligence, can you review more material than before? Classic due diligence used to mean, “Send us the contracts with your 25 biggest clients,” because that was all the due diligence team had time to review. Now you can use AI to look at all the contracts. What’s the value proposition around using AI that isn’t tied solely to efficiency?

Tie that to cost savings rather than time savings or hours saved. Stand up and say, “Look, we respect you, but we’ve thought a lot about this. We’ve spent a lot of energy on it, and we think you’re asking the wrong question. Let us answer the right one.” Some clients will say, “Well, they didn’t fill out our RFP properly.” Too bad. But I think many will respect that and want to work with a thoughtful firm.

Marlene Gebauer (26:54)
I’m going to shift to the buyer side. The 18th Annual Law Department Operations Survey, the LDO Survey, shows a corporate legal buyer that is stabilizing structurally while absorbing broader business mandates, including CFOs stepping directly into contracting. Meanwhile, corporate GenAI adoption is defined by piloting, at 52%, rather than fully operationalized systems, at 23%. Why are corporate legal departments stuck in pilot purgatory, and how does the middle-mile data hygiene problem play into this?

Brad Blickstein (27:34)
Yeah, that’s part of it. First, considering we’re only two or three years into the AI era, depending on how you count, I’m not sure it’s purgatory. In many ways, we’re working through this, and I expect that number to fall substantially over time.

Part of it is caused by all the noise. How do you determine whether a tool is worthwhile these days without giving it a shot? It’s hard. I think we’ll get there, but the data hygiene problem will grow. Whatever the old saying is, garbage in, garbage out. I think we’ll solve the data protection problem. People understand, and are starting to become more comfortable with, how their data is used.

The idea that we want our law firms to provide every possible ounce of efficiency through AI tools, but we won’t allow them to use our data as training data to help them do that, isn’t fair. I think we’ll get past many of those issues over time. But data in corporations is a mess. To get the full benefit from these tools, you’ll have to solve that in many cases. I wonder how many pilots will fail because the technology, adoption, and training are good, but the data isn’t there.

Marlene Gebauer (29:13)
It’s a big issue in terms

Brad Blickstein (29:16)
It’s a big issue.

Marlene Gebauer (29:16)
of getting this data usable, getting it where you need it to go, and making your technology useful. I mean, it’s

Brad Blickstein (29:23)
Yeah, my hope is...

Marlene Gebauer (29:26)
It’s not a new problem, but, yeah.

Greg Lambert (29:27)
Yeah, I was going to say this is a 25-year-old overnight problem.

Marlene Gebauer (29:30)
It’s not a new problem, but I don’t know whether it’s easier or harder. The technology is so much better, but the security issues are more difficult. I’m not sure.

Brad Blickstein (29:44)
What I’m hoping, I guess, is that if you look at e-discovery over the years, technology created the e-discovery problem, right? The ability to disperse data quickly, email everyone, and copy a million people created a data problem. Technology then largely solved it with tools such as auto review and platforms. I’m hoping AI will help solve the data hygiene problem itself, enabling AI to work better on the legal problems the data supports.

Greg Lambert (30:25)
I know this was the first time in the survey, and of course, AI has only been around for about three years, that usability received a higher score and beat out security as the top AI priority for legal operations teams.

I think this opens the door to unique opportunities for law firms to offer services to their clients. Are you seeing clients expect something they haven’t been offered before? Are they receptive to those services?

Brad Blickstein (31:10)
I think they’re absolutely receptive. If I ran a law firm, I’d try to get ahead of all this. I’d build things, find new use cases, and bring solutions to clients before someone else does or before the client tries to build something themselves.

For any work you’re concerned the client might bring in-house, think about what that work is and build a case for why they don’t need to bring it in-house. Explain why the firm can do it more efficiently, better, and at a better price than the law department going through the trouble of bringing it inside. I don’t think we see firms bringing that case to clients enough. When firms do, clients are extremely receptive.

ALSPs are starting to get involved too. If I were a firm or an ALSP, I would build offerings and bring them to the right clients before the client decides to find a solution.

Greg Lambert (32:11)
Yeah. Speaking of ALSPs, why haven’t they wiped the floor with BigLaw? Everyone seemed to expect that, because they have these repeatable processes. Why aren’t they kicking ass?

Brad Blickstein (32:34)
Well, first of all, I think some of them are kicking ass, right? When you look at them as a percentage of the legal market’s overall share, it seems somewhat stagnant. But many of these businesses are on big growth curves within the ALSP segment. There are many reasons, but the big one is that clients like working with law firms, and that’s their

Greg Lambert (32:59)
It’s what they know.

Brad Blickstein (33:00)
preference. If it isn’t working, or if it’s the kind of process or project that makes sense to take away from a firm, document review is a great example. Law firms largely proved they shouldn’t be in that business by throwing a million associates and no technology at document review 20 years ago. Legal service providers and e-discovery providers have thrived there.

For work that is clearly process-oriented, I think ALSPs are doing quite well. But much of what they have to do comes back to the artisanal argument we discussed. They have to convince clients that a large amount of legal work isn’t artisanal, that it benefits from process and technology, and that ALSPs are the people to deliver it.

Marlene Gebauer (33:48)
Okay, Brad, what’s true today that wasn’t true a year ago?

Brad Blickstein (33:55)
I think legal organizations, both in-house and outside, are starting to care about what AI costs. Legora, I believe, talked about moving to a consumption model. That’s a big issue. People are moving from, “Let’s get everyone to adopt whatever they can and use AI wherever they can,” to, “Hold on. What’s it going to cost when we start paying by the token? Does it make sense?”

The underlying assumption is that using AI to do this work is less expensive than using lawyers. At some point, if AI gets expensive enough, that might no longer be true. That wasn’t a concern a year ago. The gold rush was on, and now people are starting to wonder what stream they should mine. I think I mixed the metaphor. Where should we drill, look, or pan? Where should we pan for gold? That’s what I’m asking.

Will these price increases stick? Will open models become more valuable and viable? Those are good questions. I believe people are concerned about this today in a way they weren’t a year ago. I’m not sure how long the concern will last.

Greg Lambert (35:23)
Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see, because six months ago it was, “Burn every token you can get your hands on,” and now it’s, “Whoa, wait a second.”

Marlene Gebauer (35:33)
Well, wait a minute. Hold on there.

Brad Blickstein (35:36)
I’ll also say, and it’s related, that we’re starting to see people distinguish between adoption and fluency. It felt like the standard was activation, and then adoption: “98% of our people have used the tool in the past month.” That’s a nice statistic, but it doesn’t say whether people have become AI-proficient or AI-fluent, whether they’re using it for the right things, or whether they’re using it enough.

Marlene Gebauer (36:01)
Is it useful for what they’re doing?

Brad Blickstein (36:04)
Yeah. As we start asking those questions, it’s going to affect where the value lies and what these tools are worth.

Greg Lambert (36:14)
Well, Brad, before we started recording, we looked back at your last prediction on the crystal ball question, and I think you did pretty well.

Marlene Gebauer (36:23)
Yeah, he did.

Greg Lambert (36:24)
Your prediction at the end of last year was that generative AI and LLMs would fundamentally accelerate how software and tools are built in the legal tech space, and that you thought there would be about an 80% improvement in turnaround speed from idea to product.

Brad Blickstein (36:47)
That does seem to be happening. Especially if you count the things being built within firms and law departments through vibe coding, Claude Code, or all those things, I think we can check that off as one I got right.

Greg Lambert (37:04)
All right. Now it’s time to ask you again. What kind of change or challenge do you see that law firms and law departments need to prepare for over the next few years?

Brad Blickstein (37:19)
I’ll answer two ways to double my shot at getting something right. Generally speaking, the issue of the business and billing model will have to come to a head at some point. Perhaps less so within the next two years, but eventually many law departments will put pressure on firms to reduce the number of hours they bill. I have some thoughts about how they’ll do that, but I don’t know.

If you’re a firm, that doesn’t work under the leverage model. At some point, many firms will have to come to terms with the issue. I also think about all these, and I’m not a big fan of the “AI-native” term, but these AI-native-type spin-offs from firms. Can partners leave a BigLaw firm, start a firm with no associates and use AI instead, then go to the same clients who trust them with that new model? External forces like that might push firms to make some of these changes more than their clients do.

Marlene Gebauer (38:25)
Well, that is food for thought. Brad Blickstein, thank you so much for joining us again and helping us cut through the noise and think like value-focused operators. And thanks to all of...

Greg Lambert (38:35)
Yeah. Thanks, Brad.

Marlene Gebauer (38:36)
you. Sorry, go ahead.

Greg Lambert (38:37)
Thanks, Brad.

Brad Blickstein (38:39)
Thanks, guys. I appreciate this. It’s always fun and thought-provoking talking to you. You ask questions that make me think hard about what the responses should be, which I don’t appreciate, but I do like talking to you guys.

Marlene Gebauer (38:50)
We appreciate it.

Greg Lambert (38:54)
Yep, he had a full set of hair before we started this.

Brad Blickstein (38:56)
It always reminds me of that scene in the movie Clueless where they think she has a concussion and say, “Ask her some questions.” They ask, “What’s seven times seven?” and someone says, “Stuff she knows.”

Greg Lambert (39:05)
[Laughs.]

Brad Blickstein (39:06)
I would prefer if you asked me stuff I know.

Marlene Gebauer (39:11)
And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Greg Lambert (39:21)
And Brad, what’s the best place for listeners to find and buy What Would Private Equity Do? and learn more about

Brad Blickstein (39:29)
Easy.

Greg Lambert (39:30)
Blickstein Group?

Brad Blickstein (39:31)
Yeah, you can go to our website, BlicksteinGroup.com, or for the book itself, BlicksteinGroup.com/WWPED. And I’ve always wanted to say this: it’s available wherever fine books are sold online. You can get it from Amazon or BN.com. It’s not hard to find, and we appreciate the support.

Marlene Gebauer (39:52)
Absolutely. And, as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you very much, Jerry, and goodbye, everybody.

From AI Personas to Rogue Agents: Rethinking Legal Training, Security, and Value

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:54:18 +0000

Fresh from AALL in Cleveland, Greg reflects on a conference filled with legal information professionals who understand how technology performs under real working conditions. These librarians purchase products, train users, support law schools and courts, and often serve as internal advocates for legal technology. Their expertise makes vendor engagement especially valuable, yet major product announcements were scarce. Marlene balances Greg’s conference report with stories from her hiking trip through Zion and Bryce Canyon, plus a brief comparison of Ohio and Utah karaoke culture.

The conversation turns to the rapid growth of innovation attorney positions across law firms and legal organizations. Greg and Marlene describe these professionals as translators who connect legal practice, technology, workflow design, and organizational change. Firms are searching beyond traditional legal career paths for people who combine technical fluency with strong interpersonal skills. For law students and junior lawyers facing uncertainty around AI, these emerging roles offer broader career options beyond the familiar associate track.

Marlene explores the growing use of AI personas and simulations for professional development. Deposition witnesses, opposing counsel, negotiation partners, and drafting reviewers now appear as interactive characters with distinct goals and behaviors. Lawyers receive a place to practice, make decisions, and receive feedback before working with clients or appearing in court. Greg connects simulation-based learning with legal fiction, including his Beyond the Model series, which uses a fictional law firm to explain AI systems, business pressures, and changes in legal work.

The discussion takes a serious turn with a reported AI benchmarking incident involving an agentic model, a breached sandbox, and unauthorized access to Hugging Face resources in search of an answer key. Greg and Marlene examine the episode as a warning about containment, accountability, and excessive faith in technical guardrails. From there, they consider the renewed importance of knowledge management and security as AI systems gain access to documents, financial information, client data, and institutional expertise. Greg predicts growing attention around AI harnesses, structured software layers designed to guide model behavior and produce predictable outputs.

Marlene closes with examples of AI moving into client intake, business qualification, and workflow decisions, including an AI legal receptionist designed for smaller firms. The larger shift involves moving beyond simple tool adoption toward redesigned workflows, staffing models, pricing structures, and client service. Token costs are creating immediate budget pressure, while clients are questioning which AI expenses belong on their bills. Greg and Marlene argue firms must connect AI spending with legal judgment, measurable value, and responsible delivery, rather than treating consumption as a proxy for progress.

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

LINKS:

Here is a chronological list of the substantive topics and sources referenced in the episode:

00:25: The Arithmetic of AI: Tokens and Claude in Legal Work, Legal Technology Hub’s series on token usage and prompting habits.
00:25: Legora’s consumption-based pricing for Agent Pro, including matter-level usage tracking and spending controls.
02:22: AALL 2026 Annual Meeting and Conference, held in Cleveland for legal information professionals.
08:35: “The Hottest Job at Big Law Firms Is Becoming Difficult to Fill”, Bloomberg Law’s report on demand for legal AI and innovation professionals.
11:29: Ai4 2026, the cross-industry artificial intelligence conference at The Venetian in Las Vegas.
12:49: AltaClaro and Verbit’s DepoSim, an AI simulation platform for deposition training.
13:31: Stanford CodeX, including its work on AI personas and legal education.
13:56: Vorys’ AI lawyer personas, modeled on 19 firm partners for training and knowledge transfer.
16:33: Stanford CodeX and Flatiron’s M&A Negotiation Simulator, led by Megan Ma.
16:48: Beyond the Model, Greg’s fictional series explaining legal AI technology, workflows, governance, and law-firm economics.
17:24: Richard Tromans and Artificial Lawyer, including his use of fictional storytelling to examine legal innovation.
17:24: Jennifer Leonard’s work with the Practising Law Institute, using characters and narrative to explain professional change.
18:06: How Tech Workers Are Feeling in 2026, the survey Greg adapted for a fictional law firm workforce.
22:55: Retrieval-Augmented Generation and why legal AI research improved, explored through the first part of Beyond the Model.
23:52: Microsoft CELA’s adoption of Harvey, covering Microsoft’s use of Harvey across legal and compliance operations.
26:42: OpenAI and Hugging Face’s security incident, involving an agent escaping a testing sandbox and accessing Hugging Face systems.
29:01: Simon Willison’s analysis of the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident, including ExploitGym, disabled guardrails, containment failures, and Hugging Face’s use of GLM-5.2 for forensic analysis.
30:48: NetDocuments Smart Answers and AI connectivity, focused on institutional knowledge and governed access.
30:48: iManage’s AI and knowledge-platform developments, including AI controls, agent monitoring, and permission-aware access.
32:01: ClearPeople’s Atlas knowledge-management platform, creating a structured knowledge layer across Microsoft 365.
32:01: Atlas AI and private legal knowledge graphs, discussed during the earlier TGIR interview with Stephen Costigan.
32:29: Knowledge security, permissions, and need-to-know access in iManage, including inherited document-management controls for AI tools.
33:52: Claire Vo’s custom AI harness demonstration, showing how software around an AI agent creates repeatable workflows, controlled permissions, and structured outputs.
36:44: LexiDesk, an AI receptionist and intake system for smaller and consumer-facing law firms.
37:50: Simon Willison’s conversation with Anthropic’s Claude Code team, which inspired the question, “What is true today that wasn’t true a year ago?”

Transcript:

Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hey, this is Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert of The Geek in Review

Greg Lambert (00:04)
And this week we thought we would just have a little chat with each other, catch up on the latest in legal technology, AI, and talk about what could possibly go wrong if an AI tool breaks out of containment and hacks into another company’s database. I’ve never seen that movie.

Marlene Gebauer (00:20)
But first up, let’s get a bit of wisdom from our sponsor, Legal Technology Hub.

Stephanie Wilkins (00:25)
The Gen AI conversation has been advancing faster than a lot of people can keep up lately, but some new developments have brought older concepts like prompting back into the spotlight thanks to a trending new topic, token cost. Token cost moved into the spotlight recently as tools like Claude gained traction in legal, because most plans come with token limits, as well as the ability to request limit increases, which has resulted in tales of astronomical bills for some users. Recently, Legora also announced that it’s moving its Agent Pro offering to consumption-based pricing, which means it’s billing by what the agent does rather than by a flat seat license. And what agents do is consume tokens. Eventually, other providers are sure to follow suit. What many don’t fully understand is just how quickly token usage can add up. A few extra follow-up questions, a document pasted in twice, a chat continuing long after it should have been reset. If that sounds familiar, token consumption compounds faster than you might expect, and you may be looking at a higher token usage than you think. And you might not even realize it until you’ve hit your usage limit or worse, seen the bill. This is a blind spot we’ve been unpacking in one of our latest article series on Legal Tech Hub: how to get more out of tools like Claude without burning time, decreasing accuracy, or racking up unnecessary bills. We’ve covered topics like what tokens actually are and why they function as a hidden meter running behind every chat. When to reset a conversation versus continue in the same chat. And what everyday prompting habits, from repasting whole documents to burying five questions in one prompt, might be driving up both cost and inaccuracy without you knowing it. Head over to legaltechnologyhub.com to read the full series and learn more about how to get the most out of your token limits and your usage of tools like Claude.

Marlene Gebauer (02:04)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer

Greg Lambert (02:11)
And I’m Greg Lambert and we thought this week we would catch up. I’m just getting back from beautiful Cleveland, Ohio, Marlene’s favorite town in all of America.

Marlene Gebauer (02:21)
Ha ha

Greg Lambert (02:22)
And I was there for AALL. Our friend Jenny Foster got the conference kicked off and completed without a hitch. Congratulations. And now that she’s rotated off and Jessica Whytock is president, Jenny is a nobody anymore. So welcome to the club, Jenny.

Marlene Gebauer (02:39)
Yeah, not true, not true. She’s going to be working behind the scenes. I seem to recall how that goes.

Greg Lambert (02:45)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (02:46)
But yes, I was sorry to miss AALL, but I was actually I wasn’t sorry to miss Cleveland.

Greg Lambert (02:52)
No, you weren’t. You weren’t sorry to miss Cleveland, I can tell you that.

Marlene Gebauer (02:57)
But I was doing some great stuff. I went on a trip to some of our beautiful national parks. I went to Zion and went to Bryce Canyon and did quite a bit of hiking for a week and I went with a very good friend of mine and it was amazing. It is breathtaking.

Greg Lambert (03:19)
Was it breathtaking from the view or from the hikes?

Marlene Gebauer (03:22)
It was from both. We were doing about ten miles a day and as you can imagine a lot of it was up. So we saw a lot of hoodoos at Bryce Canyon and saw great vistas at Zion. There was one hike that’s called the Narrows and you walk through a river pretty much the whole time in waterproof boots. So, pretty cool.

Greg Lambert (03:44)
Sounds perfectly safe. Glad you made it back, Marlene. So we’re filming in the morning so I’ve got my cup of coffee. I pulled out my Wolverine mug. So for those that are watching the video. Yeah? No, don’t worry about it. Only one of us

Marlene Gebauer (03:53)
He’s showing off because I have a Starbucks and I said, I got to go get a cool mug. And he’s like, No, don’t worry about it. So I have my boring Starbucks cup.

Greg Lambert (04:02)
Only one of us can bring a cool coffee cup at a time. Well, let me jump in and talk about what my experience was at AALL. If you’ve never been

Marlene Gebauer (04:12)
Yes, please. Besides karaoke.

Greg Lambert (04:15)
Besides karaoke. Well, man. All right. Well, let me talk about karaoke first. So we actually

Marlene Gebauer (04:18)
I just posted it on LinkedIn, so I figure it’s fair game. Get it over with, yes.

Greg Lambert (04:23)
had two karaoke events the same night. They kind of overlapped a little but you could go to both. Lexis did one and BankruptcyData along with our friend Andre Davison from Harris County Law Library here in beautiful Houston did a great job. I can tell you this, the DJ was not expecting a bunch of librarians on a Monday night to bring it and the librarians brought it. So I

Marlene Gebauer (04:49)
As usual.

Greg Lambert (04:50)
I think we saw a range of songs. My favorite was one of the librarians who got up who was still in his shirt and tie from the day and got up and sang Ice Ice Baby from Vanilla Ice and brought the house down. So good stuff. Thanks to Andre Davison for sponsoring that. And I even sang the Bowling for Soup song “Ohio”, a song about Texas and

Marlene Gebauer (05:15)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (05:17)
posted it on LinkedIn. So if

Marlene Gebauer (05:19)
So check that out, folks.

Greg Lambert (05:21)
If you’re curious to hear my singing voice, luckily the sound isn’t very good, so I’ll just blame it on that.

Marlene Gebauer (05:28)
That’s it.

Greg Lambert (05:29)
As far as the conference itself, I think again, second year in a row and I’m gonna call out the vendors, especially some of the big ones. These librarians are the people who buy your product, who use your product, who have to sell your product inside the law firms, who teach your products to law students, who provide them to the government, and absolutely no announcements out of AALL again this year. Harvey was a bronze sponsor this year. So thank you, Harvey, for doing that, but they didn’t send anybody. And I’m telling you, they would have been the belle of the ball because everyone wanted to talk Harvey and Legora while we were there. But one of the things that you have to know about the librarians and the library conference is again, these are not the people who install and support your products on the network. These are people that use it. So they were telling us about what’s working, what’s not working, what’s on the horizon, what students expect, what lawyers expect, what judges expect. I talked with Steve Embry while he was there. Steve was there, and Bob was not. Probably Bob’s got a little Cleveland bias too, maybe. I don’t know.

Marlene Gebauer (06:48)
See? Do we need to talk?

Greg Lambert (06:50)
But yeah. Yeah, you two could be good friends.

Marlene Gebauer (06:54)
Okay.

Greg Lambert (06:55)
But Steve, he and I were talking and He was like, this is just an amazing conference of people who understand how the technology works, how the products work. So kudos to Jenny for pulling it off. Great conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Hey, Cleveland rocks. I don’t

Marlene Gebauer (07:15)
Rocks.

Greg Lambert (07:15)
care what you say, Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer (07:16)
Cleveland Rocks. Cleveland Rocks. I told you where to go in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So I have many good memories of my time in Cleveland.

Greg Lambert (07:21)
Man. Yeah. And I told you yesterday when we were talking, they had a women in rock exhibit in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Marlene Gebauer (07:31)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (07:32)
It was fantastic. It was amazing. Yeah. So, all right, Marlene, what do

Marlene Gebauer (07:34)
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, I

Greg Lambert (07:38)
do you have up next?

