AI and the Future of Law

What does Kirkland & Ellis’ $500 million AI bet mean for Big Law — and for junior lawyers?
In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack discuss Kirkland’s reported investment in building its own proprietary AI platform and what it signals about the legal industry’s shift from AI adoption to AI building. They explain why Kirkland’s strategy may make sense for Kirkland, but why other firms should be careful not to copy it without considering their own strengths, clients, culture, and market position.
Jen and Bridget also explore growing concerns about junior attorney development as AI takes on more entry-level legal work. If junior lawyers are no longer learning through the same kinds of assignments, how will firms help them build judgment, confidence, and expertise? And what new training models might emerge?
The episode also includes an AI Aha! segment on practical AI use cases in everyday life and a What Just Happened discussion on Anthropic, model risk, and emerging government oversight of frontier AI systems.
In this episode:
Kirkland’s $500 million AI announcement
Big Law’s shift from AI adoption to AI building
Why AI strategy should match firm strategy
What AI means for junior associate development
Why learning by doing does not happen automatically
How firms might rethink legal training
What Anthropic’s model-risk episode means for lawyers and clients

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What does it mean to be an AI-ready lawyer?
In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack are joined by Farrah Pepper, legal innovation partner at Harvey, and Kirsten Talmage, chief strategy officer at Practising Law Institute, to discuss The AI-Ready Lawyer: A Competency Framework for the AI Era.
Farrah and Kirsten explain why the legal profession needs a shared language for AI competency, how the framework can help law firms, legal departments, law schools, and individual lawyers, and why AI training should focus on durable professional skills rather than any single tool. The conversation also explores new legal career paths, the importance of oversight and judgment, and how organizations can use the framework to assess training gaps and build AI fluency responsibly.
In this episode:
What it means to be an AI-ready lawyer
Why the legal profession needs a shared AI competency framework
How AI fluency differs from tool-specific training
Why human judgment, oversight, and ethics remain central
How firms and legal departments can use the framework
Why smaller teams may benefit from AI training even more
How law students can assess AI readiness in schools and employers
Learn more about PLI’s AI-Ready Lawyer framework:
[PLI AI-Ready Lawyer Framework]
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What is an AI-native law firm?
In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack are joined by John Nay, founder and CEO of Norm AI and Norm Law, for a conversation about agentic law, AI-native legal services, and what it means to build legal work around agents rather than copilots.
John explains how legal and regulatory reasoning can be embedded into AI agents, allowing them to perform first-pass work, learn from prior matters, and create compounding value over time. The conversation also explores how Norm Law combines attorneys, legal engineers, software engineers, and AI engineers; why client-specific knowledge can become persistent; and how outcome-based pricing may change the business model of legal services.
The episode also examines client trust, human supervision, experienced legal talent, and the Legal AGI Lab’s research into how AI agents may be evaluated, benchmarked, and governed by law.
Learn more about the Legal AGI Lab: https://lab.norm.ai
In this episode:
What agentic law means
How AI agents differ from copilots
What an AI-native law firm looks like
The role of legal engineers and AI engineers
Outcome-based pricing and client trust
Human supervision in AI-native legal work
Legal AGI and the governance of AI agents
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How is AI changing the work of in-house legal teams?
In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack are joined by Nick Fleisher, co-founder and CEO of Sandstone, an AI-native platform built specifically for in-house legal teams. Nick discusses how AI is transforming legal operations by helping legal departments manage intake, triage work, connect business context, and move from reactive service providers to proactive strategic partners.
The conversation explores why successful legal AI depends on data and context rather than simply deploying another chatbot, how AI systems can learn legal judgment over time, what lawyers should automate first, and why human oversight remains essential as agentic workflows become more common. Nick also shares why corporate legal departments are under increasing pressure as AI accelerates work across the business, and what that means for the future of legal teams.
In this episode:

Why in-house legal teams are adopting AI differently than law firms
Building AI-native legal infrastructure
Why legal AI is fundamentally a data and context problem
How AI can help legal teams become more proactive
What AI can—and can't—learn from lawyers
Understanding agentic workflows and human oversight
Why implementation is the key to successful AI adoption
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Can law firms redesign themselves for a world shaped by generative AI?
In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack are joined by Sharon Crane, president of Practising Law Institute, for a conversation about Jen’s new book, Unprecedented: Designing a Human-Centered Law Firm When Everything Is Changing. Together, they explore why law firm transformation is difficult, how storytelling can make change feel more accessible, and why collaboration, human-centered design, and practical experimentation matter in the AI era.
The conversation also covers PLI’s AI competency framework, the value of business fables, the history of the Cravath system and the billable hour, how Jen used AI as a writing partner, and what the future of junior lawyer training might look like.
Learn more about Unprecedented: Designing a Human-Centered Law Firm When Everything Is Changing:
https://www.pli.edu/catalog/publications/treatise/unprecedented-designing-a-human-centered-law-firm-when-everything-is-changing/447974
In this episode:
Why law firm change requires human buy-in
How storytelling can make transformation more usable
Why the current legal business model is not inevitable
How AI can act as a co-intelligence, not a shortcut
What junior lawyer training might look like in the AI era

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