AI can be a great tool in the legal field, for lawyers and clients alike. But you need to be aware of its limitations and potential pitfalls. Clients: AI CANNOT replace your lawyer. Lawyers: AI CANNOT replace your brain. Use it right.

80s party tonight guys. Wish me luck 😂

As AC says and I said to another dude earlier, this guy is a LEGEND. Without his intervention, many more lives surely would have been lost.

He must follow @brockpierson

When you serve a 10-page dispute letter telling OC essentially all his discovery responses are shit.

Checking the eleventh citation before a 9am filing deadline isn't fun, but it's the job. Most people writing about legal AI right now have zero consequences if they're wrong about it. I don't. If my cite-check has a hole in it, a judge finds it, not a comment section. Everything else about this job is just logistics.

The Third Circuit just ruled that training an AI tool on Westlaw's headnotes without a license isn't fair use. Fair enough. But notice who that actually protects: the company that already owns the data. A scrappy competitor can't build a cheaper alternative on the same underlying case law without either licensing it from the incumbent or building the dataset from scratch at a cost a solo-serving startup can't absorb. The ruling favors whoever already has the library, full stop. That's a moat the biggest player gets to keep, cemented by the one company with the deepest library in the business. And the "law" is supposed to be the public's, anyway. Idk.

Rule 16(b)(4) says a scheduling order can only be modified for good cause, and courts don't treat "we got busy" as good cause. Dump the order into Claude at the start of a case and have it build a calendar entry for every deadline in it. If you want to get really fancy, you can even have a drafting schedule created. Refine the results as needed. If it works for you, you got your deadlines and the briefing time blocks ready to drop in the calendar.

There are three ways a lawyer reacts the first time Claude gives a wrong answer. One ignores it and files anyway. One panics and bans AI from the file entirely. One asks why it was wrong, learns the gap, and keeps using the tool smarter than before. Only the third camp is actually getting better at this whole "AI thing." The other two just found two different ways to stay stuck.

Rule 26(a)(2)(B) spells out six specific things an expert report has to contain, including the basis and reasons for every opinion and the facts or data considered in forming it. Use Claude to check your expert's report against all six, line by line, instead of trusting your expert's template. A report missing one of the six elements is handing the other side a Daubert motion for free.

Repario, an e-discovery and managed-review shop, just acquired UnitedLex, a much broader legal-process outsourcer, to build what both companies are calling an AI-enabled legal services platform at enterprise scale. Two private-equity-owned legal service providers merging into one bigger one is about market share, not a technical breakthrough. Watch who's left standing to sell AI-enabled labor once this round of consolidation finishes.

A Pierson Ferdinand attorney reported reviewing a 7,000-page trial transcript in about five hours instead of an estimated 55. At some point, the firm billing hourly for the 55-hour version is gonna have a problem: clients will eventually ask why they're paying for the slow way.

Claude builds a clean deposition outline in minutes: topics in order, follow-ups nested under each one, nothing missing structurally. What it doesn't know is that the witness freezes up every time you mention the second meeting, or that opposing counsel always objects to the third category of questions and folds by the fourth attempt. That's not Claude's problem. It's the kind of thing you only know from having sat across from this witness, or one enough like them, before. The outline gets you organized. Your twenty years in the chair across the table is what tells you which question actually hits hardest.

Rule 56(c)(1) requires a party asserting a fact is undisputed on summary judgment to cite specific parts of the record supporting it. Most of the fights over "undisputed" facts are really fights over whether the cited page actually says what the motion claims. Before you file your own motion, not just when you're opposing someone else's, run every factual assertion in your statement of undisputed facts back against the pincite you gave for it. Have Claude flag any citation that doesn't fully support the sentence it's attached to. Catching your own problem before the other side does is always better.

Clio just bought an AI tool for judges, already running in the nation's largest trial court. A California firm just ran out of appeals on its $6,000 sanction for AI-generated fake citations, and a D.C. firm got its third judicial warning in a year for the same thing. The bench is adopting the tool. The bar is getting sanctioned for it. Interesting times.

My teeth hurt. Fill issue.