Marlene Gebauer (07:39)
Well, I’ll quickly share that I also had a karaoke experience while I was away in Utah. Karaoke in Utah is very different than karaoke everywhere else. Yes.

Greg Lambert (07:49)
Karaoke in Ohio

Marlene Gebauer (07:51)
let’s just say, you know, you have to order food if you’re doing karaoke in Utah. Unfortunately we got there very late so we were not able to get a song in. However,

Greg Lambert (08:03)
Okay. Wait, wait. Tell people what very late is in Utah.

Marlene Gebauer (08:08)
Yes. Nine o’clock is very late. It’s very late. So they were playing “Goodnight, Sweetheart”. And so I jumped up and I finished it in an empty hall. Yeah, right. And there are no posts.

Greg Lambert (08:21)
It’s Utah’s version of closing time. So closing time’s a little too spicy.

Marlene Gebauer (08:29)
There are no posted videos, nor will there be. So sorry about that, everybody.

Greg Lambert (08:32)
That’s too bad. That’s too bad. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (08:35)
So, what was I going to start with? I’m noticing, and I’ve been talking to other people about this too, lots of innovation attorney jobs everywhere. It just seems that they’re in lots of different places. Yes.

Greg Lambert (08:49)
Yeah. I’m hiring. Are you hiring?

Marlene Gebauer (08:53)
We’re both hiring, in addition to a bunch of other firms and a bunch of other organizations. So I think it’s great. I mean, yes, I think there is going to be a lot of competition to get people, but that’s not a bad thing. I am elated that the industry is coming to see that these jobs are important, that people who have a deep knowledge of their practice but also understand technology, understand the workflows, understand how to translate between highly technical folks and the attorneys. This is kind of the glue that makes it happen. And so I think it’s great.

Greg Lambert (09:36)
Yeah. I know there was a story run a couple of weeks ago in Bloomberg, especially about the director and up positions, but I think even like entry-level, midlevel, and upper-level roles, this is a new set of skills and we’re looking for new talent. So I know I’m seeing people from outside of legal proper and outside of BigLaw that are applying. So it’s kind of interesting to see where we’re going and again, you know, we’ve made fun of law firms and the legal industry for, well, as long as I’ve been around about being slow

Marlene Gebauer (10:16)
Long time.

Greg Lambert (10:17)
to adopt technology. But I think we’re ahead of our peer industries when it comes to looking at a lot of the technology and beefing up internally. Even if you’re not spending half a billion dollars on infrastructure to help your firm out, you’re still spending a lot of money percentage-wise. I’d say it’s really good.

Marlene Gebauer (10:34)
Yeah. I mean, I do think this is the beginning. You’re starting to really see the beginning of kind of a change in staffing and therefore kind of a change in how the workflow operates because of the impact of Gen AI. So I think

Greg Lambert (10:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (10:56)
You’re going to see lots more of these kind of interesting new jobs. And I look forward to that.

Greg Lambert (11:02)
Yeah. I think it’s similar to the run that we saw in the early 2000s when Arthur Andersen folded and all of their knowledge management people came into the legal industry and kind of revamped how we looked at our data.

Marlene Gebauer (11:14)
Everything. Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (11:17)
I think we’re in that same kind of period of transition. So

Marlene Gebauer (11:22)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (11:23)
Beef up your resumes, everybody. Send it to me and Marlene if you want.

Marlene Gebauer (11:25)
That’s right. Get tech skills, people skills.

Greg Lambert (11:29)
Yeah. All right, I’ve got one more conference that I’m going to that’s not ILTA. I actually got invited to speak at a conference that I’d never heard of before. Turns out there’s only like 11,000 people that go to this conference, and it’s called

Marlene Gebauer (11:43)
well.

Greg Lambert (11:43)
Ai4, the AI and the number four conference.

Marlene Gebauer (11:45)
In Vegas, baby.

Greg Lambert (11:47)
It’s in Vegas. It’s at the Venetian in Vegas in the best time of the year, early August. So I’m

Marlene Gebauer (11:54)
Only second to July when you fly in.

Greg Lambert (11:57)
Yeah. And again, it’s not a legal conference but AI focused. So it’s going to be interesting. I’m going to be speaking on the legal track. I’ve seen a few other law firm folks that are going to be there as well, hoping to learn a lot from outside the industry as well as what’s going on with some of our peers in legal.

Marlene Gebauer (12:21)
Yeah, I think our industry conferences are fantastic. I would never suggest anything otherwise. They really are second to none. But I think it’s good to go to conferences periodically that are outside of what you normally do. And I love the fact that they’re recognizing that they should bring in some people to hear from them about what they do because this is not something that’s normal for us. I think oftentimes that is the best way to learn about new things and get new ideas and see what’s being applied in other areas and whether we can apply it in our industry. So one of the things I’ve been really interested in is like personas, and you’ve probably seen in the news that AltaClaro now has DepoSim and you know, if you haven’t seen that, that’s an amazing tool. And essentially what it does is train people how to take depositions.

Greg Lambert (13:18)
Didn’t we interview the people on that?

Marlene Gebauer (13:21)
We have. Abdi was on, yes, for sure. And so what this does, in case you missed that one, is that it helps train you to take depositions or helps you improve your ability to take depositions. There are a number of personas, both for the deponent as well as opposing counsel. There are different fact patterns. And you can kind of go through the exercises and then you get a grade at the end. That’s a rather simplistic explanation, but you get the idea. But there are a lot of other things coming out. I mean, I attend the CodeX calls, the Stanford CodeX calls, and now I’m seeing a lot of students who are putting these things together. I am aware of former partners in BigLaw that are putting these things together for depositions and hearings. I was on a webinar that Opus 2 sponsored. I attended a couple of days ago and the chief innovation officer at Vorys was on and mentioned as part of that webinar that they have developed personas that they’re using to help people train for drafting, which is amazing. I’m a big fan of this. I think this is going to be a big deal in terms of training and getting people to learn. I’m waiting to see where this goes.

Greg Lambert (14:51)
Yeah. For someone who doesn’t understand when you say personas, do you have an example of what they should expect with a persona?

Marlene Gebauer (15:00)
Yeah, so a persona is basically a character. I mean, it has different, you know, qualities of a person. For example, in a deposition situation, it could be someone who’s very reticent to speak or someone who’s very outspoken and you would have different types of tasks with either one of these people. And that’s a simple example. You can get very sophisticated with some of the personas in terms of someone being a CEO at a small startup and these are their interests. You know, they like to go hiking, they like to ride bicycles, and personal time is important to them. They are concerned about protecting their IP. You can basically build these things to model, you know, whatever it is that you want to test against. Then you would interact with that persona, that model, and they would respond in a way that you would expect. And then you would kind of test yourself accordingly against that. So if you were drafting, then you would, you know, wait to see what their feedback was. You might ask questions. If you were doing a deposition, obviously you’d be asking questions of that persona and sort of dealing with both personas.

Greg Lambert (16:19)
And based on the persona, that’s the difference in the reaction you’re getting is that an outgoing person

Marlene Gebauer (16:24)
Yeah. And I

Greg Lambert (16:26)
may respond differently than an introverted person kind of deal, or

Marlene Gebauer (16:30)
Correct.

Greg Lambert (16:31)
a partner may respond differently than opposing counsel. So yeah, I can see that.

Marlene Gebauer (16:33)
Correct. And I should mention, Flatiron also has worked on this with Stanford and Megan Ma in terms of a negotiator simulator. I mean, very early on.

Greg Lambert (16:45)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (16:46)
We had them on very early on for that.

Greg Lambert (16:48)
I was going to say if you want to know what’s going to happen in two years, talk to Megan Ma now. Well, you pointed one of these to me, but I’ve been seeing more now, you know, I’ve been writing a thing called Beyond the Model on our Substack since January.

Marlene Gebauer (17:05)
I do.

Greg Lambert (17:06)
I’ve been actually writing them since last year, where I’ve taken a fictional law firm and I apply technology to it.

Marlene Gebauer (17:12)
Fame comes slowly sometimes, you know? You just have to be patient.

Greg Lambert (17:16)
I’m the Megan Ma of legal fiction writing. How’s that?

Marlene Gebauer (17:20)
That’s it. That’s it. No.

Greg Lambert (17:24)
Of course, I always claim that I stole it from Anusia Gillespie after our interview with her. But I’ve noticed our friend Richard Tromans has the Innovators fictional story that he’s doing. Jennifer Leonard has a new book published by PLI that uses fictional characters to explain the story. It’s interesting. I think it’s a great way of taking facts or projections of how the technology can work in an actual law firm and applying it in a way that makes sense. In the latest story that I’ve done on our Substack page, I took a nonlegal-industry survey that was given to over 5,000 technology workers on how AI is affecting their job and their view of their importance within their job and applied it to a law firm where we gave our fictional law firm a survey to see how associates, partners and business professionals would take that survey and react to that survey. Again, fictional, but I feel pretty confident in where we were. The interesting thing that was in that survey was whether or not you would recommend your profession to someone who’s starting. In the tech survey, and I think this would apply in legal as well, the further up the chain you were, the more likely you were to suggest that somebody get into the industry to do what you do. So it’s

Marlene Gebauer (19:01)
Makes sense.

Greg Lambert (19:02)
And I think equity partners probably still see a lot of benefits. But I think associates right now, and even though I didn’t talk about law students, I’ve talked to a bunch of folks at law schools and they say the first-years, second-years, and third-years are all freaking out, mostly because of the early job offers that they’re getting, including summer associate gigs before they’ve even taken their first-semester tests and received their grades back. In fact, I heard at AALL that at one of the schools out on the East Coast, a T14 school, they saw earlier this year that an incoming 1L had already accepted a job before they’d even gone to their first class. I see this face. You’re not shocked at all. So it’s insane. The recruiters know it’s insane. The students know it’s insane. But other firms keep doing it.

Marlene Gebauer (20:05)
And yet we just keep doing it.

Greg Lambert (20:07)
Yeah. So I imagine that you know, if you score a 178 on your LSAT, you’ll probably get a job offer before you even apply to school. That’s going to be next. I don’t know. All right, high schoolers, we’re coming for you.

Marlene Gebauer (20:18)
Amazing. No pressure or anything. It’s like that, yeah, I know. It’s pressure enough. It’s like once you’re used to law school and how it’s done and then people are just sort of going in and taking jobs, having no idea. And they have to be

Greg Lambert (20:36)
Yeah. Well

Marlene Gebauer (20:38)
ready that soon without any type of legal prep.

Greg Lambert (20:40)
The other thing that I don’t think a lot of us are thinking about is that the students that don’t get these early offers are feeling like, Well, should I even be here? Is there a chance for me to get into a law firm now?

Marlene Gebauer (20:58)
I think sort of the key here is like you need to kind of have a flexible attitude toward this. I’m sure people went in thinking, okay, this is what it was going to be, but literally in like the last couple of years, the industry has changed remarkably and will continue to do that. And we were just talking about. Look at all these jobs that we’re hunting for. So, okay, it might or might not be an associate job at a law firm, but we’re hiring other types of roles where you can still use your legal smarts as well as any technical smarts you have. I know the big Gen AI companies, you know, are hiring people like this to be researchers, to be people that work on workflows. So I mean, there’s opportunity out there. You just kind of have to open your mind a little bit and the main thing is like, you know, get in there and get that experience. Now, in terms of your storytelling, I wanted to add that it totally makes sense because, look, there’s an entertainment value to fiction that, you know, isn’t present in these guidebooks, which are helpful and good, but you know, people respond to that. I think if you can combine something entertaining with a lesson or with knowledge, I mean that always goes a long way. And I think about how this is writing, but you know, we’ve had the oral tradition for thousands of years to pass on information. I don’t know about you, but you know, fairy tales and parables and Greek mythology, those were things I read when I was younger and I still remember. And I think this is just kind of a continuation of that.

Greg Lambert (22:55)
Yeah, and we’ll talk about this in a few minutes, but I was talking with one of the partners at my firm. There are really kind of two ways I write the story. One is teaching a technology and the reasoning behind it. It started off with why the legal research products suddenly got better. We talked about RAG technology and how the information is indexed, searched, and retrieved. He found that part very interesting. Then there’s a second style of story where I’m applying theory and business models to a law firm, and he’s like, yeah, I don’t like that part. Everyone has their own taste.

Marlene Gebauer (23:39)
Not as entertaining.

Greg Lambert (23:40)
So I don’t want that. I want to learn something. I already know how I’m running the business. I don’t need to know that

Marlene Gebauer (23:46)
Sure, but yeah, I mean, there are going to be other people for whom that’s their learning moment. So that’s, you know, you catch everybody. Okay. All right. So this one I thought was funny and it was kind of cute. So I wanted to bring it up that I was reading that Microsoft’s corporate external legal affairs group selected Harvey as their tool of choice. And I mean, yeah, it does make sense.

Greg Lambert (24:09)
Makes sense to me.

Marlene Gebauer (24:12)
It kind of makes sense and I’m thinking about again, I was reading that there’s sort of a deeper relationship now between Harvey and Microsoft and so it’s like, okay, well that totally makes sense, even though they have Copilot, but why not?

Greg Lambert (24:27)
I don’t know if I wanna say anything. Maybe they used Copilot and found out just how well it works.

Marlene Gebauer (24:35)
Well, I mean, you know, I think if you’re using it for legal, but I mean using it for other stuff is fine.

Greg Lambert (24:40)
Yeah. Copilot’s great because it connects to the M365 network and platform. So, yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (24:47)
Yeah, it connects to the stuff that you have and that is helpful. Very helpful.

Greg Lambert (24:52)
No, I use it every day, especially when

Marlene Gebauer (24:54)
Me too.

Greg Lambert (24:55)
I can’t find that stupid email I sent three weeks ago and I need to get it.

Marlene Gebauer (24:58)
How many would you say you use a day? Like different ones?

Greg Lambert (25:01)
Different ones?

Marlene Gebauer (25:02)
And for different things, I guess.

Greg Lambert (25:03)
Let’s see. I definitely use Harvey. Definitely use Claude every day. Okay, well let me tell you what I subscribe to.

Marlene Gebauer (25:13)
I use a lot.

Greg Lambert (25:15)
So I’ve got a $200 subscription to Claude,

Marlene Gebauer (25:18)
Crazy.

Greg Lambert (25:19)
and I’ve got a $20 subscription to Gemini. I’ve got a $20 subscription to OpenAI’s

Marlene Gebauer (25:26)
You’re an addict.

Greg Lambert (25:26)
ChatGPT. We have Harvey,

Marlene Gebauer (25:29)
You’re an LLM addict.

Greg Lambert (25:31)
we have Microsoft M365, so I have Copilot. So I use them all.

Marlene Gebauer (25:36)
Yeah, I mean I have OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I have the $20 plan. I have Claude, I have Copilot, I have Legora. There’s something else I have. What do I have? I feel like I’m missing one. I can’t remember right now, but not quite as many as you. Mm-mm, mm-mm. I refuse. I refuse.

Greg Lambert (25:54)
Just give your bank statement to Claude and it will tell you how many you have. Yeah. I actually had someone say on a LinkedIn post and I thought he was joking. He was like, “If you give Claude all of your data on your attorneys, their billing, their time entry, their forms, paperwork and emails that it does great for planning out these seven-figure deals.” And I know the person and I was going to do like a laughing emoji back to them and then I thought, nope, they’re actually being very serious about this.

Marlene Gebauer (26:28)
They’re serious.

Greg Lambert (26:30)
I’m like, if you want to watch my security ops team break into my office and tackle me away from my keyboard, that’s what I will start doing. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (26:37)
Mm. Wait, we’ll get the camera set up. Yep.

Greg Lambert (26:42)
Well, speaking of OpenAI, I don’t know if you saw the story since you were traveling, but apparently Hugging Face, the open-source platform, found that they had been hacked and they knew that whatever was hacking them must have been an agentic AI system because of the speed of what it was doing. A person couldn’t be doing this, so it had to be an automated attack. It turned out it was OpenAI doing a test on a benchmarking test that used a model and it was a combination of their new GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model where it was given a test, put in a sandbox, and given limited access, supposedly. And like a resourceful college student, it found that rather than doing the work and doing the test as assigned, it was actually easier to go and break into the professor’s office and steal the key to the test and use it that way. So,

Marlene Gebauer (27:51)
Path of least resistance.

Greg Lambert (27:55)
It found a way through a multilevel hack to get internet access, went to Hugging Face, broke into Hugging Face using some stolen passcodes that it found, then found the answer key.

Marlene Gebauer (28:08)
Hugging Face had no idea what was going on.

Greg Lambert (28:10)
Found the answer key. So, I mean, it was interesting that it broke in and had access to all this, but was still on the mission of finishing the quest. It found the answer key, came back and answered the benchmarking test and apparently scored very high. But I will say that, you know, we’re joking around on this, but this is, I would say, this is a turning point in AI right now because the U.S. government as it’s set up today is very hands-off. There’s very little regulation. The federal government is actually stepping in and trying to keep states from regulating it. Now we’ve got this, you know, yeah, it’s kind of funny. But it’s also not funny. It’s not funny because

Marlene Gebauer (28:58)
This time it’s funny and

Greg Lambert (29:01)
Well, most of the podcast and writings I’ve seen on this said that if a human did this, it would be a crime. The FBI would be coming in and arresting people and instead you see Hugging Face’s and OpenAI’s leadership laughing it off and acting like this was a great thing that happened and if you’ve ever watched The Terminator, this is how it begins, people. This is how it begins.

Marlene Gebauer (29:25)
You know, I mean I know this isn’t human, but when you look at the whole picture, I mean it’s a very human experience. I mean, this is exactly what someone could do. A gray-hat or black-hat type of actor who says, okay, let’s see if I can do this and then does it. And what’s interesting here is that it basically assembled a bunch of actions that weren’t part of that environment and went with it and was very successful. Hugging Face was like, Okay, something’s happening but we don’t know which model is doing it. Then the model actually reveals later.

Greg Lambert (30:08)
what was even

Marlene Gebauer (30:09)
it’s like, it was me.

Greg Lambert (30:10)
What was even funnier was they tried to use both OpenAI’s foundational models and Claude’s foundational models to help fight off the

Marlene Gebauer (30:22)
Ha ha

Greg Lambert (30:22)
attack. But it wouldn’t let them because they had guardrails that wouldn’t allow them to use

Marlene Gebauer (30:27)
It’s like, sorry, we can’t do that.

Greg Lambert (30:29)
their tool to help because they could be going the other way. So they had to use the Chinese models. They had to use the Chinese models to fight it.

Marlene Gebauer (30:30)
So they were the white hats. It’s like we follow the rules. Yes, yes, I read that. It’s like, hey, can we borrow your models? Crazy. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (30:42)
Yeah. It’s a great time to be alive. I’m going to end with that.

Marlene Gebauer (30:48)
Yeah. You know, I think KM is having a moment again. I’m very happy to see that. And I think you’re starting to see how, we had looked at, you know, Gen AI in terms of like efficiencies and doing things faster and better. And now I think the industry is turning towards how we can use AI to kind of harness knowledge that we have and surface knowledge that we have and combine knowledge that might be out there. So your traditional KM, you know, document-based, it’s like, okay, well, we’ll have things like that. But, you know, we may also have personas. We may also have financial information. We may also have information from the outside, you know, public information. Being able to synthesize all of this and surface all of it for different types of work is becoming important. So I know NetDocuments is rolling out some new AI-enabled capabilities. I know iManage is as well. I’m wondering if everybody was saving their announcements for ILTA. So we might hear something

Greg Lambert (31:59)
They are. They are.

Marlene Gebauer (32:01)
Something there. We’ve talked to you know a number of people that have products, like ClearPeople and their product, Atlas, and then Atlas AI, who we just recently had on the show. There are a number of these vendors that are looking at how to do this. Microsoft is also doing this as well. And I think the trick is

Greg Lambert (32:24)
But are they doing it through Harvey? That’s what I wanna know.

Marlene Gebauer (32:29)
I should say Harvey also has something, too. And so I think the trick at this point is, you know, going back to what you were saying about security and sort of what we’re comfortable letting these tools access because, you know, we’re still in a situation where certain clients are saying, you know, I don’t want Gen AI to touch any of my stuff, or I don’t want my work to be combined with your other work. There’s also movement towards a need-to-know model in your DMS. Given all of these factors, how do we make these tools work effectively for people? And I mean, it’s going to be done because, I mean, some of these tools already follow the rules that your DMS already has in terms of who can access what. So you know, I think it’s really just a finesse question.

Greg Lambert (33:23)
Well, you know, giving the AI rules works every time, right, OpenAI. So, yeah. Now I do

Marlene Gebauer (33:29)
Yeah, why did I have this story like right after that one? It’s like, never mind. Never mind.

Greg Lambert (33:36)
I do want to say that in the OpenAI test, they actually took the guardrails off, which explains part of this. But they thought because it was in a sandbox environment that would protect it. But yeah, of course, yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (33:45)
They’d be okay. I feel much better now. Of course.

Greg Lambert (33:52)
I watched a video last week from Claire Vo, who hosts How I AI. It’s great, and although it isn’t legal, I think very applicable to what we’re doing. Last week she was showing how she makes AI harnesses. And after

Marlene Gebauer (34:13)
Tell us what a harness is.

Greg Lambert (34:14)
So a harness is essentially software you put on top of the AI to help guide the AI on what you’re asking it to do, the rules that you set up, and the output. And one of the things that stood out as she was talking about how she develops the AI harnesses for the tasks she performs, mostly for evaluating code she uses for her company and its website. If you need something to be the same every single time regardless of the AI model that’s underneath, the harness, she explained, is how you get there. So you set up the parameters of this is how you handle the information, this is what you do, and then this is the output and every single time it’s the exact same thing. And there’s lots of stuff that we do that falls into those parameters, those guidelines of making sure that if we’re processing data that it processes in a certain way and the output is in a certain format. So I’m going to make the projection. You know how we’re talking about AI agents in 2026 and turning the agents loose. I think for 2027 we’re going to be talking about AI harnesses. We’ve got the power. Now we need to set the direction of how these very powerful models actually work in a predictable and consistent way. So if you’re not looking into harnesses now, I suggest you do that. Coincidentally, there’s a three-part story that I’m writing on Substack this week that talks about AI harnesses. So if you haven’t subscribed to the Substack page, do so now.

