u/Mysterious_Chef7417

I was thinking about how the use of AI might invert itself. It might soon turn into a requirement.

Most of the ethics discussion around lawyers and AI has focused on misuse: hallucinated cases, confidentiality problems, inadequate supervision, bad research.

That makes sense.

But theres a more difficult question.

ABA Model Rule 1.1 requires competent representation. Comment 8 specifically says maintaining competence includes keeping abreast of the “benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” And Formal Opinion 512 says lawyers using generative AI need a reasonable understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the particular technology.

Competence does not mean avoiding new technology.

Imagine two lawyers handling the same document-heavy matter.

Lawyer A reviews 8,000 pages manually.

Lawyer B uses an appropriate AI tool to identify patterns, organize the record, and surface potentially important material, then independently verifies the results.

Suppose Lawyer B finds something material that Lawyer A misses.

At what point does “I don't trust AI” stop being professional caution and start looking like “I don't use computerized legal research”?

I don't think we're there yet across the profession. AI reliability varies enormously by tool and task, and some uses remain a terrible idea. Formal Opinion 512 itself emphasizes independent verification and lawyer judgment.

But competence has never meant using the methods you are most comfortable with. It means providing competent representation under the circumstances.

So here's the question I suspect bar regulators will eventually have to answer:

Can a lawyer someday commit malpractice by failing to use AI?

I've been using AI daily in my work for about a year now. There's so much hype that I wanted to give you my list of what works for me:

1. **First-draft demand letters and client update emails.** I give it the facts and my bullet points, it hands back 80 percent of a draft in 30 seconds. I still edit every line, but it kills the blank-page problem.
2. **Summarizing long records.** Drop in a 60-page deposition transcript or a stack of medical records and ask for a timeline of key events with page references. Saves me an hour, every time.
3. **Reformatting and cleanup.** Messy notes into a clean outline, a dense statute into plain English for a client, a bloated paragraph tightened up.
4. **"Explain this to me like I'm not a specialist."** Fast orientation in an unfamiliar area before I go dig into the real authorities.

Where I stopped:

1. **Legal research that needs real citations.** Too many fake cases. I use it to find the concept, then verify everything in an actual database.
2. **Anything I'd file without reading closely.** That is exactly how people get sanctioned.

Don't think I don't notice you jumping in the group and not introducing yourself. Come on, just tell us who the heck you are. It's not that bad.

Everyone's got something to say these days about law and AI and the changes that are taking place now, in the future, and beyond. I wanted to jump in and try to generate some back and forth about a major issue, and that is: do you feel genuinely that AI will take the place of lawyers in the near future? If so, be specific and explain how that will look.

Personally, I can't see a way for lawyers to survive. They might just be evidence hunters after all of the rudimentary tasks are done by AI. The only thing left, really, is to investigate and collect evidence. Maybe not even that, but the job of a lawyer is going to change drastically, and I hope for the better, but it definitely will change.

What do you think?

>On billing and fees, the bar said lawyers may charge for time ​spent reviewing, correcting and ​applying professional judgment to ⁠AI-generated work. But attorneys cannot bill for time that would have been spent if the technology never existed, it said, reflecting other opinions from ​state bars. “Efficiency does not justify inflated billing,” the guidance said.

>Law firm ​Jackson Lewis in ⁠a report on Alabama’s AI guidance said “a clear national trend has emerged: state bars are not banning AI — they are requiring lawyers to use it competently, responsibly, and under appropriate professional supervision.”

Alabama now says lawyers cannot charge clients for hours that AI saved. They can bill only for the time actually spent reviewing the work and applying legal judgment.

If your business model depends on pretending efficiency never happened, AI is not an advantage. It is an existential threat.

Hey! I'm Melia, reporter at u/businessinsider writing about legal tech. My latest story is about OpenAI's push into legal and what it means for the startup ecosystem.

I copied the article's first section below.

I'm always open to feedback. What did I miss? What should I write about next?

OpenAI is trying to conquer the office. Legal is next.

For years, OpenAI let startups like Harvey, Legora, and others build software for lawyers on top of its foundation models — massive artificial intelligence systems trained on broad swaths of data. Now, the company, last valued at $852 billion, is making moves to court lawyers directly.

OpenAI signaled that shift in June when it hired Jason Boehmig, an executive who spent more than a decade figuring out the slow, messy business of selling software to lawyers. He had left a Big Law job to start Ironclad, a company that helps corporate legal departments manage contracts.

That business looks a lot sexier than it did when Boehmig spun out. Law firms are under pressure from clients to move faster and show they are not billing armies of associates for work that chatbots can do. In-house legal teams are looking for ways to automate more work themselves, so they can send less to outside counsel and lower their legal bills.

Suddenly, artificial intelligence has turned legal tech from what Boehmig once called an investor "wasteland" into one of venture capital's hottest parties. And OpenAI wants in.

"Jason's hire reflects the value OpenAI sees in the legal space," Dan Springer, who took over as Ironclad's chief executive last year, said in an email.

The first hints of a playbook are now emerging. On Wednesday, OpenAI told Bloomberg Law that it is collaborating with the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher to roll out ChatGPT Enterprise to every attorney and fold its large language models deeper into the firm's own tools.

OpenAI's legal entry is part of a broader campaign to make ChatGPT NSFW. The company has built a desktop "super app" for software engineers, introduced secure healthcare tools for clinicians, and hired former investment bankers to train its systems in the ways of Wall Street.

The stakes are enormous. OpenAI has filed paperwork to go public, and it wants to show investors that ChatGPT is not merely the thing people use to write emails, self-diagnose a rash, or ask whether their landlord can really do that. It wants to become the place where knowledge workers do their jobs, as well as the world's most popular chatbot.

