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.

Agentic legal AI is different from assistive legal AI. Worth keeping distinct before you buy anything. Assistive tools respond to prompts. You ask, they answer. You review before anything goes anywhere. Oversight is built in by default. Agentic tools act autonomously toward a defined goal—making decisions in sequence without stopping for confirmation. The oversight has to be built in deliberately, because by default, the tool completes the task and tells you after. Before deploying any agentic legal system, the question that matters: what does it do when it hits a decision point you didn't anticipate? "It asks" is a feature. "It proceeds" is a risk.

The attorneys who got sanctioned for AI hallucinations in 2023 could argue the verification standard was unclear. That argument got harder in 2024. In 2026 it doesn't work. Three years of published sanctions decisions have been defining the standard. If you don't know what it requires, that's a choice at this point, not a gap in the guidance.

Discovery review workflow worth building out: AI builds the document index—type, date, author, subject, preliminary relevance. Semantic search by issue, not by keyword. The attorney makes every privilege and relevance call on the flagged subset. Semantic search finds what keyword search misses. A party that never wrote "fraud" may have committed plenty of it. Search for what they meant, not what they wrote. The framing that works: AI handles the organization, attorney handles the judgment. The output should be a cleaner pile, not a smaller obligation.

When the two conflict—firm policy more permissive than your professional obligations, or more restrictive—your ethics rules govern your individual conduct. The policy governs your employment relationship. Those are different things with different consequences. If your firm clears an AI workflow you're not confident your bar rules permit, the uncertainty belongs to you. The managing partner's approval doesn't transfer professional exposure to the firm's IT policy.

Expert cross-prep before the depo: expert's report, published work, prior depo transcripts—run through Claude. Ask it to find every opinion that lacks methodological support. Ask it to find every position that conflicts with the expert's own published research. That's the cross outline. The examination still requires reading the witness in real time. The preparation doesn't have to take all day.

When opposing counsel files a citation you cannot verify, that's not a tactical opportunity. That's a Rule 3.3 question. "I found what looked like a hallucinated citation and didn't disclose it until after the ruling" is not a defensible position. Courts are watching this specific issue now. The duty runs both directions.

Anyone else exhausted by the "my buddy quit his job, built a system in 72 hours, now makes $847K a month" posts? No he didn't. No system. No buddy. Just engagement bait structured like a heroic origin story so you'll read to the end and reply. The formula is always the same: random age detail for credibility, dramatic firing or crisis, mysterious breakthrough, absurdly specific income number, cliffhanger ending. Every. Single. Time. If your business advice requires a three-act screenplay to explain, it's not advice. It's fiction with a CTA. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Florida's citation certification rule takes effect today. Here's what it actually requires, who it touches, and what happens when it doesn't get followed. 🧵

There's another player on the field in Ark Legal. It claims, for example, AI-powered legal research on a typical employment matter: 30 to 90 minutes, versus 3 to 6 hours on Westlaw without AI. Even with a discount for vendor sourcing, the gap is real enough to matter. Anyone used this service?

"And yet most lawyers are convinced that AI isn’t capable of drafting a share purchase agreement or litigation brief from scratch." Yeah, they ain't doing it right.