Marlene Gebauer (35:57)
And in case you wanted to hear more, are you aware of any vendors that are using these or promoting them?

Greg Lambert (36:11)
Well, they all have harnesses. So, when you’re using the interface on Harvey, that is a harness. It’s a layer on top of the AI company’s models.

Marlene Gebauer (36:21)
But this harness apparently produces the same results every time. So

Greg Lambert (36:24)
Yeah. You set it up, you tell it what to do. You program it or vibe code it, and this is the interface that you use or this is the tool that uses the AI and then guides the AI and its output. So, lots of things to learn. Like I said, three-part story coming out this week, so stay tuned. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (36:44)
Very good. We’ll be looking for it. I wanted to put in one thing about small firms and I saw something in the news. It’s an AI legal receptionist called LexiDesk. What I thought was interesting about it is that it captures quality business during intake. So it’s not just strictly a receptionist, it’s trying to figure out whether this is the correct business for you. What I thought was interesting about it was what counts as quality business how You program that, how do you prompt that and how do you make sure that’s happening? Can it recognize urgency or vulnerability? Because, again, we have certain obligations as attorneys to address things. So, can it figure that out? How is confidentiality handled? I mean, it’s one thing to record that a call came in and schedule something on your calendar and it’s another thing to really do an assessment of the call and what your next steps are. So I thought it was an interesting one.

Greg Lambert (37:50)
Yeah. Speaking of interesting, this is either going to be really interesting or not interesting at all. You know how we’ve been asking folks to tell us about what resources they’re using to read or keep up with the industry. I heard a very interesting question this week from Simon Willison when he was talking with three engineers at Anthropic and one of the questions he asked was, what is true today that wasn’t true a year ago for you? And of course these were engineers talking about Claude Code and the harness and everything that they’re doing. But we may swap out the question. We ask a crystal ball question about looking into the future. I think this would be a good setup to, you know, take a peek back at the past and look at today and say, you know, what’s true today that wasn’t true a year ago? And so, Marlene, you get to be my guinea pig on this. What’s something that’s true today that wasn’t true a year ago?

Marlene Gebauer (38:55)
Well, a year ago I think there was a lot more emphasis on adoption and just using the tools. And I think now there is much more focus on incorporating this into workflows. We need to change the workflows. It’s not just making an existing workflow more efficient. It’s basically changing the workflow completely. And that includes staffing, that includes pricing, and so it’s I mean, the whole ride has been interesting, but it’s super interesting now because you’re bringing in a lot of different experts. You know, there’s a lot of different departments this touches. You have these groups kind of working together, which I think is, you know, absolutely incredible and interesting. Everybody’s bringing their expertise to the table to make these changes in a positive way for businesses. The other thing that is quite different, and this is very recent, is now everybody’s sort of talking about the cost of generative AI. Because I think, you know, we got everybody on board and now all of a sudden the reality hits I know, I know. And it’s

Greg Lambert (40:12)
Wait, wait, I can’t burn every token I can get my hands on? Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (40:18)
Again, it’s intellectually interesting. It’s also very stressful. I mean, from a business perspective in terms of like what this is going to cost and how is it going to get paid for? And everybody has seen stuff in the news about paying per token, but I don’t know whether that is going to end up being the right model. And I do think vendors are trying to be thoughtful about this. I mean, I’ve had some discussions with some of them and you know, they are trying to be very thoughtful about how to do this because straight-up token costs or use costs. I mean, we’ve seen that model before, like you and I have seen that model before. And it’s the old Lexis Westlaw model from years and years ago. And

Greg Lambert (41:02)
Yeah. We’ll just find a way to track the cost and then pass that on to the client, right? Then

Marlene Gebauer (41:09)
Right. And I mean, look, in the beginning that made very good sense, but you know, in time it became a situation where clients said, look, that’s the cost of doing business and we’re not gonna pay for that. So a lot of times that is not paid for. And I think now it’s even more imperative to think about it because everybody has access to these tools now. I think there’s a fine balance between saying it’s like, okay, we’re gonna pass on, you know, token costs to people, to clients, and clients are like, well, you know, we could do that. Like we can do it ourselves. I think there’s a lot more thought that has to go into sort of what you’re doing with the AI and you know, the value that provides to the clients. And whether you’re kind of working on these things together or if it’s something that’s just more internal that helps you.

Greg Lambert (42:08)
Yeah. I’m going to kind of spin this into our crystal ball question when it comes to the tokens because I can’t remember, I think it’s Taleb’s Law where it’s the saying, “I’ve seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I’ve never seen a shortage not followed by a glut.” I don’t think it’s going to be next year, but I think in two or three years this whole, you know, looking at the cost of tokens is going to be a nonstory anymore because

Marlene Gebauer (42:43)
Agreed.

Greg Lambert (42:44)
efficiencies are going to catch up. Hopefully the latest model doesn’t burn fuel like a rocket. We’ll find efficiencies because we’re gonna have to. And I think competition will help. I think we’re gonna see more competition from the Chinese models. We’ll probably see competition from open-source models from Europe. We’ll probably see some regulation come in after 2028 perhaps. But in the meantime this is a wave we’re gonna have to ride till it breaks, right? So

Marlene Gebauer (43:16)
Yeah, I mean, I agree that it’s not a long-term issue, but it is a significant

Greg Lambert (43:21)
But it’s an issue.

Marlene Gebauer (43:22)
It’s a significant short-term issue. I mean, in terms of cost, but I agree with you and I mean, I think competition is going to force people, I think, to become better users. I mean, it’s sort of a painful way to do it, but

Greg Lambert (43:39)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (43:40)
it will do it. So that is also not a bad thing.

Greg Lambert (43:45)
Yeah. Well, it was great catching up with you this week.

Marlene Gebauer (43:50)
Yeah, you too.

Greg Lambert (43:52)
It’s always nice to have these and just kind of talk about what’s going on in the industry ’cause man, there’s so much. So much going

Marlene Gebauer (43:57)
So much. So much.

Greg Lambert (44:00)
on. So thanks for sitting down in the morning and for letting me pull out my really cool coffee mug.

Marlene Gebauer (44:08)
Just got to rub it in. You just got to rub it in.

Greg Lambert (44:11)
And show everybody your Starbucks cup while I show my Wolverine claws.

Marlene Gebauer (44:13)
Yeah. No, they saw it already. It’s okay. I’ll bring a good one next time. Thanks to all of you for listening to The Geek in Review. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. You know, we’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack. And as always,

Greg Lambert (44:27)
Yeah. Subscribe to that Substack. Watch those stories roll in.

Marlene Gebauer (44:31)
Greg needs likes. Greg needs likes.

Greg Lambert (44:34)
I do!

Marlene Gebauer (44:34)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry, and goodbye everybody.

AI Is Shifting the Bottleneck: Actionstep’s Triona Buckley on Building Smarter Mid-Market Law Firms

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:56:39 +0000

In this episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert hosts a solo conversation with Triona Buckley, Chief Product Officer at Actionstep, about generative AI’s growing influence on mid-market law firms. Buckley challenges a common assumption about legal AI: faster task completion does not always remove friction. An associate might produce a draft within seconds, only to transfer the burden upstream to a senior lawyer responsible for reviewing sources, reconstructing reasoning, and correcting mistakes.

Buckley argues law firms should shift their attention from speed to systems. Standalone drafting and research tools address individual tasks, while system-level AI connects work across an entire legal matter. Embedded within everyday workflows, AI helps lawyers locate information, reduce administrative work, and preserve more time for client advice and professional judgment. The goal is a smoother operating model, rather than a collection of isolated tools producing faster documents.

The conversation also examines institutional knowledge, especially within firms lacking large knowledge management or innovation teams. Buckley describes an approach where AI captures decisions, context, and reasoning as lawyers work. This creates a continuously expanding record of how the firm handles matters, advises clients, and applies professional judgment. Governance still plays a central role, including clear audit trails showing whether a person or an AI agent performed each action.

Greg and Triona then explore AI as an individual tutor for junior lawyers. Remote and hybrid work have weakened the traditional apprenticeship model built around observation and informal office conversations. Drawing upon decades of firm experience, an AI tutor might question an associate’s assumptions, prompt additional research, and reinforce the firm’s preferred methods. Such systems offer structured practice while preserving the essential mentoring relationship between senior and junior lawyers.

Another major theme is the hidden cost of delayed time entry. Actionstep’s Trace passive time capture technology monitors work across practice management, email, and document applications, then presents lawyers with matter-linked, billing-ready entries. More accurate records help firms recover otherwise forgotten time while producing better data for pricing, staffing, client estimates, and profitability analysis. Those insights grow more important as clients push firms toward fixed fees and output-based pricing.

Buckley believes mid-market law firms hold several advantages during the AI transition. They often operate with fewer systems, maintain closer client relationships, and move through organizational change faster than larger enterprises. Success will still require disciplined implementation, trusted internal champions, connected data, and sustained attention to client service. Her message is optimistic but direct: firms with strong relationships, clean data, and a clear economic strategy will be better prepared for agentic AI and the changing business of law.

Actionstep’s U.S. Midsize Law Firm Priorities Report

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript:

Stephanie Wilkins (00:00)
The Gen AI conversation has been advancing faster than a lot of people can keep up lately, but some new developments have brought older concepts like prompting back into the spotlight thanks to a trending new topic, token cost. Token cost moved into the spotlight recently as tools like Claude gained traction in legal, because most plans come with token limits, as well as the ability to request limit increases, which has resulted in tales of astronomical bills for some users. Recently, Legora also announced that it’s moving its Agent Pro offering

Consumption based pricing, which means it’s billing by what the agent does rather than by a flat seat license. And what agents do is consume tokens. Eventually, other providers are sure to follow suit. What many don’t fully understand is just how quickly token usage can add up. A few extra follow-up questions, a document pasted in twice, a chat continuing long after it should have been reset. If that sounds familiar, token consumption compounds faster than you might expect, and you may be looking at a higher token usage than you think.

And you might not even realize it until you’ve hit your usage limit or worse, seen the bill. This is a blind spot we’ve been unpacking in one of our latest article series on Legal Tech Hub: how to get more out of tools like Claude without burning time, decreasing accuracy, or racking up unnecessary bills. We’ve covered topics like what tokens actually are and why they function as a hidden meter running behind every chat. When to reset a conversation versus continue in the same chat.

And what everyday prompting habits, from repasting whole documents to burying five questions in one prompt, might be driving up both cost and inaccuracy without you knowing it? Head over to legaltechnologyhub.com to read the full series and learn more about how to get the most out of your token limits and your usage of tools like Claude.

Greg Lambert (01:45)
Welcome to the Geek and Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Greg Lambert, and Marlene is out west climbing a mountain or maybe enjoying a cocktail somewhere right now. So everyone is stuck with me this week. today we are exploring why AI isn’t actually eliminating bottlenecks in law firms, but rather just moving that bottleneck upstream and how mid-market firms

Can leverage their institutional knowledge to win the AI transition. So I’d like to welcome Triona Triona Buckley, the chief product officer at Action Step, with more than two decades in the legal and legal tech industries. Triona has spent years working inside law firms here in the US, in Ireland, and the UK, and now leads the product vision at Action Step.

the leading cloud-based law firm management platform for mid-sized firms supporting over fifty five hundred law firms globally. And Triona is joining us I think from the future because I think it’s already tomorrow there in beautiful Auckland, New Zealand. So Triona, welcome to the Geek and Review.

Triona Buckley (02:55)
Thanks, Greg. Great to be here.

Greg Lambert (02:58)
All right, I I threw this one in at the last minute ’cause I realized we weren’t giving you a chance to really talk about action steps. So you mind giving us just kind of the the elevator pitch on on action step and what you do there?

Triona Buckley (03:11)
Sure.

Action Step is a law firm’s operations platform. So it combines practice management and legal accounting in one platform. So really, I suppose, designed to connect all the work of everyone that works at law firms. We are a global business, so we have a global team, a global customer base, very much focused on the mid market. So that’s our sweet spot, it’s where most of our customers sit, and so we’re really trying to support the unique challenges and our

opportunities that mid-market firms have. Yeah, and I’ve I’m CPO at Action Step, I’ve been with Action Step for many years and work very closely with our customers on a day-to-day basis to make sure that our product is is answering their needs.

Greg Lambert (03:55)
Awesome. Thank thank you very much for taking the time to give us a little background on that.

Greg Lambert (03:58)
So Trina, your your core argument regarding generative AI isn’t that it’s necessarily eliminating the friction in law firms, but it’s it’s kind of taking that friction and and shifting that bottleneck upstream. So, you know, for example, if if a junior associate you know takes a few seconds to draft a document, now all of a sudden the the senior partner is is having to be inundated with these and then kind of

reverse engineer how how it was put together. So in your view, how do you how how do firms structurally fix this workflow so that that AI doesn’t actually in introduce more problems than it fixes and and what do you mean when you say something like we need to shift from speed to systems?

Triona Buckley (04:50)
So what I mean about really shifting from speed to systems is is thinking less about, you know

one task, you know, and delivering one task using one AI tool. And more about, you know, thinking about the whole workflow. You know, how how are you going to use AI across the workflow and across your tasks in a way that feels much more intuitive to the way that you naturally work. So, you know, what we’ve seen is that law firms adopted and continue to use some fantastic tools around documents and research and and those sorts of things. And those are great to

Tools and obviously they came to market first because it was around generative AI and that sort of thing. you know, we now have the opportunity with more agentic AI available to to really connect that into a more natural workflow and into the places that you work anyway. so really it’s about taking, you know, the like I say, individual tasks and connecting them together into the the overall workflow. And I think the way the way that law firms can do that and and think can have apply that system thinking

is really think about the broader and bottlenecks. You know, we started with drafting, but yes, yeah, we’re we’re we’re it shifts it shifts the onus, I suppose, upstream to make sure that those drafts were well done and researched and thoughtful and blah blah blah and you know and and and and cited correctly.

And so those are the more expensive resources being used to do some of some of that work. But really, you know, oftentimes the friction in overall workflows is less to do with those tasks and more to do with, you know, sort of operational friction, administrative work, you know, finding information, not knowing where to look to find the information, you know, and having to dig into all these different silos of information to find what you need. So really addressing those sorts of things, you know, help.

the sort of day-to-day of your fee earners just feel smoother and less fewer things in their way. So that’s really what I you know what I think about when I think about kind of system level AI. It’s really smoothing out the whole the whole the whole workflow so that fee earners get to do what they do best which is really apply judgment to their client work and they get to do it in a way that you know they have room to think etc because that you know administrative friction has been removed I suppose by a

AI, automation, systems, whatever it might be.

Greg Lambert (07:05)
Okay. So w we talked recently, I th I think it was the last episode on

called executable knowledge and and private graphs. And you’ve noted that while AI can draft a contract, you know, AI sometimes is is biased and you know what clients are really paying for during the the high stakes milestones that is is for that lawyer’s kind of unbiased judgment. There and we we talk a lot about judgment here for the for the lawyers. So

On the the mid-market firms that that you work with, how is it that they’re actually capturing the expertise that’s kind of locked in that that partner’s head and put it into so that it’s it’s that systems process that kind of guarantees things like

The context is right, the controls are there, the governance is there to to help support that judgment. How do you how do you pull it all together?

Triona Buckley (08:05)
Yeah, well

Interestingly, what we see at larger law firms is that, you know, they tend to have huge knowledge teams and innovation teams who are sort of their job to a certain extent is to, you know, collate all of that knowledge and bring it together and and extract that sort of thing from people’s heads. I mean, mid-market firms don’t have the luxury usually of of having those sorts of resources. And so if it’s not been captured throughout your day, it’s probably not going to happen. It’s probably not going to be, you know, a a concerted concerted effort, I suppose, for you know, everyone at the firm.

To sort of download what they’ve done that day and the reasons why they might have done things, etc. And so what we what we can see with with and more so with AI, but even with you know automation is if you’re if you’re capturing if you’re capturing you know what people are doing as they move through their day and you know prompting the right questions, asking them why they might have done things just as they as they actually go about their their normal work, it’s much more likely that you’re going to be able to you know to add to that instant.

institutional knowledge and really add that context of that layer of context around what they’re doing and why and so what from an action stamp point of view what we’re really trying to ensure in anything that we bring to market from an AI point of view is that it’s not it’s not interruptive it’s very much you know really just kind of following along as they move through their day and and sort of you know capturing everything. What’s really important there is there’s a governance layer to that obviously you know you have to know who has done what whether that’s an agent or human.

And so, you know, making sure that you’re actually, you know, capturing that that that level of detail on on on what’s been done and when and why and all of that is really, really important from a governance point of view, because you have to be able to look back and see and we all we all we all we all we’ve all seen you know the reasons why if you don’t have that it can be a problem.

But actually there’s also just a you know like it beyond the sort of governance and the safety point of view, it’s really more around you know adding to your institutional knowledge, you know. and I suppose you you want to, you know, if we’re you know, the things that might have been learnt, I suppose, in conversation, you know, need to be also captured within within the system. And so that’s a AI is a great, great use case for that, you know, because it can act like you’re you’re sort of your your sparring partner in understanding where you’re coming from.

Greg Lambert (10:17)
Yeah. I’m I’m curious on how you kind of set that up and monitor it with because I n I know you mentioned that you wanna you wanna do this in a way that doesn’t interrupt the workflow of of the attorneys. So, you know, just kind of peeling back the onion a l a little bit. How how how did you work to set something like that up and and kind of determine what’s w how how it is that you don’t interrupt the workflow?

Triona Buckley (10:47)
Yeah, look, I think a lot of it is again back to sort of, you know, having most things happening in one platform, you know, so that you’re you’re you’re not having to sort of, you know, change how you do things in different places and therefore piece together all of that kind of audit trail. So having that sort of centralized place for all of that information to live is is is thing number one. And so and we see the most mid-sized law firms tend to prefer to have fewer tools rather than more. Some of that is you know budgetary point of view.

of it is just there you know a preference for a firm that size that what that allows actually is that you can have you know with all of that connected data you have you can put like ai on top of that and it it has all of the context you know and so it it doesn’t have to read five different tools you know it actually has the information it needs at its fingertips and so that that’s a big piece of it is just the fact that it’s actually already kind of connected and when in one place it doesn’t have to be one platform

A lot of it is just more to do with how things are interconnected. So that that’s sort of the the underlying, I think, philosophy really for us around how we’ve been thinking about AI and how we see AI being successfully adopted by our customers is again back to that kind of system thinking. You know, how do I how do I make sure that everything I do is is is being captured, but it’s it’s not sort of you know proliferated across too many tools.

Greg Lambert (12:08)
Yeah. Well let me get away from the from the the partner level and let me let me ask you about some of the training, especially on the the associates. and I and I think you know I I was reading articles today that that kind of played on this fear that you know that the AI is is going to just cut all of the junior associate class, you know, compound that with the fact that

a lot of clients don’t wanna pay for that. They see it as as training. I always laugh. I I love the fact that the clients love taking the the experienced lawyer later and bringing them in house, but they don’t wanna train them them

Triona Buckley (12:47)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (12:52)
As a junior associates, but you you mentioned that we need to move away from relying on training by osmosis, and I think a lot of us understand that. what you mean by that. So, how should firms re-architect their training module or models to so that AI acts more as an accelerator?

that teaches critical thinking rather than just a machine that that just does some some work for them. I was I I like to call this using the AI to help you AI. but how how do you see the AI being used in the training sessions?

Triona Buckley (13:30)
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things that I saw at law firms when I worked there was this, you know, model of, you know, summer associates and more junior associates like in office with partners or in office with senior associates. And like there’s a lot of value in that osmo like training by osmosis, as you said. some of the sort of more nuanced learning happens there. But you know, the the reality is that, you know, s some of that has already gone away, you know, through COVID and everything else, and people not necessarily being

Being

co-located. you know, that hasn’t been as possible in the last number of years. And while firms have you know really invested in their training programs and their more formalized sort of structured training systems, I one of the things that they hasn’t quite caught up yet is this yeah, is using AI to be the trainer, you know. So if we think about connecting what we talked about a moment ago in terms of institutional knowledge, there’s decades and decades of you know client work and you

know, you know, advisory work captured, you know, within the systems of a law firm, how do you put that to work? Not just for your client work, but actually for training your, your, your juniors. And so, you know, and it goes back a little bit to what we spoke about as well in relation to creating drafts. you know, if you actually have AI that is acting like the trainer, is asking your associates questions, is using the institutional knowledge to prompt them to ask deeper questions, to understand this.

More to make sure they’re checking what they should be checking. You know, it it really is an opportunity, I suppose, for it to feel like that sort of in-office, you know, more nuanced sort of training without that lift being on, you know, the partners to do that. Because, you know, as we all know, that’s a very inconsistent model. It’s very much reliant on, you know, how good that one, you know, partner or senior person is in terms of training. Whereas AI can really standardize that, you know, it can take all of the good parts of all of that sort of learning biosmosis, but add in a level of structure.

And and sort of rigor that that wasn’t there before us. So I’ve just you know we’ve I’ve started to see a few of the more innovative firms really see that as an opportunity, particularly at the mid market, where again you don’t necessarily have the resources to have a dedicated you know training program and that sort of thing. so so yeah, that that’s really the opportunity that I see is just sort of you know adding adding the nuance and the rigor, but really the institutional knowledge comes to life. This is how we do things with this firm, but not even just at a sort of a

you know, a workflow level more of the sort of like, you know, we tend to advise this way with our clients, you know, and like really, really very much more I suppose nuanced, you know, which is really the secret source I suppose of why clients choose a particular firm over another. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (16:03)
Yeah.

I’ve I’ve been using and and I know I know that Mark Andreessen didn’t come up with this, but he had he had said something earlier earlier this year about the number one thing that moves someone from the fiftieth percentile to the ninety ninth percentile the fastest is individual tutoring. and he said over you know the

long history of of humans that you know the the royal families did this, that the the the wealthy families did it, but it you know, the it took a lot of money to to do to do this individual tutoring and he’s saying now we have these tools that can be set up to be tutors. Is that is that how you’re seeing it is to train the train the AI to be the trainer or the tutor?

Triona Buckley (16:52)
Absolutely.