In legal, that means taking on Anthropic, which has spent all year trying to make Claude as familiar to lawyers as a yellow legal pad. In January, the company released a legal work plugin that could analyze contracts and track compliance, frightening investors in legacy legal software and sending shares of Thomson Reuters, Relx, and Wolters Kluwer sharply lower.

For now, little is known about what OpenAI will actually build. In a LinkedIn post about his move, Boehmig said he would be working on products for the legal industry. A job posting for a founding software engineer on OpenAI's website is similarly broad, stating that the company aims to "transform legal workflows, improve access to information, and enable legal professionals and organizations to work more effectively." OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

The question of what it builds is an existential one for legal startups. A technology that combs through contracts for risks poses a greater threat to a business built around contracts, whereas a bundle of legal skills strikes closer to Harvey's turf. OpenAI was an early Harvey investor.

In interviews, Sam Altman has often described his own company as a foundation for other startups to build on, rather than a competitor with an app for every industry. "We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water," he said onstage at a BlackRock event in March, "and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for."

Legal may show whether OpenAI is content to sell the electricity — or whether it wants to manufacture the appliances, too.

Continue reading on Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-enters-legal-ai-race-hires-jason-boehmig-2026-7

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

I've been using AI daily in my work for about a year now. There's so much hype that I wanted to give you my list of what works for me:

1. First-draft demand letters and client update emails. I give it the facts and my bullet points, it hands back 80 percent of a draft in 30 seconds. I still edit every line, but it kills the blank-page problem.
2. Summarizing long records. Drop in a 60-page deposition transcript or a stack of medical records and ask for a timeline of key events with page references. Saves me an hour, every time.
3. Reformatting and cleanup. Messy notes into a clean outline, a dense statute into plain English for a client, a bloated paragraph tightened up.
4. "Explain this to me like I'm not a specialist." Fast orientation in an unfamiliar area before I go dig into the real authorities.

Where I stopped:

1. Legal research that needs real citations. Too many fake cases. I use it to find the concept, then verify everything in an actual database.
2. Anything I'd file without reading closely. That is exactly how people get sanctioned.

Hey,

I've been helping a lawyer friend look at different AI note takers and there are way more options than I expected. The problem isn't getting a transcript anymore. It's finding something that actually makes it easy to go back and find what a client said a month later. Tried Bluedot on my side and liked that it records without a bot joining the meeting, creates transcripts, summaries, action items, and keeps everything searchable afterward.

What are you all using? Are AI meeting notes good enough for legal work? Do you still end up writing everything yourself afterward? Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I’m a PRC lawyer and the founder of China Legal Hub: www.chinalegalhub.com
It’s an AI-powered fixed-fee legal workflow for China-related matters. The current focus is helping overseas SMEs, ecommerce brands, designers, importers, and founders deal with supplier risks in China — especially NNN agreements, supplier background checks, contract review, and IP protection.
I’m not looking for someone to build a vague idea from zero. The website, legal workflow, and AI-assisted process are already live.
What I’m looking for is a business / GTM partner who understands one or more of these areas:
overseas SMEs, ecommerce brands, or DTC businesses
China sourcing, manufacturing, or supplier risks
B2B SaaS / legaltech sales
founder-led sales, partnerships, or community growth
I can handle the China law, legal product design, and delivery side. I’m looking for someone who can help with market feedback, customer interviews, outreach, partnerships, and early sales.
Ideally, we start with a small trial collaboration first. If there is real traction and good working chemistry, we can then discuss a longer-term partner or co-founder arrangement.
If this sounds relevant to your background, feel free to comment or DM me. I’d also be happy to hear feedback from people who have sold legaltech, B2B services, or China-related services to overseas businesses.

The talk here gets overwhelmed with the big expensive players like Harvey and Legora. I'm wondering about those of you who took the plunge into developing your own agents. What exactly are you using? n8n, copilot studio, or are you actually coding in Python and something like langgraph?

And how are you dealing with the fact that these things seem to screw up formatting in Word documents?

I'm thinking mostly redlining here, but any other use cases welcome. Mostly trying to get a feel for which agentic frameworks people like (or hate) now.

https://www.legaltech.com/post/regulatory-changes-enabling-law-firm-2

A few things that caught my attention:

- Kirkland just committed $500M to train own Ai models

- Harvey is running POCs with firms to post-train open source models on firm knowledge (again 👀 ) and partners with 5 AI labs for research

- Post trained open source models reach Opus level on fraction of the costs

- Data from specific practice areas are very underrepresented in publicly available training data

What do you think?

Hey everyone, I'm building my first SaaS as a solo founder and I'm getting stuck on the legal side of things.

The idea is already validated. I've spoken with around 5-10 potential users and several said they would pay once the product is live. The app is about 99% finished.

Now I'm overthinking the launch. Maybe it's lack of legal knowledge, but I'm not sure what legal steps I should take before putting it online.

My SaaS will target a specific group of users, but the product will be available globally.

What would you do in my situation?

Register the business first, then launch?

Launch first, get some paying customers and maybe reach something like $500 MRR, then register the business?

What legal documents are actually necessary before launch (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc.)?

I've done quite a bit of research, but every article and forum seems to say something different. Some people say "just launch," while others make it sound like you need everything set up legally before a single user signs up.

Law school -> judicial clerkship -> bit of law firmin’ -> 30+ years of solo plaintiff’s employment practice. Handled my last case today. Settled at mediation. I’ve some follow up to take care of, and some admin tasks to close up shop, but I am done with cases and clients. It’s been a good ride. I feel v fortunate to have had this career for my work life, and also v happy to be done with working. Adventures await. That is all. Bye y’all.