The summer of our discontents


Two months ago, if you prompted Version 3 of the AI-art generator MidJourney to generate depictions of an “otter on a plane using wifi,” you were rewarded with the nonsense in the left panel of our lead graphic. A month later, Version 4 could take the same prompt and render, in seconds, multiple detailed drawings that are likely beyond 80% of the population’s imagination and certainly beyond 99.9% of the population’s acumen at illustration (above right panel).

Imagine what our new year will bring.

This matters. And we shall return to our wifi-enabled Mustelidae further down.

This lengthy essay has a lengthy preview essay authored by CSO Casey Flaherty. See Post 347. These two essays reflect nearly everything we are learning through our industry meetings. Although the act of writing is a crucial step in crystalizing our thinking for ourselves and our clients, we’ve done our best to make these essays enjoyable for readers.Continue Reading LexFusion’s Second Annual Legal Market Year in Review (348)


Unlike sharks, killer whales hunt collaboratively.  Is this the right approach to the legal tech vertical?


Why aren’t more law firms investing in startups and/or launching corporate venture arms? Is corporate venture capital (CVC) a good fit for the legal industry? If not, is there a better model? And then, finally, what does all of this have to do with killer whales?

In this essay, I’m going to attempt to answer each of these questions. I will start by giving a brief introduction to CVC and then I will outline the current models of law firm venture investments, highlighting both strengths and shortcomings. In the second half of this essay, I’ll suggest an alternative model, a collaborative industry-wide approach which I have dubbed “Investing like Killer Whales.” This is the strategy we used when we syndicated an investment in AI-based contract benchmarking startup TermScout.  See Abramowitz, “As Promised, Our Second #Legaltech Investment Announcement This Week,Zach of Legal Disruption, May 5, 2022 (describing collaborative syndicate approach and why worked well for TermScout).
Continue Reading Sharing my playbook for Legal Tech investment (324)


An emerging role in legal tech companies that ties together sales, marketing, and customer success.


At Legal Evolution, we often return to the above “five stages of evolution” graphic as a reminder that the legal industry has entered a period of profound tumult and uncertainty.

The tumult is driven by the cost, quality, and service delivery advantages of systematized & packaged legal solutions, which has set off a gold rush in legal tech. See Post 255 (Zach Abramowitz tracking legal tech investment).  The uncertainty is driven by the need for new business models combined with the lack of established, sales channels that enable end-users to buy with confidence.  Cf Post 279 (Jae Um observing that legal vertical is composed of multiple markets that are both fluid and segmented in nonobvious ways).

Well, what about solutions—is anything on the horizon?
Continue Reading How Chief Revenue Officers are making legal tech better (284)


Examining the gap between what machines do and what lawyers do.


A shiver of lawyers reading books is, perhaps, like a school of fish swimming: the fish don’t know the water is wet, and likewise, the lawyers, who may deeply consider what they are reading, will rarely stop to consider what reading is. But because reading is so important to the law, and one of the key capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) is its growing ability to work with text, it’s worth a moment to pause and consider: what are we doing when we read?
Continue Reading Did Robbie the Robot really learn to read? (book review) (237)