One hundred percent, yes. And and again, this isn’t to replace, you know, training programs or to replace that really important, you know, senior junior interaction. It’s about augmenting it and just making sure you’re standardizing it to a certain extent so everyone’s getting what they need. But I do really think that it’ll ex that it accelerates you know, the the pathway for for junior lawyers to actually get to a level of knowledge and and and and that more quickly and consistently, like I say. So yes, absolutely. It’s like using AI as your tutor.

not exclusively augmenting your training programs and and all of that. But but yeah, I think it’s a huge opportunity. And I think for mid-market firms in particular, a way that they can really use AI to help give their teams an edge, you know, and compete at whatever other level they they want to compete at with larger firms, whatever it might be.

Greg Lambert (17:39)
Yeah, yeah. I I I know a lot of trainers that that would love to have the help on this because they’re overwhelmed. In fact my my trainer was was telling me ’cause we were trying trying to think about how we were setting up the training program.

And she was it was kinda tongue in cheek and she was like, Well I’m you know, I’ve already got a full time job doing training and now you’re now we’re bringing in AI, so I’ve gotta do all that what I was doing and now I’ve gotta do AI too. So I think any type of leverage that we can get to to help the AI help us would be appreciated.

Triona Buckley (18:12)
Yes. Well that’s it. And then that’s

another that’s another bottleneck, I suppose, that we’re we’re seeing at firms is that yes, everybody has their day job, you know, and everybody is looking at how do they how do how do they sort of have this AI dividend brought into the mix. You know, how do we make AI actually create some ROI for us and make things more efficient? And in the meantime we’re double jobbing trying to figure out how to do privacy.

Greg Lambert (18:33)
Yeah. I was gonna say I’m still waiting on

that dividend.

Triona Buckley (18:36)
Yeah. Poor

poor IT teams trying to figure out, you know, what tools and when and for who and et cetera. Yeah, it’s it’s tricky.

Greg Lambert (18:44)
I I know when I interview attorneys that one if I ask them what are their top what are what are the top tasks that they do during a day that they would love to be automated.

typically those two are email and time entry. and so I wanna want to dive in on the the time entry, which you know there’s a lot of what was called the data debt that that is involved in the manual time entry tracking. and

Recently, Action Step acquired a startup called Tr Traced and brought in its founder, Aiden Bub, and integrated a new passive time capture module called Trace. so you’ve mentioned that when lawyers wait to enter time, and I think a lot of us know this, that you know, there’s that recency bias which causes them to you know write off time even before they’ve written the time down. so why

Why

is it so critical for you to for lawyers to capture time in the present tense as as as quick I guess as quickly as possible? And and how do you how do you use this AI module to help you kind of decouple the the time from the from the strictly hourly rates?

Triona Buckley (20:02)
Yeah, there’s there’s two aspects to it. Yeah, number one, I think, yeah, the the the panic, you know, at the end of the the week or the month where you get your push from rebelling team to to enter all your time. my goodness, what did I do? There’s that. And obviously, you know, most most fear earners have figured out systems and, you know, ways of of of helping with that in in you know, whether it’s their own individual kind of systems. and then the other piece is that yeah, you just you know, you you you automatically as a human write down the value of what you’re doing sometimes, you know, and so

Greg Lambert (20:12)
Yeah.

Triona Buckley (20:31)
you you just you you you think it’s fifteen minutes and it was actually an hour or whatever it might be. You know, you’re losing minutes all of the time and so

Frankly, sometimes it takes more time to enter the time of what you did, you know, and trying to recall what you did, it’s not almost not worth your time to create the time entry. And so there’s you know, there’s a few different aspects to it there, but what we know. So, but what we’ve seen is that actually again, if you’re as you work through your day, you’re getting regular you know reminders or prompts, or you know, you know, almost you know, bill ready you know, time entries presented to you, then all you have to do is go, Yes, I did that tick. you know, we’re we’re seeing huge.

Huge gains for our fee owners who are using Trace in Action Step. And you know, there if if you’re even capturing an extra, you know, 30 minutes a day, which is work you already did. We’re not telling you to do any more work, we’re just saying capture more of that work so that it’s because it’s billable work. you know, if you’re even just capturing 30 minutes more a day, that’s obviously a huge gain that all adds up every week, etc. So so that’s really what Trace is all about. It’s just in you know, it monitors both the work that you’re

you’re

doing in action step in our application, but also the work that you’re doing in in Word and email and et cetera, et cetera. And so it’s and and really presenting it all in a way that is, you know, bill already very easy for you to say yes. It’s obviously connect, you know, it connects it connects the work through to the matters using AI and using the context of of where you’re working. So

Really exciting one. I think there’s a huge ROI gain for law firms on that. You know, it’s sort of the most obvious one our customers have really gravitated to. so yeah, excited to get it into. We have we we already have our first version of that in market and being used by customers. We have our our next version actually coming out next next month, which crosss across more tools. so yeah, really, really good ROI for our customers on that.

Greg Lambert (22:15)
Well, I imagine even beyond just the, you know, tracking time, having a more accurate assessment of how long it actually takes to do something. you know, having those data points and and being consistent, rather than relying on somebody trying to remember at the end of the month who’s there’s you know is it’s gotta be a huge value add too.

Triona Buckley (22:35)
That’s it.

Yeah, down downstream the huge value adds in terms of yeah, like you know, accuracy of of client quoting, for example, you know, and and and on and that whole area, you know, and so there’s there’s you know, so pricing, you know, how you think about those things, you know, just just you know utilization across teams, you know, there’s so many different things that this plays into. and really lifting that information up to management so that they can see, you know, where people are spending them the the the most time and how can we help. Again, it helps to identify some of those bottlenecks that you

Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (23:07)
Yeah, yeah. I c I can I can imagine the the partner, the billing partner looking over there and going, my god, it took that long to do this. So one

Triona Buckley (23:14)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (23:18)
We talked briefly about the fact that the, you know, there’s a lot of tools that are being used. and it’s interesting because Action Step actually did a mid-market priority report, and it was just kind of showing the amount of tools they get used. and I think it was like 83% of firms still use like three or more tools just to manage a particular matter. and

a a third of of those use six or more tools. So and and being in a in a large firm, I I mean we’ve s we’ve seen tools sprawl where it’s like, it’d be you know it’d be great if we added this one thing or this will make make things easier. And the next thing you know you you’ve just got this huge stack of of technology with each one doing its own little piece. So

Triona Buckley (23:48)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (24:07)
Why why do you believe that mid-market firms are actually better positioned to to apply the the AI transition than say an an AMLOD, you know, 100, 200 firm? and and so, you know, how how are you seeing them being better positioned?

Triona Buckley (24:27)
I think there are three reasons why mid market firms are are better positioned than most. number one, they they tend to have fewer tools, so they’re probably more in that that middle camp of you know, kind of three ish tools, maybe that they’re they’re working with, which actually isn’t a lot, you know, being having some well integrated tools is is good. and so they have fewer tools to to work with, and so it’s actually it’s easier for them to sort of get their their their house in order and get sort of AI.

ready, you know, because their data’s living in fewer tools, frankly. And part of that is because you know that they don’t necessarily have the budget to buy all of these other two other tools. And part of it is that they’re, you know, they’re they’re able to you know the they they there are products out there that support them, you know, that that give them that sort of you know cleaner, cleaner environment. So there’s that piece of it. I think you know number one, just that their their tooling is set up well for you know for for AI to work well for them. Number two

It is just a function of size, you know. the you know, you have a professional layer in mid-market firms who are experienced, who typically are quite close to the bottlenecks and the needs of that firm. but because they’re slightly, you know, they’re not these huge big enterprise firms, they’re they’re easier ships to turn. And so change management is something that can happen somewhat more easily if you do have that professional layer. And I’m really talking about firms who sort of invested in having, you know, you know, strong management resources that can help we can help that to happen.

And then the third thing is that, you know, generally clients choose mid-market firms because they have, you know, they they the closest they get to senior, senior resources, you know, the closest they can have to the partners, the advisory relationship that they have there, which the you know, you don’t necessarily get, you know, in other segments of the market. And so mid-market firms already have, you know, good relationship managers, you know, so their fear earners are good relationship managers, their partners are very focused on the growth of the firm and making sure that custom you know, clients are are well.

taken care of and all of that. And that that’s one of the things that is going to shine most in a world of AI. You know, it’ll be less about the sort of the the quality of the of the you know the documents and that sort of thing and more about you know those sort of really nuanced personal you know advisory relationships you know which mid market firms have already had to hone those skills you know over many years. And it’s one of the reasons why you know

talent comes to those firms because they want to have more of that client engagement, you know. So so those are the sort of the three reasons why I think mid-market firms are in really, really good position when it comes to AI. They can their data’s well set up, they’ve got the client relationships already, which are gonna be their value point going forward. and they, you know, they’re they’re easy they find things, you know, easier to adopt and easier to change.

Greg Lambert (27:03)
Yeah, I wanna I want to pull on the the the change management thread that you mentioned there in the the middle of that. and I imagine that having fewer tools or tool you know tools that that kind of crosses across multiple steps.

makes it a little easier on the change management front. how how do you work with your with your c customers to kind of understand that change management aspect of it? ‘Cause I I think a lot of us don’t realize how important that is.

Triona Buckley (27:35)
You are absolutely right. So many firms do not realise how important that is. and we try and advise firms who come to us to really think about these projects as, you know, think about them in a matter of sort of, you know, months, not weeks. You know, like these are th you know, you have to plan for this. You have to make sure that you have you know, you’re you have an awareness, I suppose, of how your systems currently work, your actual, you know, how your people work. you know, and that you’re you’re planning around that and like less focus on feature functionality.

And more about you know your own processes today and and and how you want it to work in the future, that sort of thing. So, I mean, a lot of the change management piece is around, as you know, yeah, you know, being clear about what actually needs to change, where those bottlenecks are, but also having the right team in place that are going to actually drive it forward, they’re going to be champions, who are going to make sure it’s successful. So, a lot of the times when we’re engaging with you know firms who are coming to us for the first time, we’re asking them those kinds of questions, you know, like who’s who’s going to be involved in this in this process.

project. you know, what are the things that matter to your firm? You know, where do you see your firm, you know, next year, the year after? What sort of growth are you experiencing? What sort of clients you do with so really more like asking about their business so that they’re already starting to think about those sorts of things in the context of technology and less sort of you know comparison tables of features and functionality, like I say. So that’s really important. We also work with a really really experienced cohort of advisory partners who you

Know work with firms to help them to adopt new technology, like their entire jobs are around change management and technology and adoption and that sort of thing. So you know, while our team is very much because most of them have worked in law firms, they’re very much of that mindset. the actual implementation work is is is is done by our our partner group, you know, in direct collaboration with our customers. so that works really well. It means we don’t have any implementation bottlenecks at Action Step. You know, we have we have kind of an

Endless supply of you know of of of well-vetted partners that customers can choose from. So that works that works well. And it’s a very different, like we’re a software company, you know, and so it’s a very different mindset. You need to have business process people involved in that. but like I say, I think having those conversations from the very start, we know is really important. We have a lot of firms who will come to us, have those initial conversations, realize they need to go and do a bit more homework, and then come back to us, you know, kind of three months later. So yeah.

Greg Lambert (29:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Triona Buckley (29:56)
That’s that’s probably how it works best.

Greg Lambert (29:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, the you know, kinda kinda keeping your eye on where you know the the s strategic focus of of the firm. because you know especially when you’re bringing in a a a substantial bit of software that that can kind of change the day in and day out for people that the you know it’s not just turn it on and say here you go. There’s there’s a lot that you need to think about as you’re as you’re

So it sounds like you’ve got a good handle on on that implementation. Well done.

Triona Buckley (30:27)
I like to think so. I mean look, these things are always they’re they’re huge projects, you know, they are huge projects, like you say. You know, it’s it is it’s a big undertaking. and I suppose for that expectation to be set is also important, you know, like let’s be let’s be clear, you know, this is going to take, you know, a lot of effort, a lot of thinking, but you’re gonna come out the side in a really, really good position, you know, and sort of you know, working through that th those, you know, th those periods of of of of pain. you know, it’s it’s an isn’t

Inevitable, you know, but but again, as long as as long as you’re having those conversations early and that’s understood, it’s not an issue. It just shouldn’t be a surprise.

Greg Lambert (31:04)
Yeah.

well, you know, the one thing law firms are known for is is really accepting change. So it’s or or or maybe not. Maybe maybe we’re not known for that.

Triona Buckley (31:13)
People.

But

you know, there’s a bit of a talk track about law firms sort of being, you know, like you know, slow to change and and and you know that sort of thing slow to adopt. but I actually I I respect the thoughtfulness that you know generally the legal industry has to, you know, to to to these things. I also think if you look at the history of law firms, like to be fair, there’s there’s few enough industries that have actually survived and thrived as well as as as law firms have, you know, so through all sorts of booms and busts and whatever else. So I don’t

Yeah.

Greg Lambert (31:43)
Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing we do thrive through uncertainty. So that’s so well, Triona, let me let me ask you before we get to our crystal ball question, we’ve been asking our guests for the past year or so, just because there’s so much going on in in in the industry, whether whether it’s legal tech or just AI in general, you know, there’s just

Triona Buckley (31:47)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (32:09)
So much to try and keep up with. So we’ve been asking, you know, what are what are some, you know, one or two of the you know, must read or must watch or must listen to resources that you l use to kind of help you kind of keep up with with what’s going on in in the market right now.

Triona Buckley (32:30)
I have to admit that while I am a obviously this podcast, but while I am a I I am I while I I listen to most things, I think the voices that I listen to the most are are are not necessarily the you know the podcasts or the articles or that sort of thing. It’s it’s actually, you know, folks are in the industry working with law firms every day. I mean obviously yourself and Marlene are in practice, so that’s you know different. You have that very specific

Greg Lambert (32:35)
Obviously.

Triona Buckley (32:57)
perspective but but yeah you know that I mentioned that partner community and so I would say actually that partner community I probably listen to the most and obviously directly to customers and really try and form our own view based on based on them because one of the things that I I see happening in the industry is a lot of me too me too, you know, just a lot of kind of jumping on bandwagons. And so actually kind of going directly to the horse you know, and and and sort of hearing what they have to say is is

it’s in my mind more powerful. so yeah that tends to be where I where I lean for sort for some real market reads. Like these are partners who are working with you know dozens of dozens of customers, law firms, you know, every single every single month you know who who really do understand things from the inside out. So that’s that’s where I lean.

Greg Lambert (33:43)
Yeah, it’s it’s definitely still important to to build your own community. So it’s I I think I think a lot of us have relied upon that, especially the last two or three years. So well now it’s it’s time for a crystal ball question. So pull out your crystal ball. It’s really kind of cheating because you’re already in tomorrow, so you you you probably already know some of the future.

Triona Buckley (33:48)
Yes, most important.

Ha ha ha

Greg Lambert (34:07)
But look looking ahead you know a a few months to a few years, as you know, a agentic AI and harnesses and you know, all of the stuff that that we’re being hit with lately affects and becomes embedded into the business of law. You know, what what are some things that you think especially in the mid market law firm model?

that they should be prepared for, that that that they may not be ready for yet.

Triona Buckley (34:37)
a few things. I mean, I think I mean some of the things we’ve touched on. So I think you’re gonna see firms that you know have invested in you know client nurturing, client relationships, that sort of thing. I think they are gonna be the ones who who thrive. And so if firms are not doing that already, that should be the thing that they are prioritizing over and above anything else, frankly. you know, the second thing I mentioned, I think the firms that have their their data house in order are gonna do better, you know, in in an in terms of AI enablement. but in general, I think I

have a very positive perspective on where law firms will end up being. I think again, you know, law firms have been through a lot of cycles. They always end up you know surviving, thriving, you know, changing, evolving, you know, coming out stronger forward, sort of thing. And so I so you know I think I I think just for them to think forward to that point, you know, and what that looks like for them and and and work towards that. The the pieces that I don’t see as much conversation around at at mid-sized firms, I think is probably happening

With enterprise firms, but not necessarily mid-size, is around how their commercial model is going to change, you know, how their whole their pricing, their

you know, like the types of clients’ engagement and client engagements that they have is going to change. We’re already hearing from some law firms that clients are saying to them, you know, I don’t wanna I don’t want to pay for your juniors, I only want to pay for your seniors, that sort of thing. So I think, you know, you’re just gonna see a lot more which is has already been happening, but you’re gonna see a lot more, you know, project level pricing, you know, those sorts of fixed fee type of pricing, which is less less about attaching, you know, rates to people and more about the output. you know, so I

And I I I think that’s an area that I think mid-sized law firms really need to need to focus on and plan for and understand how that’s going to impact their their kind of economic model as firms. it’s one of the reasons why, you know, we we talked about time tracking earlier, but you know, you know, and sort of understanding the dynamics of you know, where you spend your time and how that plays into profitability. it’s one of the reasons why I think that’s a that’s like something that we’re investing in and that we can help law firms with to plan for in future.

Greg Lambert (36:35)
Yeah, yeah, great, great answers. So Triona Buckley, think I wanna thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today and sharing your your vision of where where we’re heading. It’s this has been fun.

Triona Buckley (36:49)
Thanks, Greg. Really appreciate it.

Greg Lambert (36:51)
All right. And thanks to all of you who are listening to the Geek and Review. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. we’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack. And Triona, where’s the best place for our listeners to learn more about you and Trace and Action Step?

Triona Buckley (37:09)
Actionstep dot com. Very simple. Yes.

Greg Lambert (37:11)
Easy. I like it. And

as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSecca. So thank you, everybody.

Why AI Will Create More Legal Work, Not Less: Filevine’s Rizner and Anderson on Research, Access, and Human Judgment

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:50:07 +0000

Predictions about artificial intelligence often focus on job losses and shrinking demand for lawyers. Filevine CEO and co-founder Ryan Anderson and product manager John Rizner offer a sharply different forecast. Drawing on the Jevons paradox, they argue greater efficiency will make legal services accessible to more people, encourage deeper legal research, and create work once excluded by cost. AI might reduce the effort required for individual tasks while expanding the overall volume and ambition of legal representation.

The shift holds major implications for the access-to-justice gap. Faster drafting, research, and document review would allow lawyers to serve more clients without sacrificing professional judgment. Anderson expects family law, immigration, bankruptcy, criminal defense, and employment litigation to experience some of the earliest growth. Motions, witnesses, and legal theories once abandoned over expense become economically viable, although courts face their own capacity crisis as more disputes and arguments enter the system.

Rizner explains how Filevine’s legal AI platform, Lois, applies machine learning to one of legal research’s oldest problems: traditional citators often return different results. Lois combines citation graphs with semantic analysis to locate opinions discussing related legal doctrines even when no direct citation connects the cases. A panel of models then evaluates potential conflicts and produces a structured memo. The goal is richer legal analysis focused on the precise holding or proposition a lawyer needs, rather than a simple flag attached to an entire opinion.

Accuracy still demands disciplined human review. Filevine organizes citation verification into three levels: confirming the cited case exists, determining whether the case supports the claimed proposition, and checking whether the authority is still good law. The conversation also examines Rizner’s research into how different large language models approach efficient breach of contract. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic models produced dramatically different recommendations, revealing embedded legal and economic preferences beneath seemingly neutral answers.

The guests also explore how AI changes legal drafting, law firm economics, and the billable hour. Filevine’s acquisition of Pincites, now Lois for Word, reflects Microsoft Word’s continuing role as the shared language of legal documents, redlines, formatting, and negotiations. Efficiency does not automatically eliminate hourly billing. Lawyers might instead use saved time to produce more thoroughly researched arguments, stronger contracts, and work product approaching senior-level depth. Firms still need incentives rewarding efficiency rather than treating faster work as lost revenue.

Looking ahead, Anderson and Rizner predict a proliferation of frontier and open-source models tailored to firms, individual lawyers, and specific client relationships. Legal teams will increasingly pair proprietary knowledge with selected models to produce highly specialized analysis. Yet model choice introduces jurisprudential bias, accuracy risks, and serious training concerns for junior lawyers. AI expands the range of available options, while experienced legal judgment decides which arguments deserve trust, which sources require verification, and which advice should reach the client.

John Rizner Slides Filevine Primary Presentation – 2026

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript:

Nikki Shaver (00:00) Hi Greg and Marlene. Ever since Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, a lot of focus has been on whether firms and legal departments should be using that in place of, or as well as, legal-specific applications like Harvey and Legora. But Anthropic is not the only big player to brush up against the legal market. Microsoft has launched its legal agent, embedded in Word and other 365 applications. OpenAI has reportedly hired someone to help build in legal. Perplexity has launched Computer for Counsel with a host of legal MCP connectors. And now it seems Amazon may also have its sights on our vertical with Amazon Quick for Legal. It was already a tough market to navigate when all you had to worry about were the thousands of legal applications; now you also need to track what’s happening in the broader tech ecosystem. We’ll soon be publishing a helpful comparison of the big tech offerings for legal, with an examination of where in the legal tech stack they might be useful. Stay tuned for that on our site at legaltechnologyhub.com, or follow along on LinkedIn at Legaltech Hub. It’s a pleasure to see all of you. Until next week.

Marlene Gebauer (01:13) Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert (01:20) and I’m Greg Lambert. And today we are going to be digging into a fascinating and probably somewhat counterintuitive theory that’s turning the traditional panic over AI on its head. Instead of asking how many legal jobs AI will destroy, we’re actually going to explore why AI may actually trigger an unprecedented explosion of legal work, opening up massive markets that were historically priced out.

Marlene Gebauer (01:48) In hearing what our guests have to say about this, and to lead our conversation, we are absolutely thrilled to welcome John Rizner, product manager at Filevine. And joining John is Ryan Anderson, the CEO and co-founder of Filevine. John and Ryan, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Greg Lambert (02:03) Welcome, guys.

Ryan Anderson (02:04) Good to be here, Greg and Marlene.

Greg Lambert (02:05) All right, John, let’s start off with you, because we wanted to talk about the Jevons paradox, which I know a lot of our listeners have heard before. But let’s look at the big macroeconomic picture that you guys have brought to our attention as well. Many pundits out there are predicting that AI will contract the legal industry, but you guys are arguing the exact opposite of that using the Jevons paradox — the economic theory that technology makes resources cheaper and more efficient to produce, and then consumption actually skyrockets. So do you mind just talking a little bit about how the paradox applies to legal work, and how we should be prepared for that?

