The question I hear at every bar event, every CLE, every conference hallway is some version of: is AI going to replace lawyers?

It’s a small question. It’s a scared question. And it centers the wrong thing, which is us.

Here’s the bigger one. The tools are here. They are cheap, they are getting better, and they are not going away. So what do we actually want to build with them?

That’s a question about values, not technology. And it’s the only one worth spending your energy on.

I’ve been practicing for over twenty years. I’ve built a firm, blown up a firm, rebuilt a firm, and now spend most of my time helping other lawyers run theirs and teaching law students. I don’t know what the profession looks like in ten years. Nobody does. Anyone selling you certainty right now is selling you something.

But I do know what I think is worth protecting. I think about this a lot. Here are seven things.

1. Access to justice is the whole ballgame

We have a system that provides justice to people who can afford it. That is not a justice system. It’s a post-Capitalist hellscape with a courthouse attached.

I say this as someone who makes his living inside that system. I’m not standing outside throwing rocks. I’m inside, and I can see it clearly.

Think about what we’ve accepted as normal. A person gets told their spouse wants to leave them. A person gets evicted. A person gets a debt collection suit served at their door. And the honest answer for most of them is that no lawyer will take the case, and they will walk into a courtroom alone against someone who does this for a living.

We built an entire profession on the premise that everyone deserves an advocate. Then we priced the advocate out of reach and called it a day. This is a choice.

Here’s what’s different now. For the first time in my career, the cost of producing competent legal work has actually gone down. Not marginally. Substantially. Drafting, research, translation, document review, intake, triage. Work that used to require six billable hours can happen in twenty minutes.

That’s the opportunity.

The question is whether we open the doors to justice and walk through them or whether we quietly pocket the margin and keep the prices where they are.

I don’t think this happens by accident. Efficiency does not automatically become access. Efficiency usually becomes profit. It takes intention to point it anywhere else.

But we have the tools now. What we need is the will.

And in an era where human dignity feels like it’s eroding in a dozen directions at once, the ability of an ordinary person to walk into a courtroom and be heard is not a nice-to-have. It’s load-bearing. More than ever big companies and the government need to be challenged. Rights need to be stood up for. And their needs to be faith in the system. Pull it out and the whole structure comes down.

AI as a tool of oppression is a possible outcome. And a choice.

2. Invest in your people, not just your practice

I’m talking about bar associations. Local groups. The dinner with four other lawyers where nobody’s selling anything. The Slack channel. The mastermind. The friend you call when the case goes sideways.

Legal community has been in decline for a long time. Bar association membership is down. The county bar lunch that used to draw sixty people draws twelve. We got busier, we got more competitive, and we told ourselves we didn’t have time.

Now we’re in the middle of the largest disruption to knowledge work in a century, and a whole lot of lawyers are trying to figure it out alone at 11 p.m. That’s a terrible way to navigate change.

Here’s the thing about disruption. Nobody has the map. What you have instead is a bunch of people who each walked a little way into the woods and came back with a partial report. Community is how those partial reports get shared.

Every meaningful thing I’ve learned about running a law firm came from another lawyer telling me the truth about their own mistakes. From actual conversations. From in person meetings. From a person who had no obligation to help me and helped me anyway.

That’s not sentimentality. That’s the actual mechanism by which a profession learns.

So join the thing. Show up to the thing. Start the thing if it doesn’t exist. Answer the email from the lawyer you’ve never met who has a question about a case type you know cold.

We are going to need each other. Some of us are going to have hard years. Look out for one another.

3. Trust is the only currency that matters

Strip away everything else and here’s what a lawyer actually sells.

Not documents. Not hours. Not outcomes, because we can’t guarantee outcomes. What we sell is the promise that when you hand us your worst day, we will handle it with skill and we will not betray you. That’s it. That’s the product.

Trust is why lawyers get to do things nobody else gets to do. It’s why privilege exists. It’s why we hold client money. It’s why a stranger will tell us things they haven’t told their spouse.

And trust is downstream of two things.

The first is access. A profession that only serves the wealthy will eventually be understood as a profession that works for the wealthy. You cannot separate the two in the public mind, and honestly, you shouldn’t be able to.

The second is a code that actually means something. Not a code we recite at swearing-in ceremonies. A code the public can rely on, enforced consistently, including against people with power.

AI puts pressure on both. It’s now trivially easy to produce something that looks like legal work and isn’t. We’ve all seen the hallucinated citation stories. Those are embarrassing, but they’re the small version of the problem.

The big version is quieter. It’s a lawyer who stops reading carefully. Who ships work they didn’t fully understand. Who mistakes speed for competence.

Nobody catches that in a sanctions order. The client just gets a slightly worse outcome and never knows why.

Responsibility has to guide this. Not as a compliance checkbox. As the actual organizing principle of how we adopt these tools.

You are still the lawyer. The machine is not a co-signer.

4. We have to get serious about mentorship

The profession has run a bad trade for far too long.

We took older lawyers and gradually made them irrelevant, because their knowledge wasn’t in the billing system. We took younger lawyers and turned them into billable widgets, because their hours were.

Then we acted surprised when nobody knew how to try a case.

Here’s why it matters more now than it did before.

The way lawyers actually learn judgment is by struggling. You sit with a hard problem. You get it wrong. Somebody senior tells you why. You feel that in your body and you never make that mistake again.

AI removes the struggle. That’s the entire value proposition. It’s also the entire risk.

When the answer comes easy, you don’t build the muscle. And the muscle is the job. Anyone can find the rule. Knowing which rule matters, and what to do when the rules point in different directions, and how to read a room, and when to shut up. That’s the practice of law. That comes from reps.

This is why I think law school still needs pen and paper. Not out of nostalgia. Because writing by hand is slow, and slow is where thinking happens. You cannot outsource the formation of judgment to a tool and then expect to have judgment.

Use AI. Use it aggressively. But make sure your young lawyers earn their instincts the hard way first, and make sure your senior lawyers have a real role in that.

The most underused asset in most law firms is a sixty-year-old lawyer with forty years of pattern recognition and no one asking them questions.

5. We need an honest conversation about AI and private equity

Two forces are reshaping legal at the same time and we’re barely talking about the second one.

Private equity is buying into legal services. In some jurisdictions directly, in others through management companies, marketing entities, and litigation finance. AI is making legal work dramatically cheaper to produce at scale. Put those together and you get something the profession has never dealt with before.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think there’s one answer.

Outside capital can be good. It can fund technology a small firm could never build. It can professionalize operations that were frankly a mess. Some of the best-run legal organizations I’ve seen have institutional money behind them, and their clients are better served for it.

Capital can also be corrosive. When the return horizon is five to seven years and the exit multiple depends on margin, something has to give. Usually it’s the part of the work that doesn’t show up in the model. The extra call. The case you take because it’s right. The client who needs more than the file plan allows.

Same with AI. It can be the thing that lets one lawyer serve a thousand people. It can also be the thing that turns a law practice into a claims processing operation with a bar number.

I don’t know where the line is. I genuinely don’t.

But I know we should be arguing about it, out loud, with real rigor. The test isn’t whether something is profitable or innovative. The test is whether it advances the administration of justice or quietly hollows it out.

That’s a conversation the profession owns. If we don’t have it, it gets had for us, by people with different incentives.

6. Teach lawyers business and technology

Private practice is the lifeblood of this profession.

Not because it’s noble. Because it’s the delivery mechanism. Legal aid is essential and chronically underfunded. Public defenders are heroic and buried. The overwhelming majority of people who get legal help in this country get it from a private lawyer running a small business.

Which means the health of small law firms is an access to justice issue. A firm that can’t make payroll can’t help anyone.

And here’s our dirty secret. We produce lawyers with no idea how to run a business.

Three years of school. Zero hours on cash flow, pricing, hiring, marketing, systems, or the difference between revenue and profit. Then we hand them a license and act confused when a talented lawyer with great judgment goes under because they never learned to collect a receivable.

I lived this. I nearly lost my firm learning it in real time, with real money, and it was not fun.

