The next real divide in the legal market is unlikely to be intelligence. The divide will be between institutions that can reliably retrieve and deploy what they already know and those that cannot. The firms that win will be the ones that can surface the right knowledge, in the right hands, before anyone else does.
Administrative services should be one of the easiest areas for a law firm to get right and one of the most impactful when they do. But that is not what we see in the market today.
By the time they pick up the phone or fill out a contact form, many perspective clients have already formed a strong impression of your firm and your attorneys. For law firm marketers, that shift has real implications for how we think about search and discoverability. That’s where answer engine optimization — AEO — comes in.
Rights of publicity now sit in a structural mismatch with the generative AI technology around them. Each unauthorized commercial use would in theory violate the right of publicity — but in practice, detecting it, identifying its source, and obtaining a remedy costs more than almost any individual claim is worth. And the volume keeps multiplying.
Clients have pushed back on what they are willing to pay for since long before anyone heard of a large language model. AI is the latest chapter in a long story about legal fees. But it introduces a wrinkle that prior tools did not.
Big Law competition for top real estate partners has accelerated in 2026 amid heightened client demand in their practices and a growing alignment between real estate and energy practices for data center work.
A proposed class action filed against Meta Platforms in New York federal court targets not only the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg but also two former senior AI researchers by name — an unusual move that could signal a new front in the wave of copyright litigation against artificial intelligence companies.
As AI becomes embedded in everyday business and legal operations, organizations are confronting a new expectation: simply disclosing AI use is no longer enough. A critical shift is taking place in the legal industry: transparency is no longer just about disclosure; it’s about comprehension.
Clients have pushed back on what they are willing to pay for since long before anyone heard of a large language model. AI is the latest chapter in a long story about legal fees. But it introduces a wrinkle that prior tools did not.
Across practices, offices, and partner relationships, firms operate with limited visibility into where meaningful connections exist and when those connections signal real business potential. The idea of a fully captured “single view of the client” remains difficult to achieve. The question is no longer how to improve CRM adoption. It is whether the underlying model is fit for purpose.