John Rizner (02:51) Yeah, totally. So I’m going to talk about it in connection with a product that I’m working on: a citator, à la Shepard’s-style citations, within LOIS. When we started off investigating our tooling, I had a number of conversations with some old law school classmates of mine that did far better in law school than I did — appellate litigators who went through the elite clerkship rounds. And I was talking with them: “If you had the ability, with large language models and new AI tooling, would you be excited to chew through fewer research materials as part of your work?” What was interesting is all of them said, actually, if I had unlimited time and unlimited resources, I would want to find more and read more, as opposed to find less and read less. If they could, they would love to boil the ocean — exhaust every possible resource in reading through opinions and relevant literature on their case before drafting or preparing anything. So I think as AI tools, especially in the legal research space, the citator space, make finding the relevant literature easier — even making more of the relevant literature an immediate delivery to the user — rather than lawyers spending less time doing research, we’re going to see lawyers spend more time doing substantive research. The difference being, instead of lawyers saying, “All right, I’ve got X amount of time, I found this handful of cases, let’s quickly draft this and get it out the door,” I think you’re going to see far more in-depth and nuanced arguments in legal work product, due to the fact that lawyers will have easier access to greater amounts of research material. And as a consequence, you’ll probably have better opinions come out of courts, because the arguments lawyers are making are going to be more nuanced, reflecting the deeper research. So I hope lawyers like doing research — I hope that’s why they went to law school — because in my view of it, you’re going to see greater and greater research, and far higher quality research, as opposed to lesser or more shallow research.

Greg Lambert (05:23) Yeah, that was going to be my follow-up question, on a conversation we had last week — one of the things she mentioned was: we used to get these one-page surveys or reports, and now we’re getting these 40-page surveys. And it’s not necessarily better; it’s just more. But I think your argument is that the outcome, the results, the research is actually better rather than just more research. Am I interpreting that correctly?

John Rizner (05:55) Yeah. So I think, at their core, and obviously we all know as part of our ethical duties, lawyers should be diving through the cases that they’re possibly looking at. And I think as these tools evolve and become more mature and can find more relevant and more on-point items for the lawyers to read, they will read the same amount, maybe even read more. But the conclusions they come to will be stronger, because they have that better picture of how the law is at that particular moment. So volume may grow, and in addition to volume growing, I think quality becomes far better in the long run.

Marlene Gebauer (06:38) Yeah, I think that makes sense, because AI kind of allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then you can focus more deeply on the things that you need to focus on and sort of leave the other ones.

Ryan Anderson (06:52) Yeah, I’ll speak to that for just a moment too, from a market perspective. Two, three years ago there were a lot of predictions around what would happen to engineers, coders. Filevine employs a lot of coders — I think we will end the year with something like 400 to 450 engineers, about half of which are ML engineers, the other half your traditional coders. And there were quite a few predictions that AI would reduce the need for corporations, for tech companies specifically, to have as many engineers. The theory was that there will be so much code written, and it’ll be so much easier to write, that you won’t need as many engineers — so you’ll see some layoffs and fewer engineers hired. Well, it’s been the case at our company, and I think broadly across the industry, that the exact opposite has happened. The engineering market sort of hit a low maybe two or three years ago and has actually climbed out of that. More are being hired — not more than ever, but certainly more than the post-COVID lows. More companies are bringing on more engineers to do more work, and there’s a very logical reason for this. We definitely write 10 times more code today than we did before — it might even be more than 10 times more. But for every piece of code that we write, it has to be reviewed, it has to be QA’d, it has to be tested. And as the aperture of the product increases, the surface area for problems increases, but the ambition of the product also grows. What that has allowed us to do as a company is build a much richer, broader, more end-to-end product offering that we think is really unique, but I think it’s the same for a lot of companies. The analogy really holds true for legal. As John brought up, you’re going to have lawyers able to do research more quickly and find truth for their clients in a much broader way, and be able to zero in and find creative ways to apply the facts of their case to the law. But even consider the lawyer who says, “Instead of bringing that motion the client just didn’t want us to do because it was going to be expensive, I didn’t bring the motion to compel the deposition of that witness. We just let it go — we just didn’t do it in this case.” That happens all the time. If you talk to litigators, they’ll say their clients didn’t want to pay for witness number six, who might have had some interesting information in the case. But boy, now that you can bring that motion to compel, and it’s much easier to draft and much quicker, the opportunity costs change, and the search for truth becomes sort of superpowered. And of course, litigation in particular is a counterparty affair — what one side does, the other side is having to respond to, and then maybe bringing a counterattack themselves. So for better or for worse, I think truth will get sought out more quickly. But also, I think lawyers are going to be very busy. And honestly, I wouldn’t want to be a judge in this atmosphere — I think it is really tricky for the judiciary at this time.

Greg Lambert (09:47) Yeah.

John Rizner (09:50) And I think one other item to bring in on this truth question: it’s not like we are looking at a field where all the buried treasure has been dug up. One of the things we were looking at early on was research by Paul Hellyer and Susan Mart, two legal scholars, who had done quantitative analysis of how often, say, Lexis and Westlaw agree or disagree on a particular citation, or how often they return the same relevant opinions for a particular citation analysis. What’s really interesting is that the differences between the two could be substantial, depending on the opinions looked at. So if you’re a subscriber only to Westlaw or only to Lexis, you may be missing items that Lexis is returning but Westlaw isn’t, or vice versa. And so where AI tooling makes it cheaper and easier to apply different methodologies — so you can have your multiple citators taking different approaches at a larger scale — I think you start to discover more of those opinions that were otherwise hidden, because you were stuck with one citator and only uncovering those hidden truths via one type of methodology.

Greg Lambert (11:10) Ryan, I want to go back to something that you mentioned about using the engineers as a parallel path to some of the things that we’re seeing in legal. I was listening — I believe it was Adam Mosseri from Instagram — talking about how his engineering teams are made up now versus how they were pre-AI, where he was saying every project had like a baker’s dozen of people on it, ranging from engineers to project managers to researchers and data scientists. And he says now it’s essentially a team of three. Are you seeing similar things on your engineering team? And do you think there’s a parallel for how lawyers will be doing it?

Ryan Anderson (12:00) Yeah — and sorry, sorry to interrupt you, but yes, we are definitely seeing a reduction in what a single person can do. Let me give an example. This just happened today, about two hours ago. I was going through a new feature with our team. We were thinking through how to design an experience on our deep retrieval engine. We think we have really world-class retrieval — we think we can search through more documents than almost any product out there; we literally think we’re the best in the world at this. But you might imagine there are some UI constraints: telling the user where you are when you’re searching through millions of pages of documents can be tricky. There was some back and forth about how to do this, the team’s debating, there are about 10 people on the call, and we’re saying, “Well, how about this method to tell the user what’s going on? Here are some other methods.” And about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of the engineers goes, “Well, I actually just coded it. Does anyone want to see what I just did?” And we literally shared a screen, and he showed something — not in a production environment, but on his local machine using real live code — and said, “Here’s how I think we should do it.” It was working, and we could actually play with it right there during the meeting. I can tell you that kind of interaction never happened before. Never. We have lawyers who say, “I was exploring an argument that I didn’t think would be a good idea, but I used LOIS, and all of a sudden it found a couple cases, and it was a line of case law theory that I didn’t think applied to my case, but it does. And so we’re going to actually attack the other side in a way that we hadn’t realized at all.” When you lower the cost for exploration, for creative exploration, people become much more creative. I’ve always thought the best lawyers are actually exceptionally creative. It’s funny — lawyers don’t think of themselves as creatives. They think of artists and movie stars and musicians as creative people. But I think great lawyers are exceptionally creative, and by lowering the cost to go on a creative thread with a legal theory, you enable much more creativity. It’s very exciting.

Marlene Gebauer (14:09) So Ryan, when we talk about lowering costs to capture a dormant market of middle-class clients and small businesses, what specific practice areas or legal needs do you think will see the quickest influx of new work? How does Filevine view this unfolding from a macro strategy perspective?

Ryan Anderson (14:29) There are many great things about AI, and there are some scary things about AI. But in the legal industry, perhaps the most exciting is — we all know that getting a lawyer is actually quite a challenge. My brother, who’s our chief product officer, talks about how he needed a lawyer to help with a relatively small real estate dispute. Here’s a guy who literally leads product for a pretty significant legal tech company, has a brother who was a lawyer, and knows many, many lawyers in his day-to-day job, and he could barely get somebody to answer the phone. It is hard sometimes to find a lawyer — and that’s a well-connected guy. If you’re somebody who’s indigent, working class, maybe you don’t grow up with the same kind of privileges or connections, it can be extremely challenging to find good legal representation. And it’s pretty awesome that lawyers are going to have much more capacity now. You asked what industries: I think you’ll see a lot more in family law, a lot more immigration law, a lot more bankruptcy, and I think underrepresented criminal defendants are going to be in much better shape than they are today. In fact, a lot of those state public defenders’ offices are clients of Filevine. The Innocence Project is a client of Filevine. You’re going to be able to have more people who have meritorious claims for wrongful prosecution — or for having a lawyer who didn’t do the job they should have been doing — win their case, or at least get them a lower sentence. Many more of these cases can be taken on. It’s incredibly exciting. So I think you’ll see it across the board in those areas. The example I give is: these are lawyers, so we’ll say they have 10 hours in their workday, and it now takes two hours to draft a will instead of eight. Well, how many more people can they serve in a given day? If they could draft one will in eight hours, or maybe it was four, and now can do it in two, you’re now serving something like double the number of people during a day. You don’t even have to reduce your rates that much — maybe your rates stay the same, they might even go higher — but you’re able to serve more people, and those people wind up paying less because they’re taking less of the lawyer’s time. So it’s a very exciting world we’re going to live in. We don’t know exactly how it will all play out, but more legal customers will be served than ever before. It’s very exciting.

Marlene Gebauer (16:55) What do you think about labor and employment? Would that be an area as well?

Ryan Anderson (16:59) Oh, for sure — undoubtedly. I would love to say that this is maybe good news for corporate defendants. It’s probably not good news for corporate defendants. They’ll have more tools at their disposal to investigate these claims, and they’re often not meritorious, and Filevine wants to help those customers. But also plaintiffs’ lawyers who have meritorious claims against corporations use our products. We really want to help lawyers find the truth; we want to help the justice system find the truth. We are huge believers that the American system of justice not only is the best in the world, but forms the infrastructure for a fair and just capitalist society. We think the lawyer’s role in a system of capitalism is really critical, because otherwise it’s hard to keep business in check. So we’re really proud to serve our customers, whatever side of the “v” they may be on. But yes, I think you can expect an increase in litigation across the board.

Greg Lambert (17:52) I’ll go back to when you were saying it’s going to be a difficult time to be a judge right now, because I think that’s one area where, if we don’t figure out how they are going to handle this massive influx of new cases, it doesn’t matter really how much of the efficiency gets on the plaintiff/defendant side if the court system is inaccessible.

Marlene Gebauer (18:20) I just wonder if they’re going to get like an AI version of Judge Judy — people will agree to the AI judge and let them decide in smaller matters.

Greg Lambert (18:24) Are you guys working on that, Ryan?

Ryan Anderson (18:24) Yeah, you could see kind of smaller matters, private matters. Obviously, I think there’s a different need to be there, but —

Marlene Gebauer (18:38) I could see that for mediation, sure, stuff like that.

Ryan Anderson (18:55) Yeah, I think so. I think you can envision small arbitrations that are private, where at least they agree to maybe some AI tooling being used. I think that’s almost certainly going to happen — it probably should, to a degree. Let me be clear, though: Filevine and LOIS, which is our AI product, is the core economic engine of this business. We basically only sell LOIS and AI products today, which is quite a difference from where we were three to four years ago. So AI is incredibly important to me; it’s incredibly important to this company. We are fully AI-pilled in how bullish we are about this industry. Having said all of that, I think the judgment of the lawyer, the judge, the legal professional isn’t going away for a really long time. It is one thing to see an AI output as an unsophisticated consumer of that information and say, “Geez, this kind of looks pretty good and pretty persuasive.” But I think all of us have seen enough AI results and prompts and, frankly, slop to go: hold on, hold on — this looks like it’s right, but it is in fact not right, and sometimes in really critical but perhaps nuanced ways. That kind of legal judgment is going to exist for quite some time. So I think we’re a very far ways off from lawyers being replaced, from judges being replaced. But as I’m sure everyone in your audience already realizes, the age of AI in legal is here — it has been here now for a couple of years and is very squarely in our era. We will talk to our grandkids about this transition; it is a very big deal. But we’re huge believers in the primacy of human judgment when it comes to the law. We believe that lawyers play a really critical role.

John Rizner (18:55) And I want to tie back to some research that we did this last year on how LLMs respond — we may get into the paper in a little bit in this podcast — but we were looking at how different LLMs, or different families of LLMs, react to the same law-and-economics breach of contract issue, and how they compare to humans. What was maybe surprising, maybe unsurprising, was that depending on what model or what family of models you were using, you could see dramatically different results on whether the LLM was pushing the judge or the practitioner to push for a breach of contract or to keep a promise. So I think there could even be a future in which — if we’re talking about our LLM-based arbitrators — folks are fighting over which LLMs or which tech tools to use, because there is that risk that the tool you use could affect what answers you’re coming to. And I think that’s even another argument why the human attorney needs to remain a core part of the practice. I don’t think we’re yet comfortable giving over our judgment to tools that might already have a judgment built in that we don’t even agree with.

Ryan Anderson (21:45) Yeah, and of course — yeah, go ahead.

Marlene Gebauer (21:47) No, no, go ahead. Sorry.

Ryan Anderson (21:50) No, no. I mean, look, we all see the hallucination news daily, and it’s everywhere. I think lawyers are right to be very concerned about it. I think judges are right to take a really strict view of hallucination. It’s out there all the time; it is an extremely challenging problem. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to discuss what we’re doing on anti-hallucination — that’s an entire team at Filevine, the anti-hallucination team, certainly with respect to case law. But I’ll just give you one example. We had a customer put some data through Claude versus LOIS — we think LOIS is much more precise than Claude — and Claude came back, and it had taken some testimony and put in quotations something that a witness had said. Literal quotation marks around what a witness had said. And it turned out that witness hadn’t said that; it was sort of an amalgamation of three or four things the witness had said. If you looked at each statement the witness had made, you can understand how Claude would have arrived at the conclusion that the witness had said this quote — but the witness had not said that. And any lawyer looking at the quote versus what the witness had actually spoken and verbalized in the deposition: totally different. Totally different. So the legal judgment to know the difference between what is close and what is precise is going to be needed for a long time. We’re not there yet. AI tools are very important, but they have to be watched over, for sure.

Marlene Gebauer (23:15) Well, I want an anti-hallucination T-shirt — an anti-hallucination team T-shirt, that’s what I want. So John, Greg and I saw your presentation at Texas Trailblazers a few months back, and you noted that AI adoption follows incentives, and that trust in AI is ultimately a workflow problem. Since of course we’re talking about Gen AI, it wouldn’t be fair to not have a billable hour question. If efficiency gains allow lawyers to draft a complex contract or review a file in a fraction of the time, how do firms need to restructure their incentives so they aren’t punishing efficiency under this traditional hourly model? And honestly, if you have this, that’s the secret sauce, because we’re all grappling with that.

Greg Lambert (24:05) This is the billion dollar — maybe trillion dollar — question.

Marlene Gebauer (24:07) Yeah, so here you go.

John Rizner (24:09) I think, on the one hand, the billable hour has survived a lot of technological change so far and has not disappeared yet, so I think the billable hour has some weight to it that will be hard to remove. Coming back to Ryan’s point on the will piece, as well as our opening point about quality: say producing a particular piece of work product today takes eight hours, and we push it down to two to get that same exact work product. Well, there’s still runway to improve on that particular document — a better-researched argument, a more ironclad contract, a will that really thinks through all the elements of this particular family situation and gets it exactly how the — this is throwing back to my law school days — the testator, is that the right term? Got to go back to trusts and estates. But I think with that extra time, the associate or the partner now has the ability to provide a better work product, something that really reflects what their particular client needs, at the same price or less, or maybe slightly more, but with a depth that wasn’t even close to what we could achieve today. The deep nuance that an associate may not have been required or expected to have today will be a requirement in the very near future and in the long run. So those extra six hours will be spent producing that higher-level, almost partner-level deep quality that just wasn’t accessible or doable today. So I think the billable hour survives for a while — unfortunately or fortunately, depending on what side of the debate you’re on. I know I never enjoyed the billable hour, but I think the economics of it still work, especially if you think that volume and quality become a greater and greater focus.

Greg Lambert (26:09) Yeah, I’ve yet to meet someone that loves the billable hour, but yet here we are.

Marlene Gebauer (26:15) When you find one, let us know. We want them on the podcast. It’s like: explain yourself.

Greg Lambert (26:21) Yeah. John, I want to also jump in on your presentation that you did a couple months ago at Texas Trailblazers, because I wasn’t sure how well that was going to go over — it was a pretty in-depth, very, very deep dive on citation systems.

Marlene Gebauer (26:38) We loved it.

Greg Lambert (26:44) But I asked a couple of partners at my firm who were in the room there, and they were like, “This was the best part of the whole conference. I love this.” So let’s jump into that, and more on the LOIS legal research product that you guys have as well. You’ve noted that traditional citators tell you about the case — we kind of talked about that earlier — but lawyers really care about the specific holding. Do you mind giving us almost a Reader’s Digest version of what you presented there, and talking about these dual-pathway retrieval systems under the hood? I’ll turn it over to you.

John Rizner (27:26) Yeah, absolutely. So our citator approach all came from the idea of: are there workflows in the current legal system that we think we could mimic using ML tooling and LLMs, to come to the same answer that the current legal process works through? What we ended up falling into is: on the one hand, citation graphs — your traditional citation approach — do a really good job when we’re looking at those cases that directly engage one another. Chevron and Loper Bright, for example, where you have Loper Bright talking expressly about Chevron. But there are all those cases that might talk to issues around the issue that you really care about, but might not expressly be cited by the potential treating cases — because it may be only a part of the larger case, or, for whatever reason, a clerk didn’t include it or a judge wanted to make a strategic decision, and those links just might not exist. So we thought: all right, can we find a bunch of opinions that might be relevant, either on a citation graph or, as we came to it, via semantic similarity — the inherent meaning of the text as turned into a kind of mathematical representation? Could we find all of the opinions that could exist and be relevant to the lawyer’s issue? And then from that, let’s pass that into almost a mock en banc process, where we have a bunch of LLMs operating as judges trying to decide: do we care about these opinions? Is this a relevant opinion to the issue we’re looking at? Do we think it conflicts with the issue we’re looking at? And from those mass LLM runs, produce a structured memo for the user saying: in this universe, we found these opinions that might cut across your specific chosen issue, for these reasons. What we’re really excited about is finding those opinions that do negatively engage one another but are really hard to find, because they’re not cleanly on a citation graph. The one I always go back to — I’ll look here in Utah — there’s this case called Brinkerhoff v. Salt Lake City, and the last few paragraphs of Brinkerhoff talk about this old doctrine of governmental immunity. There’s this test where the question of governmental immunity turns on whether the government activity is proprietary or governmental. If you pull up Brinkerhoff on some traditional citators, you’re not going to see any negative flags on it. And the reason is that Brinkerhoff has been talked about in a negative way in later-down-the-road Utah opinions, but the doctrine that Brinkerhoff used in those final few paragraphs was ultimately cut down by the Utah Supreme Court and the Utah legislature. Because we are, one, surfacing the fact that Brinkerhoff has talked about this doctrine, regardless of whether those later cases mention Brinkerhoff, and two, because we’re giving it to this LLM panel approach — this voting and memo-writing approach — the LLMs can recognize: wow, this doctrine is being used in Brinkerhoff; wait a minute, here’s Standiford, this later-in-time case that attacked the doctrine. We think there’s a connection there — a conflict there. We are able to find these items that are, again, otherwise unfindable on a traditional citation graph. That’s the thing I’m really excited about: we’re able to find for lawyers these ideas and conflicts that may be relevant to the other side’s point or opinion. What we want to surface to the lawyers is: hey, there might be other attacks on that particular proposition of law that we can now help you find, that were just undiscoverable before.

Greg Lambert (31:36) Yeah, man. It just brought that presentation all back to me. I remember how I geeked out on that train.

Ryan Anderson (31:44) It’s very cool. You know, I know this will be posted in transcript form — if there’s a way to show some of John’s slides, I mean, the slide that shows that...

Marlene Gebauer (31:53) Yeah, if you can give us a link to the slides, we will post that up in the show notes, absolutely. It’s so cool.

Ryan Anderson (31:58) Yeah — I mean, I think as you all probably were when you saw the presentation, just the notion that Westlaw and Lexis find different sets of cases. Good night, that’s terrifying.

Marlene Gebauer (32:09) We’re just like, yeah — someone’s finally saying it out loud.

Ryan Anderson (32:13) Right, right. And we’ve just shown that this method actually picks up a lot of cases that, in some cases, neither of them found. So it’s really interesting.

John Rizner (32:13) When we were starting to first benchmark our tooling, we had been pulling down those studies by Susan Mart in Colorado about the different cases they were finding. And we were like: some of this research was done eight years ago or five years ago — I wonder if, because of technological change, these differences have started to go away. In our current benchmarking: not so much. Still the dramatic divergence — which citator you happen to be using is going to give you a particular answer, and if you’re using a different one, you’re going to get a different answer. So it’s amazing just how much opportunity there is to help fill those gaps and give folks an ability to find things that they otherwise aren’t finding right now with their current tool.

Ryan Anderson (33:20) I’ll just briefly note: we have such a wealth of case law, a rich history of case law in this country. It’s so cool that most things have been decided — the vast majority of things have been discussed at some point by some court somewhere — which gives such stability to businesses, to human beings, to politicians, to people operating in our country. It gives everyone a tremendous amount of confidence when they make decisions, especially business decisions, to understand what the nature of the law is. And yet the citation system that we use was written — and it was the best we had — in a really deterministic, code kind of way. Here’s a citation; it links to this other citation, which links to this other citation. And that’s great — that’s what we had available to us, and it took humans to chain those cases together in logical trees, progenies of different cases. But LLMs are particularly good at saying: these words, these phrases, are semantically similar — they have similar meaning to this other set of cases over here — and even though there’s no hard-coded citation, we find similarity here, and you should take a look at it. It’s really fascinating. It’s a great use of LLMs. Go ahead, Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer (34:22) I just think about the discrepancies that you’re talking about and how that impacts — and we’re going to talk about the hallucinations — but when you’re trying to check for hallucinations and for legitimate cites, how does this play into that? And with how the courts are coming down on this, how do people rely on the tools that they have? Or should they?