The good news is that the barrier has never been lower. The tools that used to require a consultant and a six-figure budget now cost a hundred dollars a month and can be set up in an afternoon. A solo lawyer today can run an operation that would have needed a staff of six twenty years ago.

Basic technical competency isn’t a nice extra anymore. It’s part of your duty. Rule 1.1 comment 8 said so years ago and most of the profession skimmed past it.

Learn the business. Learn the tools. You cannot serve people at scale from a practice that’s falling apart underneath you.

7. Give each other grace

Last one, and maybe the most important.

We are living through a lot at once. Technology is changing weekly. Business models are being questioned. The rule of law itself is under strain in ways that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. Everyone I know is tired.

And into that, we’re all having about six different conversations at the same time, at high volume, mostly online.

Some lawyers are all in on AI. Some are terrified. Some are pretending it isn’t happening. Some are overselling it. Some are grieving a version of this profession they loved.

All of those people are having a real human response to a genuinely destabilizing moment.

I’ve been too quick to dunk. I’ve written the sharp reply. It felt good for about ninety seconds and accomplished nothing.

We can disagree hard about substance. We should. But the person on the other end is a lawyer who took the same oath you did, who probably has a client waiting on them right now, and who is trying to figure this out with incomplete information, same as you.

There is dignity in all of us. That includes the colleague who’s wrong on the internet.

Where this leaves us

None of what I’ve listed is technology.

Access. Community. Trust. Mentorship. Honest debate. Competence. Grace.

Those are the things that were important before any of this and will be important after. The tools change what’s possible. They don’t change what’s worth doing.

The last time the profession got a productivity shock like this, we took the gains and raised our rates. Word processing, email, electronic research, all of it made us faster, and the price of legal services went up anyway.

We could do that again. It’s the path of least resistance and there’s real money in it.

Or we could use this one differently.

I’d like to be part of the group that tries.

What am I missing? I’d like to hear it.

On Monday night we’re going to walk the North End. Bring cash. Good Italian places don’t take cards.

Spritz at Cafe Amaro. A sub from Monica’s. Cannoli at Mike’s. Espresso at Caffe Vittoria to close it out.

That walk wasn’t just a good evening. It was a continuation of something. Our team just got back from Italy We came back different. Slower. More intentional. More willing to sit with good food and good people instead of rushing to the next thing.

That’s the spirit behind Revolutionary Era.

I’ve spent years building this course. Years. And on July 21st in Boston, I get to teach it.

Doesn’t matter where you are on your law firm journey. Thinking about starting one. Already running one. There’s something in this room for you. I built it that way on purpose.

I’m also beyond excited to have Michelle Delino speak. She’s one of the best law firm owners in this country. Her story, how she built her firm, is going to hit people hard. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Here’s the part I’m most excited about. I’m turning my entire talk into Claude skills. Things you can open on your laptop the next morning and actually use in your firm. Not a binder that sits on a shelf. Real tools.

That night, I’m at Fenway. Down the first base grandstand. Not a luxury box. Never sat in one in about 150 games. That’s not an accident either. Like an exit row on Delta, it’s a place you’re likely to find me. It’s comfortable. We have just one ticket left for this.

Wednesday, for anyone still in town, I’m booking a tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Because what actually moves people isn’t digital. It’s real. It’s standing in front of something built to last.

The details:

July 21st. Suffolk University, Boston. $297. Virtual and on-demand options if you can’t make it in person. You’ll walk away with a copy of my new book, How to Build the Law Firm.

And here’s the part that matters most to me. If cost is what’s standing between you and this room, send me a message. Full scholarship. No questions asked. I don’t want anything standing in the way of your dream firm.

See you in Boston. Get your tickets now.

That should tell you something. It’s not telling the doomsayers anything, though. The ones predicting bot lawyers and empty offices. They keep missing the forest for the trees.

Here’s what they’re missing. Things are messy out there. And they’re getting messier.

At Best Era, demand for our consulting and our teaching is through the roof. Firms are drowning. Not because AI failed them. Because everything around AI got harder to hold together at the same time. New tools. New expectations. New ways to screw up an old process. Mess doesn’t disappear when you hand someone a better tool. Sometimes it multiplies.

So let me give you a simple way to figure out whether AI is going to eliminate your job in this profession.

Ask yourself one question: how messy is your job? Are you getting dirty?

The messy human parts of law will remain messy and human.

Messy shows up in a lot of forms.

Sometimes it’s a hard problem with no clean answer. A judgment call where the facts point three different directions and someone has to pick one and live with it.

Sometimes messy is a client who is scared. Scared they’ll lose their house. Their kids. Their freedom. Their business. Everything they built.

Sometimes messy is sitting at someone’s dining room table, in their kitchen, in their worst week, and actually understanding their predicament. Not the legal issue. Them.

No model does that. No model wants to.

Now here’s the other half of the answer, and it’s just as important.

The parts of legal work that aren’t messy will get automated. They should be automated. They were necessary. They were never valuable. Not really. Not in the way we told ourselves they were.

Formatting a document. Summarizing a deposition. First-pass research. Busywork we dressed up as expertise because it billed by the hour. That stuff is going away, and good riddance. It was never the job.

The future of law belongs to the lawyers willing to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. The ones who lean into the mess instead of hiding from it.

So, be honest with yourself. How much of your day is spent in the mess? The more the better.
___________
We are deep diving into the mess on July 21st.

I had changed in the 25 years between my visits to Italy. The world had changed. AI showed up and cracked open every profession, including mine. But the important things there hadn't moved an inch.

In a moment this disruptive, I keep getting pulled toward the old stuff. History. The classics. Craftsmanship. Art. Theology. Not as a retreat from what's happening in the world. As a compass for it.

Standing in front of ancient structures, it's easy to marvel at how they built them. No cranes. No power tools. Just people, stone, and time.

It was more powerful to sit with why they built them.

You feel it everywhere over there. The Colosseum. David. The Sistine Chapel. The Pieta. Florence at golden hour. Medieval walled cities that still hold their shape a thousand years later. Venice, somehow floating.

You feel it in the craft, too. In how they age Parmesan for two years before it's ready. In how they build a Ferrari. In how they still celebrate Mass at St. Peter’s.

A tangible commitment to beauty. To humanity. To the Divine.

None of it was cheap. None of it was easy. It was hard, expensive, and built with purpose. All of it. Nobody was optimizing for speed.

That's worth sitting with right now, in my line of work.

Because the easy path is right there. AI makes it easy to spin up a 500-page website nobody reads, built for bots instead of people. Easy to churn out content with no point of view. Easy to chase the algorithm instead of the client in front of you.

That's not what the builders of Florence were doing. And it's not what will separate the lawyers and firms who matter from the ones who don't.

The work that lasts is still the hard work. Showing up for your community. Protecting the profession. Fighting for justice in a way that's bigger than your own firm, your own name, your own quarter.

The winners here won't be the ones taking shortcuts. They'll be the ones who pick up the tools of this moment and use them to build something valuable.

Italy hit different this time. didn't teach me to fear AI or run from it. It reminded me what's worth building with it.

What are you building?

We're in the early stages of planning an event there for 2027. Great city. Warm, professional sales team. Nothing about the proposal was unusual. That's the point.

Here's what it said.

The math nobody shows you

The room rental was "waived." Sounds generous. It's waived because of a $45,000 food and beverage minimum.

And that $45,000 comes with two plus signs after it. In hotel language, "++" means a service charge of roughly 26%, then tax on top of that. So the $45,000 minimum is really about $62,000 before a single attendee eats anything. Feed 150 people well for two days and you're closer to $85,000 or more, all in.

Then there's the room block. We'd guarantee 150 rooms a night at $249. The contract holds us to 85% of that block. If our attendees book an Airbnb, or stay with a friend, or find a cheaper hotel down the street, we pay for the empty rooms anyway. That exposure alone can run north of $60,000.

AV runs through the hotel's exclusive provider. General session, breakouts, screens, sound. Tens of thousands more, even with a discount.

Add speakers, production, signage, travel, and payment processing, and a modest two-day event for 150 people costs somewhere between $150,000 and $190,000 before you sell one ticket.

I built a model. I moved the sliders. There's no version of that event that breaks even under $1,000 a ticket. Realistically tickets needs $2000 or more.

