Send us Fan Mail

Two legal tech dudes meet outside and discuss rapid travel, conference buzz, and what we are hearing from law firms about AI.

Damien describes an Am Law 50 executive board preparing for agentic AI and considering a shift from billable hours to flat fees, while noting internal incentive and compensation conflicts.

We cover AI-native legal startups, how to begin adoption by mapping workflows, and concerns about attention scarcity, token spend, and low end-to-end agent pass rates, with ideas like swarms of bots and “digital twins.”

Horace shares a picnic conversation with an AI-savvy 11-year-old raises fears about ASI alignment and societal refusal to use AI, echoed by reported Gen Z pilot sabotage.

We debate learning “friction”, Berkeley Law’s restrictive AI guidance, a law-student study where AI users performed as well or better, risks to junior-lawyer training and judgment, extracting expertise into artifacts, and optimism driven by more sophisticated, practical AI discussions and a client-win story using AI for pricing strategy.

00:00 Whirlwind Conference Tour
02:04 Big Law Pricing Shift
05:15 How Firms Start AI
06:13 An 11 Year Olds AI Fears
10:42 Legal Tech Marketing Arms Race
13:38 Agentic AI Reality Check
17:49 Digital Twins And Swarms
21:55 Gen Z Learning And AI
27:21 Training Junior Lawyers
29:57 Friction Lost Skills
30:14 Law Student AI Study
31:48 Surprising Study Results
33:21 Longitudinal Experiment Idea
35:13 Old Guys Debate Progress
38:51 Judgment Data Points
41:49 Quantifying Legal Insights
47:33 Law Conflicts Equity
53:40 Ethics Faith Traditions
56:21 Optimism Closing Toast

Send us Fan Mail

Horace and Damien record an unedited and unfiltered episode, opening with Horace’s stressful overnight apartment move in New York while planning a two-month summer trip to Australia.

We discuss legal tech execution versus announcements, discussing a link about Kirkland & Ellis’s reported $500 million AI commitment and whether it reflects real technology spend or largely lawyer hours, while noting firms and Fortune 100 legal departments are building internal AI teams. They explore AI raising the floor and ceiling of legal work, GPU scarcity, consumption/token pricing versus seat pricing, and proposals like taxing tokens. They discuss the Pope’s AI-focused writing as a warning about tools that can help or diminish humanity, then cover market shifts including Claude for Legal, Microsoft’s legal Word add-in, open source momentum, and agentic “law firm” projects like Lavern AI, emphasizing that data, KM, and practical execution matter more than hype.

00:00 Welcome and Moving Trauma
03:42 Kirkland AI Spend Debate
09:12 AI Floor vs Ceiling
12:00 Universal Basic Services
13:44 Nvidia Bubble and Pricing
16:54 Taxing Tokens and Models
18:21 Pope on AI and Humanity
21:45 Legal Tech Market Check
22:20 Open Source Vibe Coding
23:31 Quality Security and Stitching
25:21 Linux and Court Tools
26:42 Open Source Custom UX
27:38 Users Don’t Know Yet
28:59 Designers vs Atoms
31:12 Agentic Legal Open Source
32:25 Humans Still Sell
34:41 Jevons and GPU Scarcity
38:11 Symbolic AI Saves Tokens
42:10 Three Paths to Efficiency
46:17 AI Literacy Dunning Kruger
49:06 Precision Recall and KM Power
52:28 Royalties for Know How

Send us Fan Mail

Damien Riehl and Horace Wu record a market catch-up episode covering AI hype and positioning in legal tech. They discuss in-house self-serve AI tools for business users and whether they implicate unauthorized practice of law. They examine what remains uniquely human for lawyers — trust, intuition, integrity — arguing each may erode as AI improves, while also giving examples of human lawyers’ counseling value in Damien’s real boundary dispute. They address AI adoption barriers in firms, billable-hour incentives, shifting apprenticeship models, productizing scarce legal expertise via license fees, and end with guarded optimism and a plan to discuss guardrails for “vibe coding” next.

00:00 Agentic Legal Hype
02:04 Harvey Legora Market Map
03:22 Self Serve UPL Risks
05:57 Claude Code Copyright
10:21 Prompts vs Outputs
12:18 Lawyers Role in AI Era
13:35 Trust Intuition Integrity
15:22 Vibe Coding Trust Shift
21:02 Optimism and Policy Paths
23:06 Radiology and Automation
24:11 Chess ATMs Lessons
25:08 Jobs Disrupted Then Rebound
25:35 Will Lawyers Become Luxury
26:31 Antique Cars And Old Law
27:27 Fence Dispute Real Test
28:11 Counseling Beats Drafting
29:08 Specialists Add Hidden Value
30:19 Centaur Skills Still Matter
31:12 Training Without Apprentices
34:33 Dragon Riding New Work
37:20 AI Adoption Incentives Clash
39:56 Picking The Right Use Cases
41:51 Vibe Coding Versus SaaS
45:14 Invisible AI Wins Adoption
46:53 Productizing Legal Expertise