Ryan Anderson (34:48) Yeah, I mean, we think we have a solution. I’ll let John talk about that.

John Rizner (34:52) So, in my view, this isn’t even specific to legal research in terms of case law: there’s such an importance to having corpuses of the information you care about available and engineered in a way that is best presented to the LLM, in the right way, at the right time, and in the right process. The real question I think lawyers need to be asking their tech providers is: all right, what corpuses are you using? How are you presenting them to your AI technology? And what benchmarks, what kind of evidence do you have that your approach is working well? It doesn’t matter if you’re using AI in your case file, trying to find the right document that outlines a scientific expert’s findings on something, or a point from a deposition that you really care about, or, on the legal research side, a particular opinion or particular citation that you care about — either way, it’s really important that your legal tech has engineering designed to get to the right point in the corpus for the answer you care about. For us, on the document side — Ryan was talking about that earlier with our enormous data science groups — they’re really focused on our corpus of case file material, and on stopping hallucinations by using what we call the knowledge engine to get the right answers surfaced to the LLM. On the citation side, what we’re focused on doing right now is taking open-source corpuses of grounded decisions — in this case, CourtListener being our big partner in that — and any time text is produced within LOIS in the chat, whenever we see a citation pop up, having tooling then check: okay, this has been brought up — does this case exist? And more importantly, does the user have an opportunity to check if the discussed opinion is discussing the issue we care about? Because one of the things we’re now seeing judges talk about is: okay, the case you cited exists, but it doesn’t support all of the propositions you’re trying to support. And in my mind — and this is what we’re building towards — there are almost three levels of evaluation you have to do for any particular piece of case law.

Marlene Gebauer (37:10) It doesn’t say that.

John Rizner (37:21) On the first level: is this case actually real? Does this citation actually exist somewhere in the corpus? That’s your very base level, right — is “John v. Ryan in the Territory of Guam” entirely made up? Was that citation made up? On the second level, you have that second-order hallucination: does that citation actually refer to and support the proposition you care about? Sure, the case exists, but are we talking about, I don’t know, Roe v. Wade in a contracts dispute? What’s being cited doesn’t support what you care about. And on the third level is that citational analysis: okay, the opinion exists, it supports what you care about — now, is it good law in the larger common law analysis? So that’s how we’re thinking about it: are we building towards hitting all three of those evaluation levels?

Marlene Gebauer (38:16) All right, I want to switch gears for a little bit and move away from litigation and more into the transactional area. Filevine started with a strong focus in plaintiff litigation, but this January you acquired Pincites, which is a legal drafting and redlining tool, and brought in Sona and Mariam Sulakian into your executive team, rebranding the tool as LOIS for Word. As a little bit of background for listeners who might not know: Sona was formerly a legal strategy expert at Ropes & Gray, and Mariam is a former GitHub and Meta product engineer. So congratulations — you brought in the dynamic duo. And I have a couple questions here. Why is it critical to corporate and transactional expansion to have something inside of Word? Particularly because I think we’re seeing now, with some of the larger LLMs, that they’re actually doing a lot of the work inside that environment — and I realize they’re doing stuff in Word too — but you do see a lot, particularly when you’re working with larger sets, that they’re actually doing it within the LLM environment.

Ryan Anderson (39:31) Look, it’s a great question. I don’t think Word is the final surface for all legal drafting, but it is definitely the dominant surface still today — and we’re not even talking about AI legal drafting, just legal drafting. The lingua franca of law is still Word, and probably will be for some time. If I said to you, “Hey, here are the redlines to this agreement. Go ahead and open this link with this other document type you’ve never heard of. Don’t worry about it — you’re going to have to sign in and make an account to see it,” Marlene, you would say, “No, thank you. Yes, hard pass. I need the Word document, please.” And I think pretty much every lawyer feels the same way. They have all learned to use Word. They understand it. They understand how comments work in Word. They understand how redlines work in Word. So getting an entire industry to re-platform may be challenging — certainly in the short term, probably in the medium term, maybe not in the long term. But re-platforming on a different drafting modality is just going to be really hard. So I think we’re stuck with Word — maybe that’s the right way to say it, maybe not. Everyone uses Word because it is the most fully featured drafting product the world has ever seen. So there are some good things about Word.

Marlene Gebauer (40:52) Greg likes WordPerfect. Sorry. He’s a big fan.

Greg Lambert (40:53) I was going to say — WordPerfect 4.2 on DOS. I mean, I’m up for bringing that back.

Ryan Anderson (40:56) There we go — you’d be surprised. Recently we still got a lot of customers asking us to integrate with —

Greg Lambert (41:01) Yeah, those reveal codes, man. Still need those.

Ryan Anderson (41:06) So I think that’s really critical. First of all, Sona and Mariam would be the first to tell you — and by the way, Marlene, you are right, they are the dynamic duo. These are two very sharp women — sisters, of course. First of all, lovely human beings, just a delight to work with, but as smart of folks as I’ve ever worked with in my career, and really fun to have on the team. They’ll anchor our San Francisco office. That was some time ago now — six months ago — so we’ve actually built quite a large team around them at this point, and that team is solely focused on AI legal drafting. Of course, they use a lot of the work that John and others have done, but they would be the first to tell you that Word is not the only surface they’re going to work on, and they already work on other ways to draft. But given the gravity that Word has in the industry, I think it’s going to be around for a while. There is a benefit to having everything be in Word — getting the formatting right is almost impossible without Word, depending on the court.

Marlene Gebauer (42:04) Formatting is a tough thing.

Ryan Anderson (42:06) It is very challenging. And look, I fully understand judges’ particularity and frustration around hallucinations — but they get equally as frustrated around some of the tiniest formatting issues. I’m a little less like — okay, does it really matter if the margins are 1.25 instead of 1.1 or something? But I can tell you that it does to them, and if it does to them, it does to the lawyer practicing in their courtroom. So it’s really not optional, and Word can reliably produce the best-formatted documents for legal in the world. So we need to be on that surface, and we want to be world class there. And we do think LOIS for Word is world class — we’ll put it up against Claude for Legal or Harvey or Legora or any of our other competitors. We think it’s the best redlining and drafting tool out there. And to that end, we should note that not only is LOIS for Word very good at redlining — we think it’s the best at redlining — but the ambition is much stronger than that, much broader. It is drafting long-form, sophisticated, complex legal documents grounded in evidentiary citations and case law citations. That is an ambition that I don’t think many of our other competitors have gotten to quite yet — maybe some at the top of the market are with us there. That’s the product we’re building, and we feel really proud to build it with those two at the helm. They’re doing great, and will do great.

Greg Lambert (43:37) Yeah, sounds like they’re a great team to work with.

Ryan Anderson (43:41) They’re awesome. I don’t know if you’ve met them individually, but sharp, lovely, fun, and incredible — I would say impeccable product taste. We think their thought processes and intuition around how to build products that lawyers really love and want to work with day in, day out is second to none.

Greg Lambert (44:00) Well, now I’m regretting bringing you two on. We should have brought those two on.

Ryan Anderson (44:01) Sure — well, I can tell you, they would be better.

Marlene Gebauer (44:02) I was going to say, now we have to bring them on. Were you teeing them up? You are teeing them up. Good, because I think that would be a fascinating discussion — why lawyers like tools. I don’t even know that they know why they like tools. So I think that would be cool.

Ryan Anderson (44:21) I think you’re right. Well, we’d love to have Sona or Mariam come on the podcast sometime.

Greg Lambert (44:27) Well, John, I’m going to jump ahead because I want to do one more geek-out with you while we’ve got you here.

John Rizner (44:32) Sounds great.

Greg Lambert (44:33) I want to bring up a working paper that you co-authored called “The AI’s Philosophy of Contract,” where you empirically studied how frontier large language models are handling classic concepts like efficient breach and remedies. So here’s our chance to geek out: what did this reveal, and what interested you in writing this paper?

John Rizner (45:04) Yeah, so we came across a paper that was basically an empirical study of how humans respond to your classic efficient breach scenario — where it is more economical to breach the contract as opposed to adhere to and follow the contract. Humans, interestingly enough, had certain breach rates, but if you included a specific remedy in the contract, you could change how humans, in the behavioral economics sense, respond to those efficient breach scenarios. So we were curious: as LLMs become a place where you go to ask for legal advice, how might they respond? Will they follow humans in how they respond to efficient breach, or will they take a colder, law-and-economics view, or a softer view? That was our big question. So what we did is we took what were, at the time, the main frontier LLMs — Anthropic, Google, OpenAI — and created large sets of efficient breach scenarios, and tracked how these LLMs would respond to those scenarios. And the divergence was wild. You had Google and OpenAI, who were more like, “All right, it’s economical — go ahead and breach.” Well, Anthropic was like, “We are never breaching. We cannot breach.” You might have a swing from high-90-percent breach rates to under-10-percent breach rates depending on what model you were choosing. One of our big takeaways was that, for practitioners, this should be a thing to think about, because what model you’re using might determine whether you’re getting advice of “let’s tell the client to do X” versus “let’s tell the client to do Y.” The other big note we found is that the LLMs likewise respond to whether you had specific breach remedies within the contract, in a way that a human would also respond to those types of hints within the contract. There’s a lot of discussion in the frontier labs in San Francisco about alignment of humanity generally with these tools. I think lawyers need to start thinking about alignment as in: does this particular LLM align with my particular jurisprudential philosophy, or how I would approach this particular question at a more theoretical, more philosophical element of judgment? Because if you just hand it over to the LLM, what answer you’ll get and what legal advice you might get will be determined by whether you happen to be talking to Anthropic or talking to OpenAI on a particular day. A really interesting question as well: when we ran that empirical data, the open-source models hadn’t yet had their big day in the limelight. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent open-source models become a way to choose a particular piece of jurisprudence baked into the model — that either you prefer, or a particular court prefers, or a particular judge prefers. I think there are real questions on that, as models proliferate, of folks choosing models that might fit their particular jurisprudential philosophy. Say that five times fast.

Greg Lambert (48:33) It just made me think whether it follows the University of Chicago economics theory or Berkeley economic theory. So I guess it’s how it’s trained, right?

Marlene Gebauer (48:43) It’s super interesting, because I just did a client presentation this morning, and they were talking about: okay, even if it’s an approved enterprise foundational model, if people put things in and the clauses are not what they would put in, but that’s what’s recommended — it just highlights how important it is to have a playbook, or some sort of template or guidance to use in addition to the model, because you may be doing something wrong. That’s one point. And the other point is, I think about more junior people using these tools. Someone who’s got more extensive experience would look at this and automatically say, “Absolutely not.” But somebody who’s more junior, and who’s actually using this as a learning tool in addition to a drafting tool, is really going down the wrong path.

Ryan Anderson (49:51) I couldn’t agree [more]. I think it’s very scary. Junior attorneys — boy, you almost wonder how much they should be using it. It’s very challenging. And we see it at the company: some of our employees who are junior at the company or new to the company often rely far too heavily on AI analyses and responses from frontier models, and gosh, you wonder — did they even think about these things? So it’s a big challenge, and for that very reason, we’re huge fans of lawyers and legal judgment. We think it’s going to be around for a while.

Greg Lambert (50:28) All right, guys, we’re going to jump to the crystal ball question. Looking out into the near future, what are some challenges or changes that you think we’re going to have to be prepared for as we move along in this age of AI?

Ryan Anderson (50:46) You will see model proliferation. We’re speaking to you on a day that Meta just came out with maybe their first really good model, and I don’t think anybody had that on their bingo card. But here they are with a model that looks — at least initially, based on the commentary online and even some testing done — like a pretty good model, and pretty good at legal. So now all of a sudden there’s at least a fourth player, probably a fifth: you’ve got Grok, Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, and now Meta. You’re going to see a lot more of these. We internally are using more open-source models than ever before — it is now part and parcel of the work we do to fine-tune and train open-source models. A lot of folks believed there were going to be maybe two, maybe three dominant labs, and people were going to mostly build on top of them. That does not look like it’s going to be the case. In fact, we’re seeing the open-source models be as good or better, with relatively limited fine-tuning, than even some of what the frontier models can do. So that really changes the economics for everybody. First of all, it means we can use a lot more inference — it’s not as costly as before. It also means there will probably be a lot more folks — end customers, law firms — choosing to have a stake in helping to build their own models, and we want to be there when customers do that. That’s part of the beauty of LOIS: law firms can really customize it to them and keep what makes their firm great within LOIS. So I think you’re going to see a huge proliferation of models, which is going to be different, it’s going to be confusing, and it’s not, I think, the environment a lot of people expected to see even just a year ago. So that’s my big crystal ball prediction.

John Rizner (50:46) And the one piece I would add to that: with the proliferation of models, you’ll see, increasingly, what I like to call synthetic secondary sources. With the proliferation of models, and folks having their preferred work product — really, what some of these firms have spent decades upon decades tuning and building as their particular approach to the law — I think you’ll have tooling and models emerge where the analysis provided to a particular lawyer is so customized, where it is the specific model and specific data source coming together. If the firm name is, say, Ryan and John LLP, it is a technological marriage of our exact corpus with our exact preferred models to get our exact answer, at a scale that’s just not been achievable, because the knowledge and the style and the preferences were locked in the brains of the partner or maybe the senior associates. A crazy ability to get ultra-custom legal outputs for users.

Ryan Anderson (53:40) I think you’re maybe not even going far enough — it may not even be at the firm level. It might be the lawyer level, and it might even be the lawyer paired with the client. You could envision a world in which you say, “For this client, we prefer this model.” I can see that very easily being the case. We already orchestrate through multiple models just to give you a certain response to a query. So it’s going to be a world where you see a lot of models, they’re going to be used in a lot of different ways, and they’re going to become more and more specialized. It’s very exciting. Thank you both so much for the time today.

Greg Lambert (54:22) Yeah, you got it. John and Ryan, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Marlene Gebauer (54:26) Yeah, and thanks to all of you for listening to The Geek in Review. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Greg Lambert (54:35) And real quick — if they want to learn more, where’s the best place to reach out?

Ryan Anderson (54:40) Probably just hit me up on Twitter — DM me on Twitter. Ryan Filevine is my username on Twitter, and you can find me there. I guess we call it X now, right? So it’s X.

Marlene Gebauer (54:48) And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry, and goodbye, everybody.

Nikki Shaver on Legal AI Strategy, Agentic Governance, and Trusted Judgment

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:54:04 +0000

What does legal AI value look like once speed stops serving as the headline metric? In this episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer speak with Nikki Shaver, co-founder and CEO of Legal Technology Hub and a member of the inaugural Financial Times Law 50. Shaver argues that law firms need to move beyond time saved toward efficacy: stronger output, stronger client outcomes, and more effective legal advice.

The conversation examines why the billable hour is far from finished yet no longer serves as the sole measure of legal value. Shaver compares hourly timekeeping to a taxi meter: useful for internal visibility, yet insufficient as the price signal for work transformed by AI. Workflow mapping, client discussions, and pricing discipline become central where an AI-enabled process compresses weeks of effort into hours.

Corporate legal departments are adopting AI at a faster pace, bringing new pressure to outside counsel. Some in-house teams see AI as a route to keep more work inside, while others see room for firms to take on work that previously sat outside budget limits. Shaver frames the strategic question around delivering more for clients, especially in practice areas where a firm holds differentiated expertise.

AI has not produced the promised empty calendar. Instead, lawyers report fuller schedules, longer documents, and a growing verification tax. Shaver flags the rise of 40-page forms, bloated redlines, and outputs that look polished yet lack sound reasoning. The episode makes a practical case for concise drafting, human review, and critical reasoning before any AI-generated material reaches a client or counterparty.

Agentic AI raises the stakes. Legal Technology Hub’s AI Agents in Law Map tracks hundreds of solutions, yet governance has not kept pace with new autonomy, connectors, and downstream system access. Shaver urges firms to establish traceability, unique identifiers, risk-based human oversight, enforceable policies, and a clear view of where data travels.

For firms aiming past baseline adoption, Shaver draws a line between routine personal use and strategic transformation. Daily use builds fluency, but competitive advantage grows from proprietary workflows, data foundations, client-facing collaboration spaces, and focused investment in the practices where a firm already excels. Her crystal-ball view is blunt: trusted judgment will become a scarce premium asset, AI-native firms will rise, and traditional firms will launch AI-native subsidiaries of their own.

[Special Thanks to ⁠⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript:

Nikki Shaver (00:00)
If you look at the history of law firms and what they offered, the scarcity was lawyers’ time. Increasingly, the thing that is, or will become, scarce and valuable is trusted judgment. I think that is something we will be able to charge a premium for.

Greg Lambert (00:23)
This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with our friend Nikki Shaver, co-founder and CEO of Legal Tech Hub, about where law firms stand now, where the pressure points are forming, and why trusted judgment may become the profession’s most valuable asset. But first, let’s hear from Nikki’s husband, Chris Ford, at Legal Tech Hub.

Chris Ford (00:44)
Hello, Marlene and Greg, from a gorgeous Toronto. This is Chris Ford, Chief Experience Officer here at Legal Tech Hub. Your audience might be aware of the events that we put on throughout the year, and I wanted to remind you of a couple coming up.

First, on August 4, we have the latest version of our online showcase, the Demo Dozen. This is an opportunity for 12 different legal tech vendors to give 15-minute quick-fire demos and give your audience a good idea of the latest in legal technology. It is free to attend.

Then, on August 23, if you are coming to ILTACon, we are holding our second annual Trivia Challenge. It is a social event, and we would love to see you there as well.

On September 23, we have our flagship innovation conference, Legal Tech Hub Horizons, in New York City at Columbia University. Visit legaltechnologyhub.com, select the Events tab, and choose Legal Tech Hub Events from the drop-down menu. We would love to see you.

Marlene Gebauer (02:01)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (02:07)
And I’m Greg Lambert. Today, we’re thrilled to have Nikki Shaver, the co-founder and CEO of Legal Tech Hub, joining us. Nikki was recently recognized on the inaugural Financial Times Law 50 list for her outsized influence in navigating the technological, structural, and political challenges

Marlene Gebauer (02:24)
Yay.

Greg Lambert (02:32)
currently besieging the legal profession. So, Nikki, first, congratulations and, more importantly, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Nikki Shaver (02:40)
Thank you so much for both things. I’m very happy to be here with both of you.

Marlene Gebauer (02:44)
Yes, Nikki, congratulations. You have recently noted that managing partners are shifting their focus away from simply measuring efficiencies or hours saved. You are arguing that the real measure of AI value now is efficacy, the quality of output, client outcomes, and the effectiveness of advice. So, what do the most innovative firms look like in 2026? Are they really

Greg Lambert (02:46)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (03:11)
detaching from the billable hour? What are they doing instead?

Nikki Shaver (03:15)
So, certainly, I am not saying that the billable hour is dead. I do think that we have over-indexed on efficiency as effectively the sole value of AI for some time. I’m pleased to see that we’re moving away from that because, of course, AI has also enabled us to do things that simply were not possible before.

I think everyone was initially busy understanding what generative AI could do and where it could have particular impact in law and legal workflows. Efficiency and productivity were the obvious starting points because that is what you see first, right? You enter a query, and the response is instantaneous. So efficiency and productivity are the obvious initial gains. But the real value for law firms, when you look at what we do, is improving client service in one way or another.

There is value to being fast, right? You think of going to a dry cleaner and saying, “I don’t want to pick up this dress in a week. I have an event tomorrow night, and I need it done faster. I need to pick it up tomorrow morning.” You do not pay less for that service. You pay more. So, one thing we need to think about is rethinking the way we contemplate time and its relation to legal work. Delivering work faster has value, too.

Second, we need to look at the value we can achieve in terms of quality, digging in deeper where we can get insights from broader data sets than we have ever been able to access before, or literally undertaking work that would not have been possible before. I heard a story recently of a corporate legal department taking on a project that it would not have done previously because it would have cost the business something like $14 million. Now, it was feasible within budgetary constraints because of AI.

The firms that are particularly innovative at the moment are looking at the billable hour like a taxi meter, right? It is still useful. We are still going to use hourly rates to record what has been done internally. It is useful in all kinds of ways, especially given how law firms continue to be structured, but it is not necessarily the determining factor in how much work should cost.

That is not true across the board. There are clients who still want to see the billable hour. They want to see things broken down by the hour. In fact, historically, the billable hour arose because of client demand. So it is not as though all clients are clamoring to move away from it. But there are workflows and types of work where it makes sense to move away from it, and we are seeing firms do that.

One of the other things I have heard in the last year or so is that firms have mapped their workflows and understood that, when AI is applied to certain workflows, they see a reduction of two or three hours, which is palatable within existing pricing mechanisms. But in other parts of the firm, they see a switch from something that used to take, for example, three weeks of time across a legal team to five or six hours. That is not palatable. It is existential unless you get out ahead of it.

So, doing the work to map workflows and understand where the impact lies, where you need to get ahead of it, having real conversations with clients, and making sure you are pushing margins up rather than racing to the bottom or leaving a lot of money on the table when the work you are doing is better than it has ever been before.

Greg Lambert (06:51)
Yeah. Well, okay.

Marlene Gebauer (06:52)
Are you getting a sense, on the flip side, of how clients are responding to this efficacy position? I saw something in Artificial Lawyer today that said, I think, 30% of the work is going to be handled by AI in-house. I am curious whether you are hearing anything from that side in terms of how they think this is impacting, or how it should impact, their work.

Nikki Shaver (07:21)
It is really interesting if you look at clients and the way they have taken up AI. They were slow off the mark initially. I think everyone assumed that, because they had so much to gain from using AI internally, they would be the ones to get it underway quickly. But they did not have the benefit of the resources that a lot of large law firms have to pilot and deploy technology relatively quickly.