Unless.

Unless you sell the stage

Here's the release valve every conference host eventually finds: sponsorship.

A vendor will pay $225,000 for a keynote slot. Another will pay $20,000 for a booth. A "platinum partner" will cover your entire F&B minimum in exchange for the opening session and your attendee list.

Suddenly the math works. Tickets stay under $1,000. The hotel gets paid. The host survives.

But something got traded away, and it wasn't the host's money. It was the attendee's time.

You've been to this conference. The keynote is a software demo wearing a TED Talk costume. The exhibit hall has more vendors than lawyers. The best speaker you heard all day was the one who paid to be there, and you can't quite shake the feeling that the whole agenda was reverse-engineered from a sponsorship deck.

I want to be clear: I'm not judging the hosts. I've now seen the contracts. The guarantees are enormous. The minimums are non-negotiable. The math forces the trade.

But understanding why a trade happens is not the same as accepting it.

Our answer: two different events, one principle

At Best Era we run events. We're planning that Nashville event for 2027, and we'll do it with sponsors.

We will continue to search for event space that allows us to provide unreasonable value to attendees. It won’t be this hotel. It forces too many compromises that we are unwilling to make.

But we hold one line: vendors have to be aligned with the event. They have to add to the room, not extract from it. If a sponsor makes the day better for attendees, they're in. If they'd make it worse, no check is big enough.

Our answer to this is revolutionary.

It's called Revolutionary Era.

Here's the setup:

It's at a law school. No hotel. No F&B minimum. No room block guarantee hanging over our heads.

No sponsors. Zero. Nobody bought the stage because the stage is not for sale.

We're recording it ourselves with a camera setup we bought off Amazon. It's the same rig small churches use to stream Sunday services. It works great.

Lunch is sandwiches. We're catering them in ourselves. They will be good sandwiches from a local deli. They will not cost $62,000.

No host hotel. Stay wherever you want. Book the Airbnb. We don't owe anybody for empty rooms.

The team is two people. Brittany and I are driving to Boston. That's the travel budget.

We're not selling anything. Not from the stage, not in the hallway, not in a follow-up sequence. The day is the product.

What we are doing is delivering a full day of substantive content. The material comes from the last two years and thousands of hours I've put into building my Legal Entrepreneurship class at UConn Law. It's the deepest work I've done, compressed into one day, for practicing lawyers.

The ticket is $297. And if anyone wants a scholarship all they have to do is ask. We will give one with no questions asked.

That's an unreasonable price. I know it. It's unreasonable in the direction that almost never happens in this industry: the value should return many multiples of what attendees pay.

And if travel is a burden, there's a full virtual option. Watch from your office. The church camera works.

What gets optimized when nothing is for sale

Every event optimizes for something. Most legal conferences, through no moral failing of the hosts, end up optimizing for the sponsors, because the sponsors are paying the bills.

Strip out the minimums. Strip out the guarantees. Strip out the vendors. What's left to optimize for?

The attendee.

That's the whole experiment. One day, one room at a law school, sandwiches, a camera from Amazon, and the best material I know how to teach.

I'll report back on whether the math works. But I already know the value will.

Register for Revolutionary Era here.

Ryan McKeen is an attorney, co-founder of Best Era, and adjunct professor of Legal Entrepreneurship at UConn Law.

The man in this photo was born on the 4th of July.

An Italian immigrant. My great grandfather, Fortunato Baggetta. I never met him.

But today, on his birthday and this country's 250th, I keep thinking about what he gave up.

The Warmth He Left Behind

He was born in southern Italy. Think about what that means. Sun on stone. Olive trees. The sea close enough to smell. Family in every direction, going back generations. A place where everyone knew his name.

He traded all of it for Springfield, Massachusetts.

Springfield. Factory smoke and winter. A language he didn't speak. Streets where nobody knew him. A world away in every way that a world can be away.

That trade makes no sense on paper. You don't leave warmth for cold. You don't leave belonging for anonymity. You don't leave the known for a bet.

Unless you understand something most of us spend our lives avoiding.

Comfort is not the same as purpose.

The life in Italy was warm. It just wasn't his. Whatever he was meant to become, he couldn't become it there. So he chose the cold, the loneliness, the uncertainty. He chose the pain.

And because he did, I exist. My family exists. Everything I've built exists.

I never met him. But I live his decision every single day.

Pain Is the Price of Becoming

Here is what I've come to believe, and I believe it in my bones.

We must experience pain and discomfort to become what we are meant to become.

There is no other road. Not one I've found. Not one I've seen in any lawyer, any firm owner, any person I've ever worked with. Growth costs. The bill always comes due in discomfort.

I know because I've paid it. Leaving a firm I co-founded broke my heart. The uncertainty kept me up at night. Some of the consequences are still with me. And it was still right. On the other side of that pain was a life and a business and a mission I could never have found by staying warm.

My great grandfather taught me that lesson before I was born. I just had to live it to learn it.

So let me say plainly what I tell the lawyers I work with:

If you are in a job that's not for you, leave. Not next year. Not when it's convenient. The job that isn't yours is quietly costing you the one that is.

If you employ people who aren't aligned, help them leave. This is not cruelty. Keeping someone in a seat that isn't theirs is the cruelty. Help them go find their Springfield. It's the kindest hard thing you'll ever do as a leader.

If you are working in ways that no longer serve you, let go. The billing model. The practice area. The habits that built the old version of you. Honor what they gave you. Then release them.

It's hard. All of it. It's supposed to be.

It's also worth it. All of it.

250 Years of Choosing the Hard Thing

America turns 250 today.

This country was born the same way my great grandfather's new life was. People looked at what they had, decided it wasn't what they were meant for, and walked into pain on purpose. War. Winter. Uncertainty. No guarantee any of it would work.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we're still figuring it out. Still falling short of the promise. Still reaching for it anyway.

That's not a flaw. That's the whole design. A country, a firm, a career, a person. None of them get to become anything without discomfort.

On Optimism and Faith

But pain alone doesn't carry anyone across an ocean.

There's something to be said for optimism. For faith. Those are the things that sustain us through the unknown.

My great grandfather had no evidence. No data. No proof that America would work out for him. What he had was a stubborn belief that it could. That somehow, it all works out.

Some people will call that naive. They'll tell you to be realistic. They'll treat your hope like a character flaw.

Never let anyone shame you for being optimistic when you have no reason to be. Never let anyone shame you for having faith that somehow it all works out.

Optimism without evidence isn't foolishness. It's fuel. It's the only thing that gets you through the middle. The part where you've left the old thing and the new thing hasn't shown up yet. The winter in Springfield before the life takes root.

Every founder knows this middle. Every lawyer who's ever left a firm knows it. Every immigrant who ever stepped off a boat knows it best of all.

The realists stayed home. The optimists built this country.

His Birthday, Our Country's Birthday

America turns 250 today. Two hundred and fifty years of choosing the hard thing on faith. Of falling short of the promise and reaching for it anyway.

My great grandfather left the warmth of southern Italy so his family could become something he'd never live to see.

I never met him. But everything I have traces back to his courage, his pain, and his unreasonable faith that it would all work out.

I hope he would be proud of me.

Happy 4th of July.

---

Ryan McKeen is an attorney, co-founder of Best Era, and adjunct professor of Legal Entrepreneurship at UConn Law. He writes about the business of law, AI, and building better firms.

Whole agendas. Breakout sessions. A guy on stage swiping through exhibits like it was magic.

Nobody runs those anymore.

We all have iPads now. We all carry phones that would have looked like science fiction twenty years ago. The thing that felt like an edge quietly became the floor.

AI is on the same path. You have Claude. Your competitor has Claude. The firm across the street has ChatGPT, Gemini, and three legal tools you have not heard of yet. The technology is powerful, it is getting cheap, and it is everywhere.

So here is the uncomfortable part. The tool is not your advantage.

The challenge is human, not technical

Pope Leo said something this year that stuck with me. He said we are living through “an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human.” He said the real challenge of this moment is not technological. It is anthropological.

I think about that every time I walk into a law firm.

