Kirkland & Ellis made headlines again when it stated it will no longer disclose financial information to The American Lawyer magazine and other media after 2026. Firm leadership said financial disclosures could put too much focus on quantitative metrics over the quality and caliber of the firm’s legal services.
Kirkland is in a category…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a breakthrough technology, helping fuel the AI industrial revolution. OpenAI and Anthropic are market leaders, with extraordinary private valuations. The prospect of their respective trillion-dollar public company valuations, should their initial public offerings come to fruition, has drawn attention to LLM economics.
LLMs are transforming industries including healthcare and the…
Anyone can make sweets, but not everyone can make a Hershey bar.
The debate over legaltech startups offering nothing more than a “thin wrapper” around an LLM begs a deeper analysis of the value of a wrapper, particularly as open-source alternatives take root.
Let’s start with a Hershey bar. You pay for the chocolate, right?…
When Kirkland & Ellis announced a $500 million investment in AI, much of the reaction focused on the dollar amount. That much money commands attention in the legal industry.
But the dollar amount may not be the most interesting part of the story. The more important questions are what is Kirkland actually buying and…
Last week, Will Chen released MikeOSS, an open-source project on GitHub that claims to be feature-equivalent to Harvey and Legora. Among other things, MikeOSS has an assistant, a tabular review function, and reusable workflows. While it’s too early to tell how strong the technology is, the response in the development community has been…
This is the final installment in a three-part series examining the forces reshaping the legal industry. Part One and Part Two covered the macro dynamics of the AI industrial revolution and also the bending of UPL as consumers turn to AI products such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for legal advice.
Consumer behavior…
When Anthropic announced legal skills inside its Cowork environment this week, shares of Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer tanked. Investors appeared to price in a new competitive threat from Claude.
But Ken Crutchfield believes the market got it wrong.
Ken Crutchfield
“I feel the market reaction does not reflect the reality…
Where does all the pressure building in legal tech concentrate? On unauthorized practice of law (UPL), says Ken Crutchfield — and something’s got to give.
In Part 1 of his series on “The New Physics of Legal Tech,” Crutchfield examined the macro forces shaping the industry. Now, in Part 2, he zeroes in on…
Forget the bold predictions. Ken Crutchfield is focusing on something more fundamental: the physics of the legal tech market.
In the wake of a banner 2025 — with Harvey hitting an $8 billion valuation, Filevine raising $400 million, and Clio’s acquisition of vLex — it is tempting to either celebrate the boom or fret about…
What does McDonald’s real estate strategy have to do with legal tech? More than you might think, says Ken Crutchfield.
In the wake of Robin AI’s recent struggles to secure funding and reports of potential emergency acquisition talks, Crutchfield draws a compelling parallel to Ray Kroc’s revelation in The Founder that McDonald’s wasn’t really in…
Fresh off his first Waymo ride, Ken Crutchfield observes that autonomous vehicles had to be trained to navigate real streets and make life-or-death decisions years before legal tech began exploring agentic AI. Now, as law firms rush to deploy AI agents, there are crucial lessons to be learned from Waymo’s journey, he says.…
A Reddit post last week ignited a firestorm of speculation across the legal industry about the long-term prospects of legal AI company Harvey, with some dismissing it as little more than a ChatGPT wrapper. But is that criticism missing the point?
Ken Crutchfield
In his latest column…
Robert Ambrogi Blog
