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Cooley Handed Potential Clients the AI
Every firm in this series pointed its AI at its own lawyers. Cooley pointed it at potential clients — handing Y Combinator founders an AI tool that doubles as marketing and relationship capture. A look at why the move fits Cooley's franchise, and which firms can actually copy it.
What Kirkland Actually Bought
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10 mins
Kirkland's $500M has a name: Palantir. The deal is a knowledge-moat play — deep in one practice — but it's built on and bound to Palantir, which means the odds ride on Palantir's track record. Here's how it wins and how it breaks.
The AI Use Spectrum, Updated for 2026
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16 mins
From chat windows to agent harnesses to enterprise platforms — a framework for governing AI use as it actually happens
The Same Dataset, Now Your AI Can Read It
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11 mins
The court orders dataset from the explorer, rebuilt as an API and MCP server so AI assistants can query 929 real orders.
From Westlaw to GPT: A Brief History of Legal Technology
Legal tech adoption has always lagged general technology by 10–20 years. That gap is closing fast — and the next wave won't wait for a committee to finish evaluating it.
Ten Things That Will Happen to Legal AI Before 2027
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17 mins
Ten research-grounded predictions for legal AI through the end of 2026 — from the first disbarment for hallucinated citations to the collapse of point-solution vendors to the pricing collision between AI-enabled firms and their clients.
Can AI Do What a BigLaw Associate Does?
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16 mins
The APEX benchmark — built by Mercor, with tasks authored by BigLaw-experienced lawyers and advised by Cass Sunstein — is the most rigorous test of whether AI can perform real legal work. The answer is more specific than vendors or skeptics suggest.
You Can Agent the Work, Not the Walls
An Instagram account-takeover wave exploited Meta's AI support bot at the password-reset gate. The lesson for law firms: authentication and ethical walls exist to refuse persuasion — exactly what agents are built to do well.
Lying Spreadsheets
Excel custom number formats let a cell store one value and display another. Every extraction library reads the stored value. Every LLM platform I tested shifted from 'do not pursue' to qualified interest on the same file.
Kirkland's $500 Million AI Bet
Every headline called Kirkland's $500M commitment an AI bet. The signals in the announcement — no named model, full exclusivity, value-based pricing — point to something different: an infrastructure play that happens to run AI.