The owner wants to talk about software. Which platform. Which integration. Which prompt. Those are fair questions. They are not the hard part.

The hard part is people. Law is a human profession. You are not managing widgets. You are leading people who have fears and mortgages and a little league game to get to at five.

That is why so many great tools fall flat. The owner buys a product to solve a problem they imagined, instead of listening to the team living the real one.

Your people are scared, and they are not wrong

There is a backlash building. You can feel it.

Eric Schmidt got booed at a commencement this spring. He was not the only speaker who did. Pew keeps finding Americans more skeptical of AI, not less. I teach at UConn Law, and my students are not bullish on this stuff. They are nervous.

My teenage children call LLMs “clankers.” I think this some sort of Gen Alpha diss.

Here is the part that surprised me. The people most excited about AI right now tend to be over forty. The twenty-somethings are wary. That is a flip from how technology usually moves.

So when your paralegal hears “we bought a new AI tool, you are going to love it,” do not be shocked when the room goes quiet.

People do not fear the software. They fear what it means for them.

Name the fear out loud

Let me tell you about a hundred dollar bill.

Take a hundred dollars from someone and they will feel it for weeks. Hand that same person a hundred dollars and it is forgotten by the time they reach the parking lot.

We are wired to feel loss far more than gain. Economists call it loss aversion. I call it being human.

When you roll out AI, your team runs that math in their gut. You are talking about the time they will save. They are grieving the skill they spent ten years getting good at.

The paralegal who lives for building medical chronologies knows that work is changing. Telling her it is fine does not help. Naming it does.

So name it. Say the scary part out loud. We do not know exactly how your job changes. We only know it will. And we are going to figure it out together.

That honesty is not a weakness. It is the whole foundation.

Trust is the only moat left

People love to talk about moats. Judgment is a moat. Proprietary data is a moat.

I am not so sure. Not with the models getting as good as they are getting.

Here is the one I believe in. Trust.

As long as we are serving human beings, trust is what we are really selling. Trust from your clients that you will show up. Trust from your team that you mean what you say.

Using AI is no more an advantage than owning an iPhone. Everyone has the phone. The only question is whether the person holding it picks up when you call.

A phone call will be worth more in five years than it is worth today. Bank on that.

So how do you actually lead this

You do not lead it with a memo. You lead it like a coach.

Start by listening. What do people fear. What do they need. What do they love about the work. Then solve the real bottleneck in your process, not the shiny app you saw demoed at a conference.

After that, go small. One process improvement a week. One new skill a week.

It is like the gym. Nobody gets in shape by reading about the gym. You just have to show up once. Then again. The people who get hooked are unrecognizable nine months later.

Make space for someone to teach. Not a coder. A teacher. Someone whose whole job is to sit next to one person at a time and show them what is possible today. Give people small wins. Small wins are dopamine. Dopamine is adoption.

And do not just buy the software. Live it. With your people. In 2026 this is a core function of the business, not an app you bought.

The last mile is the whole game

In shipping, the hard part is not the ocean.

It is easier to move a container from Shanghai to Long Beach than it is to move that same box the last few miles to your front door. The last mile is where it gets slow, expensive, and human.

Your firm is the same. Your team is buried in last-mile problems. Part of it is a knowledge problem. Part of it is a tools problem.

Here is the good news. The tools can meet them there now.

I am not a coder. A few weeks ago I told Claude to watch my court docket and ping me in Slack whenever something new was filed. It just did it. No engineer. No ticket.

Your paralegals can do that too. Your job is to give them air cover. Clear policies that let them solve their own problems safely. Then find your champions, the ones who light up, and let them teach everyone else. Peer to peer beats top down every time.

And yes, the people who flatly refuse to move will have to go. Refusing this in 2026 is like insisting on paper files. I say that with love. It is still true.

The real work

I have kids. Lately I find myself wondering whether they should even go to college. That is a strange question for a lawyer to be asking out loud. It tells you how fast the ground is moving.

I cannot tell you what your firm looks like in three years. Neither can you. Anyone who says they can is selling something.

What I can tell you is this. The macro forces are bigger than all of us. The AI backlash is going to be one of the defining fights of the next decade. You will not change those tides.

But you can be a steady hand on the ship while the storm runs.

You can show up as a human being. You can pick up the phone. You can tell your team the truth, then stand next to them while it gets uncomfortable.

That is not a software rollout.

That is courage.

And it is the only part of this that was ever really up to you.

It’s ignorance.

Not rent. Not payroll. Not marketing. Not software. Ignorance.

I know because I paid that bill for years. I call it the “stupid tax.”

When I started out, I couldn’t find the right information. So I learned the hard way. I made expensive mistakes. I figured out things by trial and error that someone could have taught me in an afternoon. The right information, at the right time, would have saved me money, time, and a lot of sleep.

When I finally got it, everything changed.

That is why Revolutionary Era exists.

On July 21, 2026, I’m teaching for a full day. At a law school. In Boston. One day, every core function of building and running a great firm. Marketing. Intake. Money. Hiring. Systems. The stuff nobody handed me. I’m laying it all out in a way I never have before. Nothing held back.

Here is what it is not.

No sponsors. Nobody pitching you from a stage. Nobody selling you a funnel. It is me, teaching, which is the thing I love most in the world. I teach legal entrepreneurship at UConn Law. This is that, for you, for a day.

Every revolution starts in a room. Ours starts in Boston.

Building a firm is an act of independence. Nobody hands you a firm. You declare it. Then you fight for it every day. That is not a burden. That is the best work you will ever do.

The room will be full of people who get that. People walking the same road you are. And I will tell you something I believe deeply. The people you meet in that room may be worth more to your career than anything I say from the front of it. You cannot put a price on that. There is no greater asset than a room full of people trying to do what you are trying to do.

The cost is $297.

We added a virtual option, because Boston is not practical for everyone, and the content matters more than the zip code. Every attendee gets a recording too. Watch it whenever your life allows. The goal is access. Plain and simple.

Come in person and you also get lunch, some swag, and my book.

The book is “How to Build a Law Firm.” Two years of work, built from my lectures and materials at UConn Law. It hits Amazon on July 28th for $34.45. Big Papi and Pedro. If you know, you know. Every in-person attendee gets a copy. In your hands. No upsell.

We also have a few Red Sox tickets left. When they are gone, they are gone.

One more thing, and it matters most.

If money is the thing standing between you and that room, scholarships are open. No questions asked. Just DM me and I will give you one. This is about access to dreams. Whether you are just starting out or already in the thick of it and trying to get better, I want you there.

At Best Era, we have committed to helping more than 15,000 lawyers in five years. We are going to crush that number. Events like this are how we do it.

So here is my pitch, stripped down to the truth.

Drive down the cost of ignorance. It is the best investment you will make in your firm this year.

Come build with us. It’s going to be a special day.

Claim your seat at Revolutionary Era.

That’s not what’s happening.

Private equity firms aren’t buying law firms to preserve your legacy or reward your years of service. They’re buying market share. And in most cases, they don’t need to buy your firm at all to take it.

The Brutal Math of Law Firm Valuations

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth about what your law firm is actually worth. Unlike a manufacturing company with patents, equipment, and long-term contracts, or a SaaS business with recurring revenue and high switching costs, your law firm owns almost nothing of defensible value.

Your clients can leave tomorrow. Your lawyers can leave next week. Your brand recognition? That matters in a market of one—your local market—and even there, it’s easily overwhelmed by superior marketing spend. Your processes and systems? PE firms will replace them with their own standardized infrastructure.

This is why law firm sales typically command multiples well under 1x owner’s discretionary income. You read that correctly. After building a practice for 20 or 30 years, many law firm owners discover their business sells for less than a single year’s profit. Sometimes substantially less.

The lawyers who do score significant exits share common characteristics: they’ve built genuinely differentiated firms with institutional clients, recurring revenue models, an inventory of personal injury cases, defensible market positions, or proprietary technology. They represent the exception, not the rule. For every attorney who sells their practice for a meaningful multiple, dozens more discover their life’s work has minimal enterprise value.