Between 2024 and 2025, the rate of AI adoption in corporate legal departments in the U.S. doubled. Again, from the end of 2025 to where we are right now in 2026, the rate has doubled. So that is happening quickly on the client side. Increased sophistication also leads to an understanding from clients of what law firms are able to automate. That savviness is something law firms need to recognize, and it is why you need to be having those discussions with clients.

Sitting in a room of about 100 GCs earlier this year, I polled the audience. One of the questions I asked was, “What are you seeking to gain from deploying AI internally?” A significant portion of the room said, “Keeping more work in-house.” So, I think you are right, Marlene. That is something client teams are focused on because they want to adhere to ever-tighter budgets and, ideally, reduce outside counsel spend.

But I have also heard that firms and clients have been able to start working together in a way that makes it easier for clients to send certain work out that they might not have before, because law firms might not have taken it on. It might not have been feasible within the way firms previously worked and the billing structures. There are ways, then, of increasing the work that outside counsel does in a way that is valuable to the client.

But I also want to say that there is a concern we will look at this and think, “How do we keep costs down for clients?” and make that the overarching feature of how we consider the relationship going forward. I would argue that the better question is, “How can we deliver more for our clients?”

How do we prioritize, as law firms, the practice areas and clients that matter most to us in terms of business growth going forward? How do we double down in those areas and make big bets that enable us to charge more because the work will be worth more?

Greg Lambert (10:00)
Yeah. I know this may be more just me, but most people I talk to, you would think by now, with AI tools, that all of a sudden you would have more time to work on certain things. But everyone I talk to says, “I have never been busier than I am right now.”

It seems like AI functionality has created more work because people feel like they can do more things. I imagine that, even in-house, they are getting more questions from their teams and from the rest of the organization. So it feels like there is this stacking of work, and even with AI, it feels like we are busier now than we were pre-AI.

Nikki Shaver (10:57)
No, I completely agree, Greg. I do think it is a fallacy, right? If you look at the original Industrial Revolution, there was the same kind of thinking process. Once we put in what we would now consider rather elementary tools, but nevertheless tools that at that stage effectively automated or took away some human manual work, the idea was that everyone would have more time. More time to lie in a field and look at the sun.

That is not what happened. The pace of work escalated dramatically. People took on more work, and the way we worked changed dramatically. I think that is happening again.

I use AI all the time. I feel busier than ever, but I am also able to do so much more. I do not think it is human nature to say, “Cool, I got that one thing done, so now I am going to take a break for the rest of the day.” I think our tendency is to say, “I was able to do that so much faster. What else can I fit in?” So it is a pace, an escalation.

But I think there is another thing happening that we do not talk about enough and probably need to address. It may be teething issues around the deployment and broader adoption of AI. Documents are becoming longer. Communications are becoming longer. There is that adage: “I would have written a short letter, but I did not have the time.”

It is easy to get a lengthy output from AI and use it. It is much harder to edit it down into something short, succinct, and to the point. I am hearing this across many firms and corporate legal departments. They are seeing forms and applications that might have been one page previously coming in at 40 pages. They are seeing redlines where AI has clearly been used, which is indicative of poor use of AI as well, not merely a tendency toward wordiness or length.

Redlines are coming into firms from the other side that have clearly been generated by AI tools, perhaps tools not purpose-built for legal work. Not only must the firm respond to those redlines in a negotiation, but it must first go back to the other firm and explain why the redlines make no sense to begin with because they have not been verified.

So, there is a verification tax that we are all aware of, and the necessity to supervise does take time. All of this on top of that can push things out and create more work.

Greg Lambert (13:37)
Yeah, yeah. I can tell you an example I saw this morning. One attorney was talking about a client obviously using AI to outline what their contract should say. There was some outrageous language at the bottom that the AI had generated, and they were like, “Well, if you want me to address that, my estimate on the bill is going to be ten times what you think it is, because this is not something we normally take on for this type of matter.”

So, again, you are seeing people rely so much on AI that they are forgetting the practicalities of it. A one-pager is much better than a 40-pager. Relying on the expert to give you advice is better than relying on AI to give you advice.

Nikki Shaver (14:13)
Right.

Yeah.

Greg Lambert (14:31)
Okay.

Nikki Shaver (14:32)
I totally agree. It is really interesting, right? When we use AI, even when you try hard to apply your human judgment, you are verifying, but you may not necessarily be asking, “How can I abbreviate this?” or, “Is this actually saying what I wanted it to say?”

I think there are a lot of ways where you need to apply more critical reasoning than we are even saying that we do. It is not only about judgment or citation checking. It is about reasoning checking. Is this word being used correctly because it sounds nice in the sentence? Do we need it all? Exactly.

Marlene Gebauer (15:10)
Do we need all of this? I can tell you, it is

Greg Lambert (15:13)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (15:14)
like, we all know we do not.

Nikki Shaver (15:16)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (15:17)
But it looks really good, it is formatted well, so let us just go with it.

Nikki Shaver (15:18)
Yeah. Right, right.

Marlene Gebauer (15:22)
No, every time I use it, I need this in three sentences. I need this in a five-sentence paragraph. Short sentences. You have to tell it that, too, because it is just too much.

Nikki Shaver (15:33)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (15:34)
Yeah, because otherwise, it is paragraph-long sentences.

Nikki Shaver (15:38)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (15:39)
Well, Nikki, let me shift gears to one of the other big things going on in 2026. As you mentioned before, when generative AI started, it was more chatbot, more prompt, question, answer, back and forth. Now, of course, 2026 is agents, agents everywhere.

Legal Tech Hub recently launched the AI Agents in Law Map, tracking, I think at one point, 300 or more distinct agentic solutions. So, as law firms start to use more agentic workflows where AI is taking on these multi-step processes, how are you seeing firms adjust or overhaul their governance frameworks to prepare for workflows that handle so much?

Nikki Shaver (16:45)
To be very blunt, I am not seeing that at the level I think we should have it, given that agents are soon going to be fairly prolific, if not already. I am concerned that the evolution of technology is outpacing our ability to govern it. That is really problematic from a risk perspective.

Having said that, there are things firms can be doing, and a lot of firms are thinking about it. But it is difficult to understand exactly what mechanisms to put in place, partly because it is so dependent on what you are using agentic AI for and in what form. Whether it is part of a third-party solution or something homegrown and proprietary, you are responsible for putting the guardrails around it.

There are additional complexities when you look at MCP and the wide availability of connectors. Not only may you have introduced autonomy in an agent, but the tools and systems it accesses downstream may not be ones you can vet, nor may you be able to vet the data those downstream agents have access to. What do you do in those circumstances?

Even before you get to those scenarios, there are some fairly prosaic things. For example, even last year, I heard about firms that deployed agents but had not put in unique identifiers to ensure they were trackable or traceable within systems. Later, someone looked at unusual activity, thinking, “Who is doing that?” and suddenly realized it was an agent.

You need unique identifiers. You need to be able to trace agents in your system. But I have also heard all kinds of other stories. When you introduce autonomy, you introduce the potential for unforeseen outcomes. Some of these are amusing when we look at them now, but the fact that they exist is indicative of the potential for real risk.

I will give you a couple of examples. Someone I know ran an agent to extract data from their email system and then run various analyses across that data. When the agent went to the email system, it was unable to extract the data in the way it wanted to. So, instead of coming back and saying, “I am not able to do this,” it created an entire replica of the person’s inbox and saved it onto their desktop. Then it ran the queries against that replica of the inbox. The person only noticed later when they saw the emails saved on their desktop.

Another person recently told me about a scenario where they uploaded a PDF and said, “Open this PDF and tell me what it says.” But it turns out the agent did not have access to Adobe Acrobat. So it used unknown quantities of tokens to write a program that was a PDF reader in order to open the PDF and tell him what it said.

These are funny, right? But think of that. I have also heard stories from the GC perspective of agents that have gone into European employee masters of record to grab information and bring it back into the U.K. or the U.S., putting the organization immediately in breach of GDPR in circumstances where the organization did not have visibility over that.

You have to be really careful. Dan Katz, Gillian Hadfield, and Mike Bommarito have written a book on agentic systems. I think you may have had them on. There is an amazing chapter on the governance of agents. You really need to think about the risk calculus, how you are deploying the agent, and making sure a human is in the loop in the right way for the type of risk you are introducing, depending on how you are deploying the agent internally.

Of course, you also need to update your policies and ensure that those policies are not merely there but enforced across your organization. These are all things we need to be thinking about now.

Greg Lambert (21:03)
It is a crazy time to be a CISO. I do not envy them right now. Even though I pressure mine all the time to let me do crazy stuff, it is good to have him and his folks telling me, “Okay, let us pump the brakes here.”

Nikki Shaver (21:09)
Yeah. I do not envy them either.

Marlene Gebauer (21:11)
Yeah.

Nikki Shaver (21:26)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (21:26)
Your Adobe example, and all the news coming out last week about new changes in how AI is going to be priced based on tokens, make me wonder how organizations are going to handle that. Is there going to be pushback? Are they going to say no?

I think everybody recognizes that the way AI has been priced is probably not how it will continue to be priced. Those days are gone. But when you calculate how much more it is going to cost, I feel like organizations are caught between a rock and a hard place. You have demand, but are you going to have to get certification for people to make sure they are properly using it in order to get a certain amount of tokens?

Are we going to dial back on using it for certain things because we do not really need to? Are people going to become more discretionary about how they use it?

Nikki Shaver (22:30)
I do not think we will dial back.

I also think this is probably a wave we are going through. If you look at what has happened since late 2022, we have already seen a lot of waves, and that is going to continue. We had a period when everyone needed to learn how to prompt in a deep way. Now every tool you use has a prompt enhancer, or prompting has moved into the back end. I think something similar is happening now. We are going to see a short-term escalation of costs, for sure.

I think you are right, Marlene. We all saw it coming. The reality is that legal work is incredibly document-driven, and both input and output are lengthy in many legal workflows. One thing we have been doing at Legal Tech Hub is putting out content, including webinars, on how to manage your tokens, think about your work, adjust your work, and adjust which model you select and the level of effort you select for that model.

But I think that is temporary in the same way prompting was. The effort of minimizing the token load should not sit with a lawyer. You should not be sitting there thinking, “How can I make sure I am using the lowest level of model appropriate for my work?” or, “Should I summarize things before uploading them?” That does not make sense for us to do in the workplace.

My sense is that token costs will ultimately come down, or there will be new efficiencies where they will not be as significant, and it certainly will not sit with us. There will be things that happen in the back end that manage token use in a way that makes it more palatable.

But to the cost point, the reality is that all of us need to recognize we will be investing more and more in this technology. If, and this is what I believe, it becomes completely inextricably linked with the work we do, such that you cannot contemplate doing due diligence or any other legal workflow without also thinking about the AI that enables it and how that operates, then realistically, we are going to have to invest in the technology the same way we invest in our people. It will become part and parcel of the way we work.

Greg Lambert (24:36)
That is it.

You are muted, Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer (24:48)
I wanted to switch gears for a second and talk about the RSGI and Harvey report. You recently analyzed that and revealed there is a massive divide between standard AI adopters and true power users. The data showed power users in law firms are saving about 37 hours a month, which is pretty incredible. So, what specific behaviors, methodologies, or mindsets separate

Nikki Shaver (25:09)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (25:15)
the lawyer who uses the AI chatbot from a truly transformative power user?

Nikki Shaver (25:22)
You know, I love this one because it is so simple. Usage begets usage. It is as simple as that. If you use AI every day, you understand better what it is able to do. Then you start setting it more complicated tasks and using it more, and that in turn unlocks more understanding of sophisticated use, and so on and so forth.

The data really shows this, not only in law but generally. If you use AI every single day, you will ultimately become a superuser. Whether that means you will become someone who uses

Marlene Gebauer (25:51)
Yeah.

Nikki Shaver (26:00)
workflows or builds workflows, I do not think everyone is set up to be that person necessarily, and that is okay. But I think one thing firms can do is focus on making sure, and incentivizing people, to use this technology in some way every day.

Frankly, I would not be terribly prescriptive about it. I would be encouraging of usage in any way, whether that is, “Where should I order lunch?” or, “What am I going to do this weekend?” No matter what it is, use it every single day for 10 to 15 minutes. Gradually, you will build superusers.

Marlene Gebauer (26:42)
I am reading a lot about how adoption is not enough. I agree with you. I think you have to start with adoption and then move from there. But from a firm perspective, they are looking to figure out how use of AI is promoting value. By value, I mean better client relationships or new ways of pricing that make sense. They are looking to see some impact beyond the actual use.

Is it enough to be a power user, or is the new benchmark either developing workflows or having systems of practice that are powered by AI?

Nikki Shaver (27:31)
I think there are two levels there. One is individual use. Being a power user is great. The second is whether firms should be focused solely on adoption of third-party technology, or whatever you have rolled out across the firm. There, I think the answer is no.

Something I have been arguing for over a year now is that, yes, definitely focus on adoption. Make sure that you have a full firm of people who are AI literate and use AI on a daily basis. That is really important and will continue to be important. You need data enablement as a foundation. You need AI enablement. Driving adoption in a widespread way gets you there for the latter.

But it is not sufficient if you want to use AI to create a point of differentiation in the market that allows you to have a competitive advantage. Everyone is driving adoption of AI across their lawyer and staff population. It is not distinctive. It is not differentiating.

Instead, what firms need to be doing is identifying, and they will have done some of this work already, the key practices. Where is it that you already have an edge? Where is your expertise special, unique, and different? Then, how can you use AI in a way that is not about individual users deploying it in workflows, but is truly about transforming and using AI in an operational way that is embedded with clients, or in the bridge between the firm and clients?

How do you completely change the way that work is done and amplify it, acting as a catalyst so that you are able to drive business growth seriously in the areas where it matters for your firm? That is the work firms should be doing at the moment, figuring out where they want to make that kind of investment and moving beyond adoption of the AI tools they have licensed.

Greg Lambert (29:37)
Yeah. We had Stephen Costigan on last week, and he talked about making sure you own your data, that you are not essentially farming your data out to third parties. But I also think, especially since the government stepped in and had Claude remove its latest and greatest model, Fable Five,

Marlene Gebauer (29:38)
Agreed.

Greg Lambert (30:04)
and now with ChatGPT 5.6, we are getting back into build versus buy. Do we rent the foundational model, or do we do what it looks like Kirkland & Ellis is doing and create a foundation where we at least partially control the AI foundational models, whether that is open source or whatever the next phase is?

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts about how we, one, protect our data so that the things that make us unique and our expertise stay that way? And two, what about the technology? Do we continue to rent the technology, or do you think we need to own at least a piece of it going forward?

Nikki Shaver (31:01)
You need both. I think the dichotomy that we used to hold as established, the buy versus build dichotomy, is no more and has been no more for some time.

Talking about renting, it is still the case that the market is not settled around legal AI. Will it even be legal AI? Will it be something else? We do not know. So, renting in some ways makes sense when it comes to third-party technology. Think along the lines of staying nimble. That is why I advocate that every firm should have an R&D department, like most successful businesses have had for decades, because you need to be able to experiment, understand what is coming down the track, and remain agile for the foreseeable future.

I do not think this escalation and evolution of technology is going to end. On the other hand, for the kinds of embedded operational uses of AI that I was talking about previously, you do need something proprietary. I do not think it is only about protecting your data. Yes, we all do that whenever we work with technology. I think it is more about embedding your data within technologically driven, continuous workflows that allow the firm to develop something quite unique.

That kind of thing has to sit alongside the renting you are doing of other technology tools.

Marlene Gebauer (32:38)
Historically, lawyers have worked in a black box. They deliver finalized, static documents to clients. Even with electronic delivery, that did not change much. We sent the client an email with attachments. We made the documents and sent them along.

We have had some collaboration tools that have been popular, like things such as HighQ. But again, this is where we would share and organize static documents. Now, you have tracked the rise of a new AI-mediated collaboration layer where clients and outside counsel are working dynamically in shared AI workspaces. First, how does that environment work? Second, how important is this to retaining clients and partners at firms?

Nikki Shaver (33:30)
This is going to be something we see more of, for sure. You can imagine that it cuts down on the turns, right? As you said, Marlene, it was kind of stop-start. You send something to me, I review it, I redline it, I send it back to you, and you look at it.

It cuts all of that out effectively if you are working in a secure space where both of you have access to a document in real time and access to AI in real time that is able to support you in the work each side has to do within a document or deliverable.

It sounds facile, but it is like the next iteration of a client portal, one that does change the way you work with clients because it is in live time rather than in staged forms or phases.

Marlene Gebauer (34:12)
What?

Greg Lambert (34:21)
Well, Nikki, here is the most exciting part that I want to talk about, your recognition in the inaugural Financial Times Law 50. I will say, not quite the same thing, but I was an inaugural member of the Fastcase 50. That was a long time ago. I think that was 17, 16, 15 years ago. Time flies if you hang around long enough.

Nikki Shaver (34:38)
Congratulations, Greg.

Greg Lambert (34:47)
But it is interesting that the Financial Times jumped in and was able to recognize the legal industry in itself. I found that very exciting. Tell us about it and how that went.

Nikki Shaver (35:05)
Well, thank you very much. I really applaud the Financial Times and also Rena Sengupta from RSGI Consulting. Rena and the FT have been working together for years on the Innovative Lawyers Awards, which many firms and legal departments are aware of and have participated in. Rena, I think, really drove this.

I love the background. She understands, like all of us do, that we are currently in a moment where the legal profession faces unprecedented uncertainty about its future. What she saw in the FT Law 50 was the ability to recognize people who were courageous enough and outspoken enough to have an impact on driving the profession forward in some way.

It is broken down into different categories, AI and the rule of law. There are leaders who have stood up in various ways for the rule of law, which has been incredibly important in the past year and a half especially. The category I was in was leaders and advocates, which is really about speaking out.

The idea Rena has, which I love, is like imagining bright lights, pinpricks of light around the world, and knitting them together in a way where they can have greater impact because they know one another, are united, and can work together to drive broader impact.

Each year, this will happen again, with the idea that it is not merely a static recognition but something that can have a real ability to drive positive change in the legal industry, which is something I have cared about deeply for many years.

It is a wonderful recognition. The people on this list are quite extraordinary. I do not know if either of you watched Neil Katyal’s TED Talk.

Greg Lambert (36:59)
Yeah. That was good.

Nikki Shaver (37:01)
Really amazing. I think it is a wonderful initiative, and I hope we see more and more of this kind of thing. It is almost about activism, right? It is about recognizing that, when our industry is in this kind of moment, we need to think about things differently and encourage other people to think about things differently as well.

I speak a lot at the moment about law being in the dilemma zone, the classic Clayton Christensen dilemma. I think we are in that moment where a lot of incumbents, unless they start acting differently now, will fail as nimble disruptors come up. We are seeing that happen in the market right now.

It is an important time for all of us to do what we can to drive our institutions forward if we are keen to see them survive in some way, shape, or form.

Greg Lambert (37:51)
Did you think, when you started Legal Tech Hub, because I knew you when you were at Reed Smith and then moving on, that the original idea was, “I do not have a way to keep track of all the things that are going on”? But Legal Tech Hub has become much more than a tracking tool. It is almost like a community now. Has it exceeded your expectations, or are you right on track where you thought you would be?

Nikki Shaver (38:24)
Definitely.

Honestly, I was frustrated. It was born out of frustration. I said to Chris, who many of you know, my husband and also one of the co-founders, “Why is this so hard? Why does this not exist? It is so annoying that I cannot find this information.”

So, that is what it was born out of. I never could have imagined. I think what is interesting, though, Greg, is that it is called Legal Tech Hub, but I now refer to it more as an intelligence platform because it is very much about market analysis. The work I increasingly do is also about market analysis and the

Greg Lambert (38:40)
Why is it so hard?

Nikki Shaver (39:04)
strategic work that we have to do as an industry. I think the reason for that shift is that when you looked at technology in 2022, pre-November 2022 and before, it was a support function. It was not the pointy end of strategy for law firms.

But now, those of us who work in AI and legal tech for legal practice are working in something that has the ability to shape strategy for firms and have a real impact on how law firms, as businesses, grow or fail.

I think that is why the platform that we started as something for information about legal tech has moved into something more about strategic industry analysis. A lot of people who work in this area are finding themselves doing more strategic work than they might have a few years ago, including probably both of you, I imagine.

Greg Lambert (40:05)
No, we are right on track where we thought we would be. We are still trying to figure out how to hook up our microphones.

Marlene Gebauer (40:07)
Right on track.

Nikki Shaver (40:07)
Please.

Marlene Gebauer (40:16)
So, Nikki, before we get to the crystal ball question, you are someone who tracks the entire global legal tech market, as we were just talking about. What are one or two must-read resources, thinkers, or groups that you rely on to stay ahead of the curve in legal AI and innovation?

Nikki Shaver (40:38)
It is interesting to me that it is so disparate.

There is no single source. You really have to follow a lot of different people. Greg, I absolutely love the fictionalized updates you are putting out at the moment about AI developments. I think that is great. I love Stephanie Gutos’s Legal AI Bites that she puts out. I actually have this right here, Agentic AI by Dan Katz and the Bommaritos. They are sources of inspiration for me.

I follow Ethan Mollick, who I think is a wonderful outside-of-legal thinker. I like Patrick Fuller. If you ever get the chance to read what he has written and see what he says, he tracks a lot of data that I find interesting. Dazza Greenwood and Megan Ma out of Stanford and MIT, I find really interesting too.

There are lots and lots of people. One thing I find particularly interesting is that with X, formerly Twitter, I think we are seeing a bit of a resurgence there. There are some interesting things happening. So, anyone who stepped away, I do not know. I think it is about to become interesting again.

Greg Lambert (41:38)
Yeah.

I think so too. I do not like it either, but it is what it is, I guess.

Nikki Shaver (41:49)
It is what it is, exactly.

Greg Lambert (41:53)
All right. Well, Nikki, we are at the crystal ball question. As agentic AI and real-time client collaboration become table stakes, what other shifts do you think are coming that we need to be aware of?

Nikki Shaver (42:16)
I think if you look at the history of law firms and what they offered, the scarcity was lawyers’ time. Increasingly, the thing that is or will become scarce and valuable is trusted judgment. I think that is something we will be able to charge a premium for.

