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.

BigHand's September 2026 pricing survey found 31% of law firms that scrutinized their data say AI improved profit per matter. Only 27% report fewer billable hours on certain tasks. Slightly more firms are seeing the margin gain than the shorter invoice. If you're a client billed hourly, ask your lawyer where the saved time went.

Before you send a royalty audit notice under an IP license, pull the actual audit clause and check what it lets you look at, not what you assume every audit clause allows. Some audit provisions limit the reviewer to the licensee's own royalty reports and sales records for the specific licensed product. Others let you subpoena the licensee's full general ledger. An audit demand broader than the clause actually authorizes hands the licensee a real objection, and a reason to slow-walk a request your own contract doesn't fully support. Send one that matches the clause exactly, and the licensee has a lot less room to withhold records. Read the four corners of the audit clause before you draft the letter that invokes it.

Every legal AI vendor is racing to become the layer everything else plugs into. That position is worth more than any single feature, because whoever holds it survives the next model swap even when their own product doesn't win a single head-to-head comparison.

Lean on AI too long for something and the real damage ends up a lag: you get slower to notice when the output stops holding up, because the muscle that catches a weak argument on sight was built by writing weak arguments yourself first. That muscle doesn't stay sharp on a diet of finished drafts.

Checking that a case exists and checking that it says what your brief says it says are two different jobs. A cite-checker will tell you the first. Only reading the page tells you the second. Everyone say it with me, loud and proud: VERIFY BEFORE YOU FILE. *golf clap*

The D.C. Court of Appeals said in the Deutsche Bank opinion that every attorney who signed the brief bears some responsibility for the fake citations. Judge Stephen Glickman's concurrence adds a clarification for firms. The duty can be a group effort, the concurrence says, and cite checking is generally the principal drafter's job, so the associate who drafted section three answers for section three's cites. Here's the part to steal. Write down who cite-checks which section before the brief goes out. A group effort with no assignments is how four fake cases get through a brief with three lawyers listed on it.

New Jersey Assembly Bill A5494, introduced September 14, would bar insurers from letting AI make the final call on a homeowner, auto, or flood claim denial. Algorithms could still triage, assess, score fraud, and approve claims, but a person has to make the denial decision. Penalties run up to $5,000 per violation. Whether or not this bill passes, the question works in any bad-faith or coverage case today: who made the final decision on this claim, and what did that person actually look at?

Your signature is becoming a certification that a human verified your AI-assisted work, and the Tenth Circuit has proposed writing that into a rule. The rule asks for a signature. A court that doubts it will ask for the record. Read the full breakdown below👇🏻:

Before you file a motion to compel, build the meet-and-confer record first. Rule 37(a)(1) requires a certification that you conferred, or tried to, in good faith without court action. Dump the email chain into Claude and have it build a dated list of every request you made, every response, and every stretch of silence. If that list looks thin, your certification is too. The fee-shifting rule has an exception for this: a court doesn't have to award expenses when the movant filed the motion before attempting good-faith conferral.

Four judges in the same N.D. Cal. federal district, four different AI rules. One wants AI-drafted documents identified in the title or caption. One wants lead trial counsel's certification and a record of every prompt. One wants billing statements to say when AI was used. The fourth allows AI and says counsel alone bears responsibility for what's filed. The rule that applies to you depends on who drew your case.

OpenAI launched 26 vendor-built legal plugins for ChatGPT on September 17, including ones from Thomson Reuters, Harvey, Legora, and iManage. Vendors are competing at the plugin layer now. 🧵

Before your expert touches an AI tool on your case, decide who saves the prompts. A federal magistrate judge in Connecticut ordered one side to disclose the prompts its expert used on May 18. 🧵

Opposing counsel's brief is suddenly better written than their last three filings. Before you respond to the argument, pull the first five cases and read the pages the brief cites for them. Polished writing is easy to produce now, so what you're checking is whether each case actually says what the brief claims it says. It takes about 20 minutes. Either the cites hold, or you've got a paragraph for your reply.

Judge Trina Thompson's standing order in the Northern District of California says any billing statements submitted for review of the court must indicate AI usage when applicable. It cites ABA Model Rule 1.5 and ABA Formal Opinion 512. So the fee petition is where your AI use becomes visible to the court. If Claude did the first pass on a motion and the time entry only says "drafted motion," you've got a description problem. Start tagging AI-assisted entries as you go, because rebuilding which ones involved a tool from memory in the middle of a fee fight would be miserable.