Why PE Doesn’t Need Your Firm

Here’s what private equity firms have figured out that most law firm owners haven’t: in legal services, distribution beats quality. Marketing budget beats reputation. Speed beats tradition.

PE-backed legal services companies are building Management Services Organizations that can launch new practices faster and cheaper than acquiring existing ones. They hire lawyers at market rates, plug them into standardized systems, and deploy marketing budgets that dwarf what traditional firms can muster. Within months, they’re capturing market share that took you decades to build.

They don’t want your case management system—they’ve already built better ones. They don’t care about your referral relationships—they’ll manufacture leads through digital marketing at scale. Your phone number and your face on the billboard? Irrelevant. They’ll establish a new brand identity optimized for search algorithms and paid acquisition.

When PE does acquire law firms, it’s typically not because your firm is valuable. It’s because acquisition is momentarily cheaper than organic growth, or because eliminating you as a competitor accelerates their timeline. You’re not the prize. You’re an obstacle being removed.

The Real Game Being Played

The PE strategy in legal services isn’t complicated. They’re building consolidated platforms that can operate at dramatically lower costs through centralized infrastructure, standardized processes, and economies of scale in marketing and technology. They’re assembling the components of what will eventually become the dominant service delivery model in high-volume practice areas.

Your value in this equation is limited to three scenarios. First, you control enough market share that acquiring you is cheaper than competing against you. Second, you have specific institutional relationships or referral sources that can be absorbed into their platform. Third, you’re willing to sell cheap enough that the deal pencils as a simple acqui-hire.

None of these scenarios involve PE firms valuing your systems, your culture, or your brand. They’re buying revenue and eliminating competition. Everything else gets discarded.

The Alternative Path

Here’s the perspective shift that matters: if you’re running your firm well today, you’ll generate more wealth as an owner than you’ll ever extract from a PE sale.

A well-operated law firm with strong unit economics, efficient systems, and defensible client relationships can produce owner returns of 20% to 40% annually. Compounded over a decade, that dramatically outperforms a sale at 0.7x discretionary income, even accounting for reduced personal risk.

The opportunity for most isn’t preparing for an exit. It’s building a better firm right now.

This means investing in the infrastructure that PE firms are building: real client relationship management systems, genuine process standardization, comprehensive technology adoption, and data-driven decision making. It means developing actual AI fluency among your lawyers instead of buying expensive legal tech middleware. It means building recruiting and training systems that reduce key person risk.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that the transformation happening in legal services doesn’t require you to sell out. It requires you to level up.

And if you are looking to exit it is best to build your buyer by developing younger lawyers.

Build or Be Erased

The lawyers who will thrive in the PE era aren’t those positioning for acquisition. They’re the ones building firms that can compete against PE-backed platforms on efficiency, client experience, and innovation.

Your competitive advantage doesn’t come from hoping PE will value your decades of grinding. It comes from using those decades of experience to build something genuinely difficult to replicate—not through your phone number or domain rating, but through relationships, expertise and execution.

PE firms are coming. But they’re not coming to make you rich. They’re coming to take your market share, with or without buying your firm. The question for most isn’t whether you can sell to them. It’s whether you can build something strong enough to compete against them.

The answer determines whether you control your own destiny or watch it get erased by someone with deeper pockets and a better playbook.

Meanwhile, their associates are quietly undermining every AI initiative they roll out.

The data tells a story that most managing partners don’t want to hear. According to Pew Research Center’s September 2025 study, 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about increased AI use in daily life. That number has jumped from 37% in 2021. More damning: 57% of Americans view AI’s societal risks as high, and when asked to explain why, the most common concern was about AI weakening human skills and connections.

Your team isn’t exempt from these fears. They’re lawyers, yes. But they’re also people reading the same headlines, absorbing the same anxieties, and wondering if they’re training their replacements.

And here’s what they won’t tell you directly: they don’t trust you to handle this well.

The Pew study found that 60% of Americans want more control over how AI is used in their lives. Your associates want that control too. But instead of giving it to them, most firms deploy AI like they’re rolling out new timekeeping software. A vendor presentation. A training video. An expectation that everyone will simply adapt.

Then firms act surprised when adoption rates crater and quality doesn’t improve. As law firm consultants we see this again and again. And the result is predictable, a lot of frustration at a high cost.

The Sabotage Is Quiet But Devastating

When people feel threatened, they don’t usually quit. They resist. In law firms, that resistance looks professional. It’s an associate who “forgets” to use the AI tool on the next draft. It’s a partner who insists the technology “isn’t quite ready” for client work. It’s an entire practice group that nods along in the training session, then returns to their old workflows the moment the door closes.

You can’t see this sabotage in your dashboards. Usage metrics might look acceptable. But the real measure is impact: Is your work product better? Are your associates more efficient? Are clients seeing value?

Usually, the answer is no. Not because the tools don’t work. But because half your team is actively avoiding them, and the other half is using them wrong because they were never properly brought along.

The Pew data reveals another critical insight: 53% of Americans lack confidence in their ability to detect AI-generated content versus human-created work. Your team shares this uncertainty. They don’t know how to quality control AI output. They don’t trust their judgment about when to use it and when to avoid it. And rather than admit that uncertainty, they simply revert to what they know.

This is a leadership failure, not a technology failure.

Why Traditional Rollouts Don’t Work

Most law firm AI implementations follow a corporate playbook designed for software that doesn’t threaten anyone’s identity or job security. You can roll out a new case management system with a vendor demo and a help desk. Nobody fears that Clio will make them obsolete.

AI is different. The Pew study found that 53% of Americans believe AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively. Among adults under 30, that number jumps to 61%. Your younger associates, the ones you’re counting on to lead AI adoption, are the most skeptical about whether this technology will make them better professionals or just replaceable ones.

When you bring in a vendor for an hour-long demo, you’re not addressing these fears. You’re confirming them. You’re signaling that AI is a product you bought, not a capability you’re building together. You’re showing that you care more about the deployment timeline than about your team’s legitimate concerns.

And your team reads that signal loud and clear.

The Opportunity: Leadership That Actually Leads

Here’s what works: meeting people where they are, not where you want them to be.

That means acknowledging fear instead of dismissing it. Yes, AI will change legal practice. Yes, some work that associates do today will be automated. But the lawyers who learn to work effectively with AI won’t be replaced by it. They’ll be empowered by it. That message only lands if you’re willing to have honest conversations about what’s actually at stake.

It means investing time in individual relationships, not just group training sessions. The partner who sits with an associate and shows them how AI helped draft a motion, then works through the quality control process together, builds trust. The managing partner who admits they’re also figuring this out creates psychological safety. The practice group leader who asks for feedback and actually implements changes based on that feedback demonstrates respect.

This is hand-to-hand combat work. It doesn’t scale easily. It can’t be outsourced to a vendor. It requires your senior lawyers to model AI adoption themselves, transparently, including their mistakes and uncertainties.

It also means giving people control. The Pew study found that 76% of Americans say it’s extremely or very important to be able to tell if content was made by AI or humans. Your team needs that same transparency and control. Let them choose which tools work for their workflow. Let them experiment without penalty. Let them build AI fluency at their own pace while maintaining minimum standards for client work.

What This Actually Looks Like

Start with volunteers, not mandates. Find the associates who are curious about AI and work with them to develop best practices. Let them become internal champions who can speak credibly to their peers about both benefits and limitations.

Create space for honest feedback. Your team needs to be able to say “this tool isn’t working for this task” without fear of being seen as resistant to change. Some AI applications will fail. Your culture needs to support learning from those failures rather than hiding them.

Invest in depth, not breadth. It’s better to have one practice group using AI effectively than to have superficial adoption across the firm. Go deep with early adopters. Document what works. Build institutional knowledge. Then expand based on proven success, not vendor promises.

Most importantly, tie AI adoption to your firm’s mission of serving clients better. The Pew data shows that Americans are more open to AI in analytical tasks where clear value exists: 74% support AI for weather forecasting, 70% for detecting financial crimes, 66% for developing new medicines.

Your team will embrace AI when they see it making their client work better, not just faster. Show them how AI helps them spot issues they might have missed. How it lets them spend more time on strategy and less on document review. How it helps them serve clients who previously couldn’t afford the firm’s services.

