Practical guidance, ethics analysis, and real-world observations from practitioners working at the intersection of law and AI.
Most small and mid-size firms need senior AI leadership weekly, not a $400,000 full-time hire. A look at how the fractional CAIO model works inside a law firm.
Seven concrete steps for building a defensible AI governance program inside a law firm, sequenced in the order they should be executed, grounded in ABA Formal Opinion 512 and the Model Rules.
AI is functioning as an intelligence multiplier inside law firms, and new specialized roles are emerging: prompt engineers, governance consultants, and agent orchestrators.
When IT drives enterprise AI adoption without Legal at the table, regulatory exposure follows. General Counsel needs to be in the vendor evaluation, not informed of it after the contract is signed.
Courts across the country have begun issuing standing orders that govern AI use in filings. California's statewide rule and the Louisiana Fifth Circuit's Kenney decision show where this is heading.
AI models trained on biased historical data reproduce and amplify those biases. Under Rule 8.4(g), that is an ethics problem for the firm that deployed the tool.
A vague prompt returns boilerplate. Legal prompt engineering is becoming a required skill under the duty of technological competence, and the techniques are learnable.
Shadow AI use is already happening in most firms that lack a formal policy. A working Acceptable Use Policy tells attorneys exactly which tools are sanctioned and what the verification expectations are.
Pasting client facts into a consumer chatbot is a Rule 1.6 problem. The path to compliant AI use runs through closed enterprise systems with contractual zero-retention guarantees.
Agentic AI moves past question-and-answer interaction into autonomous task execution. For legal operations, that changes both the productivity ceiling and the governance requirements.
From Mata v. Avianca to the Louisiana Fifth Circuit, courts are sanctioning attorneys who file AI-generated citations without verifying them. The verification duty is non-delegable.
Generative AI is compressing the hours that used to drive law firm revenue. Clients have noticed. The shift to value-based pricing has already started.