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writing from the institute

The uncomfortable parts, said plainly.

The billable hour has no good answer to work that takes a fifth of the time. Most firm pilots cannot produce a negative result. Prohibiting AI does not stop its use, it moves it somewhere you cannot see. What follows is the Institute’s writing on the questions firm leadership actually has to decide, with the date on every claim.

A bound policy document on a boardroom table beside an unopened pen case
New Revenue & Service Lines

Can a law firm sell AI governance as a service line?

Clients need AI policies, vendor diligence and incident playbooks, and roughly half of firms do not have a policy of their own. The structural constraint is Rule 5.7 and what happens when legal advice and consulting share an engagement.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 An empty chair on one side of a long conference table set for a client meeting
Marketing & Business Development

Are clients actually leaving firms over AI?

Thomson Reuters found 32 percent of in-house professionals reconsidering firms that lag on AI, while 11 percent of lawyers thought they could lose clients over it. Three times as many clients are considering leaving as there are lawyers who think they might.
September 4, 2026 · 4 min read
 Two identical desks side by side, one with a monitor on and one with it dark
Adoption & Change

Does Microsoft 365 Copilot actually make people faster?

The only UK government evaluation with a control group found Copilot users doing spreadsheet analysis were slower and materially less accurate. It also found one group with a clear statistically significant benefit, and that is the more useful finding.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 A row of identical filing cabinets with one drawer secured by a separate lock
Tool Selection & Evaluation

Does the AI subscription tier your firm is on actually protect client data?

In the New York Times litigation against OpenAI, a preservation order captured Free, Plus, Pro and Team users. Enterprise, Edu and zero-retention API customers were exempt. The tier boundary, not the privacy marketing, was the control that mattered.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 An empty glass-walled meeting room at night with a conference phone on the table
Governance & Policy

Can you put an AI notetaker on a client call?

Two New York City Bar opinions say not without affirmative all-party consent, and the second makes calls with third parties default-off. What the vendor does with the transcript afterwards is the other half of the analysis.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 An open case reporter with a magnifying glass resting across the page
Verification & Quality Control

How often do legal AI research tools still get it wrong?

Roughly 15 to 25 percent of the time on research tasks, per the best synthesis available in February 2026. The harder failure is not the invented case. It is the real citation that does not support the proposition it is cited for.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 A mechanical clock face with its hour hand removed, lying on a ledger
Billing, Pricing & Fees

What happens to the billable hour when the work takes a fifth of the time?

ABA Formal Opinion 512 says a lawyer cannot bill for hours AI saved as though a human worked them. That is the ethics floor. The commercial question underneath it is harder, and firms have already started moving without answering it.
September 4, 2026 · 4 min read
 A partly assembled machine on a workbench beside a sealed manufacturer’s crate
Automation & Building

Should your firm build its own AI, or configure what it already pays for?

MIT NANDA found internally built systems succeeded roughly a third as often as bought ones. For most firms the real question is neither build nor buy but configure, because the capability is often already inside a contract the firm signed years ago.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 An empty witness stand in a courtroom lit from a high window
AI Law & Rules

Does machine-generated evidence need a human expert to sponsor it?

The proposed Federal Rule that would have required one stalled in June 2026 and went back to the Advisory Committee, together with the deepfake-authentication proposal. That leaves the question to Rule 702, Rule 901 and the judge in front of you.
September 4, 2026 · 4 min read
 A printed legal pleading on a desk with one block of the page conspicuously blank
Security & Threats

Can a document you are reviewing give instructions to your AI?

Yes, and it has already happened in two courtrooms. A Connecticut judge caught 3-point white-on-white text because he printed the pleadings. Lawyers professionally ingest documents written by adversaries, which is an exposure no other profession has.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
 A closed leather document portfolio tied with a ribbon beside a sealed envelope, under a desk lamp in a dark law office
Confidentiality & Security

Is what you type into a consumer AI chatbot privileged?

In February 2026 a federal judge in the Southern District of New York said no, and the reasoning turned partly on the provider’s own privacy policy. A different court had reached the opposite result a week earlier on different facts. The distinction between them is the thing to understand.
September 4, 2026 · 5 min read
AI adoption conciergeorientation · not legal or ethics advice
Happy to. Tell me roughly how big the firm is and what it already pays for — Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, a practice-management system — because the honest answer to most AI questions at a firm your size starts with what you have already bought rather than what you should go and buy.