This Is Where the Profession Splits

Some firms will treat AI as a technology problem. They’ll buy the best tools, schedule the training, and wonder why results disappoint. They’ll blame their people for being resistant to change.

Other firms will recognize this as a leadership challenge. They’ll invest in building AI-fluent teams through relationships, trust, and genuine empowerment. They’ll move slower at first but build capabilities that compound over time.

The Pew study shows that public concern about AI is growing, not shrinking. Your team’s anxiety isn’t going away. The question is whether you’ll lead them through it or simply expect them to get over it.

The tools matter. But the tools are easy. You can buy Claude or ChatGPT or Harvey tomorrow. Building a team that trusts you enough to fundamentally change how they practice law? That’s the hard part. That’s the leadership part.

And that’s where the actual opportunity lies.

It happened in medicine. It happened in dentistry. It happened in accounting. Now it’s happening in law.

Last week, Dudley DeBosier, a Louisiana personal injury firm, finalized a private equity deal with Uplift Investors. The structure uses a Managed Service Organization to sidestep professional ethics rules that prohibit non-lawyer ownership of law firms. The MSO houses technology, finance, and back-office functions in a separate entity that private equity can own. The law firm remains “100 percent owned by attorneys” while paying fees to the MSO that make the arrangement lucrative for investors.

This is not an isolated deal. The Financial Times reports that McDermott Will & Emery, one of the 20 largest law firms by global revenue, and white-collar defense firm Cohen & Gresser are considering similar structures. A Texas ruling last year gave MSOs a regulatory blessing if they follow certain guidelines. The floodgates are opening.

Make no mistake about it the goal of private equity is to extract as much value as possible and then sell within 5 years.

If you’re a lawyer who thinks this won’t affect your practice area, you’re wrong.

The Consolidation Machine

Personal injury is just the entry point. Uplift’s managing partner Will Hausberg explained the logic: contingency fee practices create alignment between efficiency and profit. When you get paid based on outcomes rather than hours, making the work faster increases margins.

But don’t mistake this for a PI-only phenomenon. The same math applies to any practice area where technology can reduce labor costs or where scale creates purchasing power.

Big Law is already exploring these structures. Family law firms handle enough volume to attract consolidators. Immigration practices process standardized applications. Social Security disability cases follow predictable patterns. Bankruptcy mills already operate at scale. Estate planning can be systematized. Any practice area with sufficient volume and some degree of standardization becomes a target.

The only practices safe from private equity are those too small and too niche to be worth the effort. If you’re the only lawyer in three counties who handles a specific type of agricultural dispute, you’re probably fine. Everyone else should be paying attention.

AI Makes This Worse

The convergence of private equity capital and artificial intelligence creates a particularly dangerous combination for independent practitioners.

Private equity needs operational leverage to generate returns. AI provides exactly that. When document review that used to require associates can be handled by software, when client intake can be automated, when research can be accelerated by orders of magnitude, the firms with capital to deploy these tools gain structural advantages.

A PE-backed network of firms can invest millions in custom AI systems. They can negotiate enterprise agreements with technology vendors. They can hire technical talent to build proprietary tools. They can spread these costs across dozens of practices while independent lawyers struggle to keep up with off-the-shelf solutions.

This isn’t speculation. It’s the stated strategy. Hausberg told the Financial Times that Uplift aims to “partner with multiple top-tier firms, bring them into the network and let everyone benefit from sharing of best practices.” Those best practices will be technology-enabled and capital-intensive.

The independent practitioner using basic case management software will compete against networked firms deploying custom AI tools built with millions in investment. That’s not a fair fight.

Your Three Options

If you’re a lawyer in a practice area that could attract private equity interest, you have three strategic paths forward.

Option One: Sell Before It’s Too Late

The roll-up strategy only works if there are practices to acquire. Early sellers get better valuations than late sellers. If you’re approaching retirement or simply want to capitalize on what you’ve built, the window for favorable exits is open now.

This isn’t cynical advice. It’s practical. The partners who sold their medical practices to private equity in 2015 did better than those who sold in 2020. First movers in any consolidation wave capture premium valuations.

Option Two: Build What They Can’t Buy

Private equity acquires operational infrastructure, client lists, and revenue streams. What they cannot acquire is genuine community presence and personal relationships. Build brand in the truest sense of the word: that you are the name people in your community think of when they have a specific kind of legal problem.

The doctors who thrived despite hospital consolidation are those whose patients followed them regardless of which system they worked for. The accountants who maintained independence are those whose clients stayed loyal through transitions.

For lawyers, this means building authentic connections in specific communities. Not marketing. Not advertising. Actual presence. Being the lawyer that people in a particular industry, neighborhood, or community know personally and trust implicitly. Of course, advertising can supplement and accelerate those connections through top of mind awareness. But be strategic about it.

This path requires investment in relationships that don’t scale. It means showing up at events, serving on boards, and building a reputation over years. It’s harder than operational efficiency, which is precisely why private equity can’t replicate it.

Option Three: Specialize Until You’re Invisible

Consolidators target practices with volume. They need enough cases flowing through to justify the infrastructure investment. If your practice is specialized enough that the volume isn’t there, you fall below their radar.

This means going deeper rather than broader. Instead of general personal injury, you handle only a specific type of medical device case. Instead of general family law, you focus exclusively on high-net-worth divorces in a particular jurisdiction. Instead of broad corporate work, you become the definitive expert in a narrow regulatory niche.

Specialization creates defensible positions. The more specific your expertise, the harder you are to replace with scale.

The Clock Is Running

The Dudley DeBosier deal signals acceleration. Legal services have been the last major professional sector without significant private equity penetration. That’s changing quickly.

Professional ethics rules were supposed to protect the independence of legal advice by ensuring lawyers owned their firms. The MSO structure demonstrates that determined capital will find workarounds. Expecting regulators to save you from competition is not a strategy.

The lawyers who will thrive in this environment are those who recognize the shift now and respond strategically. Whether you choose to sell, differentiate, or specialize, the worst option is pretending this won’t affect you.

Medicine learned this lesson. Dentistry learned it. Accounting learned it.

It’s legal’s turn in the barrel. What are you going to do about it?

This is not a coincidence. This is a convergence. And lawyers who fail to recognize it risk becoming irrelevant to the justice system they claim to serve.

The Problem: Power Consolidating Against Access

Start with Harvey, the legal AI company that announced in December 2025 it had raised $160 million at an $8 billion valuation. The company has now secured about $760 million in 2025 alone, more than doubling its valuation since February. About half of the Am Law 100 use its software. Annual recurring revenue reportedly exceeds $150 million, triple what it was at the beginning of the year.

Harvey’s co-founder Winston Weinberg said something revealing to the New York Times: “This is an industry that technology has not penetrated that much.” He’s right. And that penetration is happening in one direction. The biggest law firms serving the most powerful clients are adopting these tools first. Corporate legal departments at companies like Comcast, Bridgewater Associates, and Repsol are already using Harvey’s platform.

Meanwhile, in California, Uber has been pushing ballot initiatives designed to let corporations avoid accountability in court. The playbook is familiar. Spend millions on advertising. Frame corporate immunity as consumer protection. Get voters to strip away their own legal rights without understanding what they’re giving up. These initiatives are coming to your state.

Then there’s ICE. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the agency has embarked on a spending spree, signing contracts worth up to $25 million for surveillance technology: social media monitoring, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, and remote hacking tools. What’s new is not the technology. It’s the target. The federal government now openly says it will use these capabilities against people who oppose ICE’s actions. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said his agency intended to probe anti-ICE protesters and their supporters. “We are going to track the money. We are going to track these ringleaders.”

The Brennan Center reports that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions for tools that gather information from social media platforms, the dark web, and location data databases. A recent press release from ICE claims an “8,000% increase in death threats” against law enforcement, backed by just four examples, none of which clearly constitute death threats.

These three developments share a common thread. Legal AI flowing to those who can afford it. Corporations seeking to avoid courts entirely. Government surveillance chilling the right to protest and petition. The courthouse doors are closing, and they’re closing fastest for people who already struggle to get inside.

