Opinion
Essays from the bench, the bar, and the engineering side.
The 8am report shows the legal AI policy gap is now a firm-management problem.
8am’s 2026 Legal Industry Report says generative AI use among legal professionals more than doubled, but firm-level policy and training are still lagging individual behavior.
The most AI-forward law firms may have the least confident associates. That is a management problem.
A Chambers survey points to a striking disconnect: firms selling sophisticated AI advice to clients may still be struggling to make their own junior lawyers confident users of the same tools.
Tax lawyers have the clearest answer to legal AI: verify first, automate second.
Recent commentary and sanctions cases show why tax law is a stress test for legal AI. Probabilistic answers cannot replace deterministic authority, and verification remains non-delegable.
Privilege is the next frontier and most legal AI vendors are getting it wrong
A senior in-house counsel argues that current AI tools treat privilege as a checkbox, not a doctrine.
Law schools are failing to prepare lawyers for an AI-first practice. Here is what the curriculum should look like.
Law school curricula were largely designed for a world where the primary productivity tool was a Westlaw subscription. That world is gone. A proposal for what the AI-integrated law school curriculum should actually include.
The specialization gap: why legal AI is still terrible at the work lawyers find hardest
Legal AI has gotten very good at the work lawyers find easiest. It remains surprisingly weak at the work lawyers find hardest. An honest assessment of where the technology actually stands — and what it will take to close the gap.