
It wasn’t one moment, it was a pattern I couldn’t unsee. AI was stuck inside the legacy tools, and the only products that had meaningful output, like Claude, didn’t know the judge, didn’t know what the other side had argued in their last three filings, and hallucinated all over the place. The good AI tools were just built for a different job. Litigation isn’t just a higher-level, precedent-dependent writing exercise. It’s an adversarial one. Someone across the aisle is working, right then, to beat you in front of a specific judge with specific habits, and a tool that ignores context misses the entire point of the work.
Nothing surprised me. I’m a litigator. I’m the user. I know what earns my trust as a platform. I need quality and depth in legal analysis, creativity without hallucinations, and the nuance that AI generally has a hard time with. That’s our magic.
The real disruption is going to come from the bottom, not the top. The first movers were the big firms, but they signed agreements with companies that were more obsessed with capturing market share than with developing a product that evolved as fast as the industry. That’s why you’re still seeing fake cites being filed, and being filed by big firms, because their attorneys are using the cutting-edge AI (which isn’t built for law) that their firm doesn’t offer. The litigators with the most to gain are the ones without the headcount: the solo running a federal defense practice, the fifteen-lawyer boutique going up against a firm of two hundred. For them, this isn’t about efficiency. It’s about firepower. It closes the gap between them and an opponent who used to simply have more hands, and they’re the ones who move fast, because for them the value is survival, not convenience. That second wave of adoption is in the small to mid-sized firms, and that adoption is what will create real disruption.
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