The Access Crisis Already Exists

Before you dismiss this as alarmism, consider the baseline. According to Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, in three-quarters of civil cases in state courts, at least one party lacks a lawyer. These are not obscure disputes. They are debt collection actions, evictions, mortgage foreclosures, and family law matters. Approximately 15 million cases a year involve at least one side without counsel.

Professors David and Nora Freeman Engstrom, who co-direct the Rhode Center, describe this as just the tip of the iceberg. Below the visible cases are millions of people with violated rights who never make it to court at all. The person with an uninhabitable apartment who never enforces her right to habitable housing. The person jerked around by an insurance company who gives up. The woman being abused who never gets the restraining order she needs.

Why can’t these people get lawyers? Legal services cost on average $300 an hour. Anyone middle class or below is priced out. The contingency fee system that makes personal injury representation accessible does not apply to housing, debt, or family matters.

The Engstroms note that economic precarity has increased even as poverty rates have remained relatively stable. Most American households cannot weather any significant financial hit. When they get behind on rent or face medical bills they cannot pay, debt collection and eviction follow. These cases overwhelmingly end in default judgments because defendants have no meaningful legal help.

The most numerous type of case in American courts today is consumer credit debt collection. The debt collection industry has learned to leverage technology to assembly-line filings. About 60 percent of these cases are brought by debt buyers who purchase tranches of debt and use automation to generate pleadings. But restrictive rules saying only lawyers can practice law mean that technology is not nearly as available to the individual defendants on the other side.

This is the system into which legal AI is arriving. Not a level playing field, but a tilted one. The question is whether that tilt gets steeper or whether we use this moment to level it.

AI Makes the Disparity Worse Unless We Act

The legal AI market is exploding. Harvey faces competition from fast-growing rivals like Legora, a Swedish startup now valued at $1.8 billion, and established players including Luminance and CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters. Investors see dramatically improved efficiency for white-collar professionals. They’re not wrong about the capability.

But notice who the customers are. Big law firms. Corporate legal departments. The same institutions that already dominate the legal system. David George, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who led Harvey’s funding round, said it plainly: “At some end state a lawyer will be using Harvey or some product like Harvey.”

He might be right about lawyers. But what about the 15 million people in court without lawyers? What about the millions more who never get to court at all? Legal AI could help them too. It could help people understand whether their problem is legal. It could map plain language descriptions to legal claims. It could generate the documents needed to assert rights. The technology is capable of this.

Whether it actually reaches people who need it depends on choices the legal profession makes now. If we maintain rules that only lawyers can practice law, and only in traditional law firm structures, then the benefits of legal AI will flow to those who can already afford lawyers. The access gap will widen. Courts will become even more the province of institutional plaintiffs pursuing individual defendants.

The Engstroms have studied states that relaxed traditional rules to allow new legal service delivery models. In Utah and Arizona, companies can now offer tiered services: a software-based tier at the bottom, a paralegal or paraprofessional tier in the middle, and full lawyer representation at the top. In those states, LegalZoom is using rule relaxation to hire lawyers to supplement document assembly. Immigration services companies can layer in legal services. A company in Utah helps people achieve expungement of criminal records through a user-friendly software platform.

These experiments matter. They show what’s possible when the legal profession stops protecting its monopoly and starts solving problems.

The Fourth Amendment Is a Legal Problem

The ICE surveillance expansion is not just a civil liberties concern. It is an access to justice concern. The Supreme Court held that police must have a warrant to obtain cellphone location records extending over days. But ICE and other agencies take the position that this rule does not apply if they purchase information from data brokers instead of obtaining it directly from communications companies.

This workaround guts Fourth Amendment protection. And it is being deployed against people exercising First Amendment rights. The Brennan Center reports that FBI agents have visited the homes of people who participated in anti-ICE demonstrations, asking who paid for protest signs.

The legal profession has particular responsibility here. We are officers of the court. We have sworn oaths to support the Constitution. When government agencies openly announce plans to use surveillance technology against protesters, we cannot stay silent.

This is not a partisan issue. The tools being developed today will exist for whoever holds power tomorrow. Surveillance infrastructure built to target one group can be turned on any group. Lawyers who believe in the rule of law must insist that it applies to everyone, including people the government dislikes.

What the Legal Profession Must Do

The convergence I’ve described demands a response. Not committee meetings. Not another task force. Action.

First, regulatory reform. The rules that restrict legal services to lawyers practicing in traditional structures were not designed for the public good. As the Engstroms document, the organized bar created the prohibition on corporate practice of law in the 1920s and 30s to crush competition at a time of financial strain. Auto clubs that provided legal services to members were shut down. There was no evidence of consumer harm. People were thrilled with the services. The bar wanted to eliminate rivals.

We should expand the Utah and Arizona experiments nationally. Allow non-lawyer ownership of legal services companies. Allow tiered service delivery. Allow technology companies to provide legal assistance under appropriate supervision. The alternative is that technology flows only to those who can afford lawyers, while everyone else goes without.

Second, court reform. Courts need technology to serve people without lawyers. Filing systems should be accessible. Forms should be understandable. Processes should accommodate people navigating the system alone. The debt collection industry has figured out how to assembly-line cases through courts. Courts should make it equally easy for defendants to respond.

Third, legislation. People facing eviction should have lawyers. People facing debt collection should have lawyers. If we believe the adversary system produces justice, we cannot defend a system where one side always has representation and the other side rarely does. Right to counsel should extend beyond criminal cases.

Fourth, law school reform. Legal education costs too much. Students graduate with debt that makes public interest work economically irrational. If we want lawyers serving underserved communities, we need to reduce the financial burden of becoming a lawyer. Shorter programs, lower tuition, expanded loan forgiveness, and alternative pathways to licensure all deserve serious consideration.

Fifth, engagement on surveillance. Bar associations should take positions on Fourth Amendment erosion. Individual lawyers should speak up. The profession that claims to uphold the rule of law cannot be silent when the rule of law is under assault.

The Risk of Irrelevance

The legal profession has been slow to adapt to technological change. Law firms formed committees to discuss AI while clients adopted it. We debated whether large language models could pass the bar while the tools transformed how work gets done.

But the stakes now are higher than efficiency. The question is whether courts remain accessible to ordinary people, or whether they become private dispute resolution systems for those with resources.

If powerful interests succeed in closing courthouse doors while the legal profession watches, we will have earned our irrelevance. We will be administrators of a system that serves the powerful while telling ourselves we believe in equal justice.

The technology exists to expand access. The regulatory changes are understood. The need is overwhelming. What’s missing is urgency from the profession itself.

Fifteen million cases a year with at least one party lacking representation. Millions more people with violated rights who never get to court. Government surveillance chilling constitutional rights. Corporate initiatives stripping legal protections. Legal AI accelerating the advantages of those who already have them.

This is the convergence. These are the courthouse doors closing.

The question is what lawyers will do about it. No one is coming to save us.
______________

Ryan McKeen is an attorney.

Elon Musk posted seven words on January 5, 2026: “2026 is the year of the Singularity.” I am not a Musk fan. He may not even be right about this year. But like Tesla’s self-driving cars, which skeptics mocked for a decade before they worked, he will be right eventually. And eventually is closer than most lawyers understand. A lot closer.

The Wrong Conversation

The legal industry’s AI conversation remains stuck on the wrong questions. We talk about whether AI can draft a motion. Whether it hallucinates citations. Whether this vendor or that vendor has the better product. These questions matter about as much as asking whether the telegraph operator has good penmanship.

Consider what is actually happening. Nathan Lambert, writing in Interconnects, describes Claude Code with Opus 4.5 as moving software creation from “an artisanal, craftsman activity to a true industrial process.” He compares it to the Gutenberg press. The sewing machine. The camera.

This is not hyperbole from an AI enthusiast. Lambert has used coding agents extensively for months. Something fundamentally changed in the last few weeks. Software is becoming free. Human design, specification, and entrepreneurship are the only limiting factors.

Read that again. Software is becoming free.

Legal services are, at their core, information processing and document production. If software is becoming free, what does that make legal work?