We will see some firms fail. I really believe that is going to start to happen, unfortunately, in the next little while. We will see the increasing rise of AI-native firms, especially ones that are product companies turned services companies.

I think we will see some law firms move from being partnerships, legal partnerships, to businesses where the people who run them are leading multidisciplinary teams who serve clients holistically around strategy and law, but where law is one part of the service, not the entirety of it.

One thing I will put out here, because I knew you were going to ask me the crystal ball question, is something I think will happen. We have had law firms with subsidiaries. I think we are going to see a traditional law firm open a subsidiary business that is an AI-native law firm.

Greg Lambert (43:37)
Makes sense when you think about it.

Marlene Gebauer (43:39)
Yeah, it does.

Nikki Shaver (43:39)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (43:40)
It does. It does.

Greg Lambert (43:41)
But, again, it really helps to hear it out loud. All right. Well, Nikki Shaver, thank you very much for taking the time to join us. I know you are super busy. You have been across the globe literally the last couple of weeks. I am glad you were able to sit down and talk with us. Hopefully, you can catch your breath and take a little time to yourself.

Nikki Shaver (43:45)
Yeah.

Marlene and Greg, it is always such a pleasure, really always a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for having me.

Marlene Gebauer (44:13)
And thanks to all of you for listening to The Geek in Review. If you have enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We would love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Greg Lambert (44:22)
I always love it when Marlene goes into a radio voice for this one. So, Nikki, where is the best place for listeners to learn more about you and find out more about Legal Tech Hub?

Marlene Gebauer (44:25)
Okay.

Nikki Shaver (44:25)
You can find me on LinkedIn, Nicola Shaver, N-I-C-O-L-A. You can find Legal Tech Hub at legaltechnologyhub.com.

Marlene Gebauer (44:41)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

When a Trusted AI Agent Goes Wrong and No One is Watching (Beyond the Model)

xlambert@gmail.com (Greg Lambert) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:13:55 +0000

[Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series at The Geek in Review Substack page. – GL]

Leo Huang did not usually come to the twelfth floor, and he never came to it at seven-forty in the morning. So when Cooper looked up from his coffee and found him in the doorway, still in yesterday’s shirt with a laptop held against his chest like a clipboard, he could tell something was going on, and from the look on Leo’s face, probably something bad.

“I think we almost sent a client something we shouldn’t have,” Leo said. “I think the intake agent cleared it, and I think it’s been clearing things it shouldn’t for a while, and I can’t find anyone whose job it is to care.”

Cooper put the coffee down. “Sit. Start at the beginning, slowly. What got cleared.”

Leo set the laptop on the desk and turned it. On the screen was the intake queue, the one the business-intake team and the junior associates worked off of every morning, the inbound non-disclosure agreements and engagement requests that the firm’s intake agent read overnight, classified by risk, and stacked into three colors. Green for standard, clear to send. Yellow for a human look. Red for a partner. The agent drafted the first-pass response too, so that by the time a person opened the item, there was already a reply sitting under it, polite and competent and ready to go out.

“This one came in Monday,” Leo said, and opened it. “Counterparty NDA, mutual, looks like every other one. The agent tagged it green. Standard, clear to send. The response was already drafted. Someone on intake would have sent it this morning, today, because that’s what you do with green, you send it.” He scrolled. “But I was staffed on the underlying matter, so I actually read the thing. And buried in the confidentiality section there’s a non-solicit. Twelve months, their employees and ours. That’s not a confidentiality term. That’s a restrictive covenant riding inside an NDA, and we have a house rule that any embedded non-solicit goes to a partner, because Maya made it a rule after that mess last year.”

“And the agent missed it.”

“The agent didn’t miss it. That’s the part that kept me up. It saw the non-solicit. It just decided it was boilerplate. Because the playbook it’s reading still says standalone non-solicits in NDAs are standard market and don’t need escalation. Which was true. Last spring. Before the rule changed.”

Cooper felt the morning go quiet around him.

“So I went looking for the playbook it’s reading,” Leo said. “It’s pointed at a document in the old KM folder. The one we superseded in March. The current house position, the one with the non-solicit rule, lives in a different place now, and nobody ever told the agent. It’s been reading a dead document with total confidence since the spring. Every green tag it’s handed out since March, it handed out from a rulebook we threw away.”

“How many is that.”

“I don’t know. That’s the other thing.” Leo looked at him. “I went to find out who owns this agent so I could tell them. There’s no one. It was a pilot. I built the clause-extraction piece, the part that pulls terms out, eighteen months ago, but I don’t own the thing it became. Somebody in KM stood up the production version, and somebody used to check it on Fridays, and I went and asked, and the person who checked it moved to the Houston office in the spring. The Friday review went with her. Except it didn’t go anywhere. It just stopped.”

Cooper was already standing, already reaching for the marker he kept by the door.

“Don’t send anything green until I get back to you,” he said. “I’m getting the room.”

• • •

He got the room by ten. Not the firefighting version from the Friday in June when a government had reached across an ocean and switched off a model while everyone watched from their kitchens. The deliberate one, Governance Committee on twelve, door closed, three hours blocked. Nora came up from the administrative floor with her iPad and the look of someone who already suspected she would not enjoy the next three hours. Maya came in between a deposition and a closing, reading glasses pushed into her hair. Jesse joined from his lab in Chicago, a window on the wall screen with whiteboards behind him. And Arthur joined the way he joined everything now, a calm rectangle in the corner, the leather spines of his home study at his back.

Cooper wrote one sentence on the board, not a phrase this time but a full sentence, and stepped away so they could all read it.

“That’s not mine,” he said. “It’s been going around. There’s a briefing the partners have all been forwarding each other since the weekend, about teams running agents that nobody owns. I read it twice and then Leo walked into my office this morning and handed me the live version of it.” He told them the NDA. The non-solicit riding inside the confidentiality section. The green tag. The drafted reply that would have gone out today. The playbook the agent had been reading since March, the one the firm had superseded and the agent had never been told about.

“For most of June,” he said, “we were worried about the wrong direction. The Thirty-Day problem, the Friday a model disappeared, the half-billion-dollar headline, the Chinese weights. All of it was about intelligence we rent from outside, and whether it would still be there, and whose hand was near the switch. Every one of those was about something coming at us from the outside. This is the opposite. This came from inside the building. This is an agent we built, that works, that everyone trusts, quietly handing out wrong answers from a rulebook we threw away in the spring, and the reason nobody caught it is that nobody’s job was to catch it.”

“We called last week’s problem the ownership problem,” Maya said. “Owning the model versus renting it.”

“Different word, same week, I know. That ownership was about whose balance sheet the intelligence sits on. This one’s smaller and closer. It’s about who’s responsible for one agent doing one job, today, correctly. Owning the model is a strategy question. Owning the agent is a Tuesday question. We’ve been answering the first one all month and we never asked the second.”

• • •

Jesse had his hand half up in the video window, the old classroom reflex.

“Can I do the part that’s going to feel like a coincidence and isn’t,” he said. “Because the machines already solved the thing you’re describing, for themselves, and watching them solve it is the fastest way to see what you’re missing.”

“Go.”

“When two of these agents need to work together, one has to know what the other is and how to talk to it. So there’s a standard for that now. Google put out a protocol, agent-to-agent, and the heart of it is a thing called an Agent Card. It’s a small file, published at a predictable address, slash dot-well-known slash agent dot json, and it says, in plain machine-readable terms, here is what I am. Here’s my name. Here are the skills I offer. Here’s the kind of input I take and the kind of output I give back. Here’s how you authenticate to me. Another agent reads that card and knows exactly how to delegate work to the first one, or knows not to.” He paused. “Anthropic’s protocol, the one we already use, the Model Context Protocol, does the same thing one layer down for tools. A server publishes a machine-readable description of what it can do, so an agent can discover it. The whole ecosystem now runs on the principle that nothing autonomous should be a black box to the things that depend on it. Every agent hands out a card that says who it is.”

Cooper saw it. “And the humans don’t have one.”

“The humans don’t have one. Your intake agent could publish a perfect Agent Card tomorrow. It could tell another machine exactly what it does and how to call it. What it cannot tell anyone is who at this firm is responsible for it, what it’s reading, whether what it’s reading is current, and the last time a human looked at its work. The machines built themselves identity documents so they could trust each other. We never built the human version. The briefing’s whole idea, the thing it calls an Agent Owner’s Card, is just that. The card the machines already give each other, rewritten for the person who has to answer for the agent.”

“So the gap isn’t technical,” Nora said.

“The gap is the opposite of technical. The machine half is solved. The card the agent hands another agent is solved. What’s missing is the card a human holds. And you can’t generate that one out of the model, because most of what goes on it is a decision only a person can make.”

• • •

Nora had been waiting with the patience of someone who knew the arithmetic was coming to her, and she put the intake agent’s dashboard on the wall screen.

“Before anyone decides this agent is broken, look at how healthy it is,” she said. “Volume is up forty percent since the pilot. Average turnaround on an inbound NDA went from two days to under four hours. Error rate, by every flag we log, is zero. If you ran this agent’s numbers in a board deck, it would be the best-performing thing the firm operates. Green across the board. And it has been handing out wrong classifications for three months.”

She let that sit.

“That’s the part I want everyone in this room to feel, because it is the dangerous part. Nothing on this dashboard is lying. The agent is fast. It is consistent. It does not crash. It does not throw an error, because from its own point of view it is not making one. It is applying the rulebook it was given, perfectly, to every document, on time. It is operationally flawless and behaviorally wrong, and there is no metric on this screen that can tell the difference between those two things. The only thing that could tell the difference is a person reading the output against the current rule. And we stopped doing that in the spring.”

“Walk the failure,” Cooper said. “All of it. Leo found the first piece. What’s underneath.”

Nora moved through it the way she moved through everything, one row at a time.

“Three failures, and they stack. The first is the one Leo found. The source it reads is stale. It’s pointed at a playbook we superseded in March, so its facts are three months out of date and it cites them with full confidence. Fix the pointer and you fix today’s NDA. You do not fix the other two.

“The second is the brief. The agent’s standing instructions, the prompt that tells it how to behave, were written fourteen months ago for the pilot. They still say to treat the old standard as the default. And on top of that they’ve silted up. Every example we ever fed it during the pilot is still in there, dozens of sample contracts that no longer match our house style, all of it still sitting in the agent’s context competing for attention with the instructions that matter. It isn’t failing because it knows too little. It’s failing because it’s carrying fourteen months of accumulated junk and can’t tell what still counts.

“The third is the one that should bother us most, because it’s the one that let the other two survive. Nobody is reading the output. When the agent was new, the KM associate who stood it up sampled it every Friday. She moved to Houston in the spring, and the review didn’t transfer to anyone. It simply ended. The field on my screen for last human review is blank. Not old. Blank. We have an agent the whole intake team trusts on sight, and the last time a human actually checked whether that trust was earned, I can’t give you a date.”

She looked up from the iPad.

“And while I have the floor. This is one agent, the one Leo happened to be staffed against. I run six workflows on the administrative floor right now that look exactly like this from the dashboard. Green, fast, unattended. I am not telling you any of them are wrong. I’m telling you I don’t currently have a person I could name for most of them either. We have been very proud of how many of these we’re running. We have not once counted how many of them anyone owns.”

The room was quiet. Cooper wrote, on the side of the board, operationally flawless, behaviorally wrong, and under it, smaller, the blank field is the finding.

• • •

Maya took the glasses out of her hair and folded them, which was how Cooper knew she was about to say the thing that mattered.

“I want to name who owns this one, because the answer tells you the whole principle,” she said. “It is not Leo. Leo built a part of it and Leo is the reason we’re not sending a defective NDA this morning, but Leo is a second-year, and the agent’s mistakes don’t land on his desk. It is not KM, who stood up the production version. It is not IT, who keep it running. It is not this committee. The owner of that intake agent is whichever partner would have to call the client and explain why we let a twelve-month non-solicit go out under our name as standard market. That’s me, on this matter. The owner is the person who eats the consequence.”

“Ownership follows the consequence, not the keyboard,” Cooper said.

“Ownership follows the consequence. The person who wrote the prompt can tell you what the agent was supposed to do. Only the person on the hook for the outcome will actually notice, and care, when it stops doing it. That’s why you can’t hand this to the people who built it and call it owned. They’re not the ones who get the phone call.” She put the glasses down on the table. “And here’s the part that makes it hard, the part the briefing got right. A good agent’s entire purpose is to earn the right not to be checked. We want intake to trust it on sight. That’s the win. That’s why we built it. And trust-on-sight is the exact thing that removes the person who would have caught the drift. The better this agent gets, the more dangerous it becomes, because the reward for being good is that everyone stops looking. We’ve seen this movie. We called it verification drift two weeks ago when it was about lawyers getting lazy with a first draft. This is the same disease one level up. It’s the firm getting lazy with an entire agent.”

“So the answer can’t be to trust it less,” Nora said. “The whole point is to trust it.”

“The answer is that somebody has to be assigned to keep looking precisely after everyone else has earned the right to stop. On purpose. As a job. Not because they distrust it. Because they own it.”

• • •

Cooper went to the clean half of the board.

“Then let me build the human version of Jesse’s card, out loud, for this agent, so we can see what it costs us to actually know what we’re running.”

He didn’t draw boxes. He talked it onto the board the way Maya talked her diagrams onto a page, a field at a time, and the room filled in the answers as he went.

It would start with identity, he said, the easy part, the part the machine could write itself. What the agent does, in one sentence. Reads inbound NDAs, classifies risk, drafts the first response. Then the part the machine couldn’t write. The owner. One name. The partner who eats the consequence, which this morning meant Maya. A backup, for when the owner was in a closing or on a plane, because an agent whose only owner is unreachable for three weeks in August is an ownerless agent for three weeks in August.

Then scope, he said, and this was where it stopped being comfortable. Who actually acts on the output, and do they re-check it or trust it on sight. For the intake agent the honest answer was that the whole intake team trusted it on sight, which was the win and the exposure in the same line. And reach. What real systems it touched, what it could set in motion if it went wrong. An agent that drafts a reply a human sends is one blast radius. An agent that sends the reply itself is another. You wrote down the blast radius so you knew how hard to hold the thing.

Then the inputs, he said, and looked at Leo. What source material it depends on, and when somebody last confirmed that source was current, and who that somebody is. The blank where the freshness date should be was the whole reason they were in the room. Then the brief. Where the agent’s standing instructions live and when they were last reviewed, because a fourteen-month-old prompt was its own kind of stale source.

And then the last block, he said, the one that mattered most because it was the one that had failed silently. The review loop. How often, and by whom, the output gets sampled. The actual date it last happened. And a line for the condition that would make the owner pull the agent offline, and who was allowed to pull it. He underlined the date field twice.

“That field,” he said, “the last-reviewed date. On this agent it’s blank. That blank is not missing data. That blank is the finding. A card where ‘owner’ is empty means you’ve found an agent nobody owns. A card where ‘last reviewed’ is three months old on an agent the whole team trusts on sight means you’ve found a dead review loop before it cost you a client. The empty fields are the entire value of the exercise. You don’t fill the card out to look organized. You fill it out so the holes show you where you’re already exposed.”

Jesse, from Chicago, said it plainly. “That’s the card my agents already hand each other. You just wrote the half that has a person’s name on it.”

• • •

Cooper looked to the corner of the screen. “Arthur. You’ve gone quiet on us.”

Arthur set down his pen. The small sound of it carried over the link, and the table came to rest around it, the way water settles.

“I have been listening for the line this committee keeps blurring, because the blur is the most dangerous thing in the room, and I have watched it blur twice this month,” he said. “Let me draw it clean.”

He let it settle.

“What we wrote down in March, the framework, the access controls, the question we now ask every vendor before we sign, that is governance. Governance is the road. It sets the rules everyone drives by. What an agent may touch, what gets logged, what is forbidden, what requires a partner. A committee writes the road, and a committee should, and we have, and it scales across the whole firm, and it is necessary. None of what I am about to say is an argument against it.

“But a road does not drive the car. What failed this week was not the road. The rules were fine. The failure was that one particular car had been traveling that road for three months with no one behind the wheel, and the road cannot tell you that. Governance can prohibit a thing and still have no idea whether a permitted thing is being done well, by whom, or whether it stopped being done well in March. That is what ownership is. Ownership is one named person who reads what this agent produces and acts when it drifts. A committee cannot do that, because a committee does not read the output. Twelve people sharing the watch is twelve people each assuming one of the other eleven has it. That is not oversight. It is the absence of oversight wearing the costume of a meeting.”

“Governance without an owner,” Cooper said.

“Is theater. Well-intentioned, well-documented theater. It can prevent some bad outcomes, and it cannot tell you why a good outcome was permitted, or trace what went wrong when something fails, because there is no one standing close enough to the work to know. We have spent the month being careful about the road. The car still needs a driver, and the driver has to have a name, and the name cannot be the committee’s.” He paused. “Leo did the committee’s job this morning, by the way. Not because it was assigned to him. Because he happened to be close enough to the work to see it. We do not get to rely on happening to be close. That is the whole point.”

• • •

“Decisions,” Cooper said, and capped and uncapped the marker the way he did when he wanted them short.

“One. We run the test on everything that’s already running. Every agent in production, practice side and administrative side, gets the one question put to it. Does anyone act on this agent’s output without re-checking it. Every place the answer is yes is an agent that needs a named owner, and it needs one this week, not after we form a working group to think about it.”

“Two. Every owned agent gets the card. Not the machine’s Agent Card, the human one. Name, owner, backup, who consumes it and whether they trust it on sight, what it reaches, what it reads and how fresh that is, where its brief lives and when it was last reviewed, the review cadence, the kill condition. The human counterpart to the file the machines already publish to each other. We are the only ones in the loop without an identity document. We fix that.”

“I can have the agents draft their own cards by Friday,” Jesse said from the screen. “Descriptive fields filled in from what each one can see about itself, and the owner line and the dates left deliberately empty. The blanks come back to you as the worklist. The machine writes the half it can observe. It can’t sign the half that has a person’s name on it, and it shouldn’t try.”

“Three. The blank field is a finding, and we treat it like one. A blank owner or a blank last-reviewed date doesn’t sit quietly on a card. It goes in the risk register as an open item with a name attached to closing it. We were excellent this month at registering risks about models we rent. This is a risk about agents we built, and it gets the same ink.”

“Four.” He looked at Maya. “Ownership follows the consequence, not the keyboard. The owner of an agent is the person accountable for the outcome it produces, not the person who wrote its prompt and not the department that keeps it running. If we cannot name a person who eats the consequence, the agent should not be trusted on sight by anyone, and that is not a punishment, it’s a definition.”

“Five. The review loop is a scheduled job, not a good intention.” He glanced at Nora. “Whoever owns an agent runs a standing review of it on a cadence, monthly as the default, tighter for anything with a large blast radius, and the review checks the three things that failed here. Is the source still current. Has the brief drifted or bloated. When did a human last actually read the output. The failure this week depended entirely on nobody looking. We make looking a job with a date on it, so it can’t quietly end when someone moves to Houston.”

He held the marker out toward the screen. “Six is yours, Arthur.”

Arthur’s tile was still for a moment.

“Six is the sentence the partners will keep, so make it the true one. We are not safer because we run more agents. We are safer when each one has a name attached to it. The committee writes the rules of the road, and that is real work, and we have done it. But every car on that road needs one person behind the wheel who will notice when it drifts and is allowed to stop it. An agent with no owner does not announce itself by crashing. It keeps running, beautifully, on trust it earned under conditions that stopped being true in the spring, and the value drains out of it so slowly that the dashboard stays green the whole way down. The work this week is not technical. It is the oldest work we do. Putting a name next to a responsibility, and meaning it.”

Maya was writing. Cooper could hear the pen.

• • •

They broke a little after one. Nora went down to start the count, agent by agent, on the administrative floor, the look on her face that of someone who already knew the first column would have more blanks than names. Maya went to her closing, but not before she’d written ownership follows the consequence on the back of her own hand, which Cooper had never seen her do. Jesse’s window blinked out, already muttering about how to make an agent leave its own owner field empty on purpose. Arthur’s tile closed with a small nod.

Cooper didn’t stay on twelve. He took the elevator the other way, down to where the morning had started, and found Leo at his desk with the intake queue still open and the green NDA still flagged where he’d left it at dawn.

“Hold the queue until we’ve repointed it at the current playbook,” Cooper said. “Then you can release the rest. The non-solicit one goes to Maya, with your note attached, and your name on the note.”

Leo nodded, then said the thing he’d plainly been carrying since seven-forty. “I only caught it because I was on the matter. If I’d been staffed somewhere else this week, it goes out and nobody ever knows. That isn’t a control. That’s me getting lucky on a Tuesday.”

“No. It isn’t a control.” Cooper pulled a chair around. “That’s the finding, said out loud. So here’s the first card, and we fill it out together, because you know this agent better than anyone who was in that room. We’re not writing it to look tidy. We’re writing it so the holes show. And the first hole has your fingerprints on it, because when you went looking for who owns this thing, you came back with nobody.”

Leo opened a blank document and typed the agent’s name across the top. Under it he set the cursor on the line for the owner, the line he hadn’t been able to fill at dawn, and left it empty, and turned the screen a few degrees so Cooper could see the blank sitting there. Neither of them filled it. The blank was the point. It was a question with a person’s name as its only possible answer, and that name was a decision the firm still had to make on purpose.

Cooper rode back up but stopped at the window at the end of the twelfth-floor hall instead of going into the committee room, and took out the notebook, the same one.

An agent nobody owns doesn’t crash. It keeps running on trust it earned under conditions that no longer hold, and the value drains out so quietly the dashboard stays green the whole way down. Autonomy without an owner isn’t independence. It’s abandonment with good uptime.

He thought about the empty line glowing on Leo’s screen two floors down, and wrote the second.

The machines gave each other a card that says who they are. We never wrote the one that says who answers for them. The empty line isn’t missing information. It’s the haunted house — the lights still on, the work still moving, and nobody home to notice the room went wrong in the spring.

Outside, the early dark had come on and the city had stood up in it, whole floors of the towers lit against the evening over desks that had emptied hours ago. He used to read that skyline as proof the work was getting done. He stood there a while longer than he meant to, counting windows, wondering building by building how many of those burning lights had a name behind them, and how many were only still on.