I have seen partners exiting firms to launch their own AI native practices, but why would a law firm want to launch its AI-native office? Isn't it cannabalizing their existing billing hour model to standard price hour? Why would a client prefer their traditional service over AI -native?
Just saw this clause making the rounds in a law firm's engagement agreement (attached image). We are starting to see this type of language pop up all over the place now, and it is a fascinating, messy situation.
Basically, the firm is threatening to completely fire you as a client if they catch you using AI to read their documents or write your emails.
It feels like a massive, defensive panic to protect their old way of making money. Here is what is actually going on:
Blanket-banning a client from using a tool just to better understand their own case feels like a lazy, anti-consumer move to stop tech competition.
What do you guys think? Is the "unreliability" concern genuine, or are law firms just terrified of a shifting economic landscape?
According to Reuters:
• Document review, legal research and drafting are increasingly handled in-house using AI.
• A 38-person internal team, LegalEdge, is taking on work previously outsourced to law firms.
• AT&T has partnered with OpenAI to make 100+ years of institutional legal knowledge accessible through AI.
• The company may reduce its panel of around 30 national law firms to 18–20 over the next two years.
Source: Reuters
We’ve had AI access for a while now, but in practice hardly anyone here uses it consistently for actual contract drafting.
Between clients opting out of AI, InfoSec reviews taking forever, and partners worrying about billable hours, it’s been pretty clunky. Plus most lawyers here refuse to open anything outside of Word anyway.
Is your firm actually seeing real time savings from AI, or are people mostly just sticking to standard Word templates and precedent folders? How are you guys navigating this?
AI is everywhere and getting used for pretty much everything in legal now, from research to drafting and document review. But is there a particular task where you’d still rather have a human doing the work, regardless of how good the technology is?
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Alex
I’ve been developing Doctex, a system that approaches complex document analysis differently from generative AI summarisation.
Instead of asking an LLM what a document means, Doctex measures structural characteristics of the document and produces a Structural Intelligence Report showing measurable patterns, transitions, friction/coherence changes, and regions that may deserve closer human examination.
I’m now looking for 15 pre-pilot participants who regularly work with complex documents, particularly:
• Legal documents and court decisions
• Contracts and agreements
• Policy and government documents
• Regulatory and compliance material
• Research and academic papers
• Technical reports
Before asking anyone to join, I want people to actually test the system on a document they understand.
Your first eligible document of 1,500–5,000 words can be scanned free.
Send the document and I’ll return the completed Structural Intelligence Report within 24–48 hours. You can examine the measurements against the original document and decide for yourself whether they provide anything useful to your review process.
There’s no obligation to join the pre-pilot after the free test.
Doctex isn't intended to determine whether a document is legally or factually correct, and it doesn't replace professional judgment. The purpose is narrower: measure the document first and identify where closer human examination may be worthwhile.
I’m the founder of Doctex, and at this stage I’m particularly interested in feedback from people who already spend significant time reviewing complex documents.
If you’d like to test one, DM me or visit doctex.ee. Email us at desk@doctex.ee
Thanks for reading, have a great day.
Four frontier AI models were given a SaaS agreement to negotiate, turn by turn, on contract states prepared by practising attorneys.
Where the counterparty's edit should have been accepted, they passed 80 to 99 per cent of the criteria.
Where it should have been rejected, 6 to 50 per cent.
One model, in one scenario, accepted 98 per cent of what it should have accepted and rejected 6.6 per cent of what it should have rejected.
That is RedlineBench, published in June and scored against rubrics written by practitioners. Two details say more than the aggregate: attorneys change about 100 characters per edit, models 320 to 520, and the models did worst in the opening turn, where you have to decide for yourself what is worth fighting for.
The numbers confirm something visible in contract practice for a long time, without a name.
I have called this the AI negotiation loop and broken it into four mechanisms: revision churn, agreement substitution, the borrowed ruler and mandate drift. On top of them sits what the benchmark measured, the refusal deficit: a model finds yes easier than no, so it does not oscillate around an equilibrium, it slides.
Churn is change without improvement. The tool was built to produce something when asked, and leaving a clause alone is not something it produces. So it rewrites the sentence where you would have swapped a word, and every rewritten sentence is a new doorway for the other side, who can now say "you changed it, so we are reopening it". The tell is simple: if you cannot justify an edit in one sentence by reference to what the client actually wants, it is churn, however intelligent it sounds.
Agreement substitution is older than the technology. Negotiation researchers have known for a decade that solo negotiators sign deals that should never be signed, while teams more often notice that no deal is the better outcome. The tool is the solo negotiator in its purest form. Nobody at the table tells it that walking away counts as a result, and nothing in its training rewards it for recognising a negative bargaining zone. Closing feels like success to it in exactly the way closing feels like success to a tired associate at eleven at night.
The borrowed ruler is the one that costs clients money without anyone noticing. Vendor opens at a cap of one year's fees, purchaser opens at nine, the assistant suggests five as a reasonable landing. Five is reasonable only on the ruler the other side supplied. The questions that actually decide a cap, exposure, insurance, price, what the client does if there is no deal, never entered the arithmetic. Models anchor on the first number the way people do, and in one study they anchored on a mood: an agent that performed desperation improved its payoff by a fifth. Whoever supplies the ruler owns the midpoint, and in a redline the other side supplies it every time they send a draft.
Mandate drift is what happens when every round answers the previous round instead of the client's instructions. After enough turns the document answers only to itself. If you delegate a redline to a tool, the prompt is the mandate, and a prompt that says "review this and find a reasonable solution" is a mandate to drift.
Why the slide runs in one direction has, I think, little to do with the model having a personality. In one round you ask it to find the risks, so it proposes interventions. In the next you ask it to find a compromise, so it proposes concessions. Alternate those two instructions a few times without a fixed mandate in between and the tool spends round nine repairing the risks it introduced in round seven and reopening the point it closed in round five. No preference for the middle is required. Two alternating tendencies and no memory will do it.
Asking it to "review once more" does not help, and the self-correction research explains why: without new facts, another pass adds another reason to change things, including things that were already right. The most expensive edit in any negotiation is the one to a clause that was fine, because it reopens what was closed and teaches the other side that nothing is ever settled.
I'm looking at leasing a new place and I need to quickly provide financial reports.
Does anyone have recommendations for a cheap service where I can just upload bank statements and it'll spit out a profit/loss statement, cash flow, balance sheet, etc?
I don't need anything fancy or ongoing, just a one-off to show my financial strength at this point in time.