The Signs Are Already Here

The Forbes piece on Musk’s singularity prediction notes that StackOverflow queries have been imploding. Humans are not doing as much coding anymore. The models write poetry, dissertations, ads, policy papers. As the author puts it, “Legions of paralegals and poets pound the pavement, looking in vain for a place to add value.”

This is not a future scenario. This is January 2026.

Dario Amodei has predicted powerful AI could arrive as early as this year. Sam Altman wrote about “The Gentle Singularity.” Masayoshi Son, Eric Schmidt, and others have made similar predictions. The consensus among those building these systems is that something profound is happening now.

Yet walk into most law firms and the conversation remains: Should we allow associates to use ChatGPT? What is our AI policy? Which legal research platform should we license?

We are rearranging deck chairs.

Staying Relevant When Bots Argue With Bots

If the legal profession wants to survive, let alone thrive, we need different conversations entirely.

Imagine a near future where justice is your AI arguing against my AI before a judicial AI. Many lawyers recoil at this scenario. But consider the alternative we have now. The court doors are effectively closed to most Americans. Only well-heeled corporate clients can afford meaningful legal representation. The rest get form responses, overwhelmed legal aid attorneys, or nothing at all.

Would AI-to-AI dispute resolution be worse than the access to justice crisis we have today? For millions of people locked out of the current system, the answer might be no. The profession must decide whether it wants to expand access to justice or protect a business model that serves a shrinking slice of society. That choice determines whether law remains relevant in 2040.

Teaching Judgment Without the Grunt Work

Lawyers in 2035 will not be writing briefs. They will not be drafting contracts. They will not be conducting basic legal research. AI handles these tasks now, imperfectly. It will handle them near-perfectly soon.

But judgment, wisdom, the ability to counsel a client through a crisis, knowing when to fight and when to settle, reading a jury, understanding what justice actually requires in a specific situation: these remain human. For now.

How does a lawyer develop judgment without years of grunt work? The associate model assumed learning through doing. Write a hundred briefs and you understand what makes a good one. Draft a thousand contracts and you develop instincts about risk allocation. If AI writes all the briefs and contracts, how do young lawyers learn?

This is not a theoretical problem. It is an urgent curriculum design challenge for law schools and training directors today. We have perhaps five years to figure it out before an entire generation of lawyers lacks the foundational skills their predecessors built through repetition.

Preventing AI From Becoming a Tool of Oppression

Data is the new moat. Those with access to comprehensive databases, training sets, and computational resources will have advantages that compound over time. If the legal profession becomes a tool where only wealthy clients can access the AI systems that actually work, we have not improved justice. We have created a new form of oppression with a technological sheen.

The profession must advocate for open access to legal information. It must resist the enclosure of legal data into proprietary systems available only to those who can pay. It must build and support tools that democratize legal capability rather than concentrate it.

The Timeline Is Not What You Think

Lambert ends his piece with a prediction: “Claude with a 100X context window and 100X the speed will be AGI. By the end of 2026 we definitely could get the first 10X of both.”

Whether you believe that timeline or not, the direction is clear. The pace is accelerating. The legal profession’s response cannot be incremental policy adjustments and committee deliberations.

Build or Be Built Over

Law firms need to restructure around AI capabilities, not treat AI as an efficiency add-on. Law schools need to reimagine legal education entirely. Bar associations need to rethink what it means to be competent in an AI-enabled world. Courts need to plan for a future where most litigants arrive with AI assistance.

The ground is shifting. The question is not whether to engage with AI. The question is whether the legal profession will shape the future or be shaped by it.

Those who understand this are already adapting. Those who do not will wake up in 2030 wondering what happened.

The time for wondering was yesterday. Today is for building.

____________________
Ryan McKeen is an attorney, consultant at Best Era, LLC, and an adjunct professor of law on legal entrepreneurship.

A moat, in business terms, is what keeps competitors from taking your market share. Warren Buffett popularized the concept. Think of a castle surrounded by water. The wider and deeper the moat, the harder it is for enemies to breach the walls. In business, moats take many forms: brand recognition, regulatory barriers, network effects, proprietary technology, switching costs.

For decades, lawyers believed their moat was expertise. Complex legal knowledge combined with the requirement of bar admission created what seemed like an impenetrable barrier to entry. That moat is drying up.

Private equity has been circling the legal industry for years, watching from a distance, probing for weaknesses. In 2025, they found them. Over $3.2 billion flowed into legal technology companies. Legora raised $230 million across two rounds. Eudia emerged with $105 million and an explicit mandate to acquire. Harvey, Clio, and dozens of others pulled in funding at valuations that have some observers muttering about bubbles.

These are not random investments. This is a coordinated land grab.

The Kraft Playbook

To understand what is happening, look at what Bob Kraft did before he became the owner of the New England Patriots. Kraft did not start by buying the team. He started by buying the parking lots around Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Then he bought the stadium’s operating lease. Then the stadium itself.

By the time the previous owner wanted to move the team to St. Louis, Kraft controlled everything the franchise needed to operate. You cannot run an NFL team in suburban New England without parking. The Patriots were trapped. Kraft bought the team for $172 million in 1994. It is now worth over $7 billion.

Private equity is running the same playbook on law firms.

They are buying the marketing companies that generate leads. They are buying the technology platforms that handle research, drafting, and document review. They are buying the practice management software that runs daily operations. They are buying the finance companies that provide working capital.

These investments look like bets on legal technology. They are actually bets on legal infrastructure. When you control the tools lawyers depend on to practice, you control the economics of practice. The rent is going up.

The Arizona Opening

In 2020, Arizona eliminated its prohibition on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. The state created a new category called Alternative Business Structures, allowing outside investment in legal services. Utah followed with a regulatory sandbox. Other states are watching.

The official rationale was access to justice. The practical effect was opening the door to private equity. Once investors can own law firms directly, the infrastructure play becomes a full acquisition strategy. Buy the parking lots, then buy the stadium, then buy the team.

Even if other states do not follow Arizona’s lead, it may not matter. When artificial intelligence handles research, drafting, and increasingly complex legal analysis, the question of who owns the law firm becomes less relevant than who owns the AI. The technology is becoming the primary delivery mechanism for legal services. Controlling the technology means controlling the delivery.

The Healthcare Precedent

If you want to see where this leads, look at healthcare.

Harvard researchers have documented what happens when private equity acquires hospitals. A 2023 study found Medicare patients at private equity-owned hospitals experienced a 25 percent increase in hospital-acquired complications. Bloodstream infections from central lines rose 38 percent. Surgical site infections doubled. Falls stopped declining even as they decreased at other hospitals.

The pattern is consistent. Private equity acquires a healthcare facility. They cut staff to reduce costs. They increase charges to boost revenue. They load debt onto the acquired entity. They extract dividends and management fees. When the math stops working, they file for bankruptcy and move on.

Steward Health Care owned more than 30 hospitals across eight states. In 2024, the company collapsed. Patients faced understaffed emergency rooms, cancelled surgeries, and facilities so neglected that stairwells were infested with bats. Two hospitals closed entirely. Thousands of patients and hundreds of staff were left scrambling.

The CEO enjoyed a $40 million yacht while patients collapsed waiting for care in his emergency departments.

This is not an anomaly. This is the model. Private equity-owned hospitals earned 27 percent more income after acquisition, according to Harvard researchers. They achieved this by increasing charges, seeing fewer Medicare patients, and cutting the human labor that makes care possible.

The researchers were blunt about the cause: staffing cuts driven by debt loads and short-term profitability expectations. Health care remains human-labor intensive. Cutting staff has consequences for quality and outcomes.

Law is also human-labor intensive. The work requires judgment, discretion, and the kind of trust that develops between professionals and clients over time. What happens when the same financial engineering comes to legal services?

The Core Contradiction

Harvard health policy professor Meredith Rosenthal identified what she called the core contradiction in corporate healthcare: the public expects these companies to prioritize public interest over profits, but that is not what they are built to do.

The same contradiction exists in corporate law.

Lawyers have always made money from their work. Physicians were historically small businesspeople too. But there is a difference between a sole proprietor serving clients and a mega-corporation that believes its only purpose is return on equity to shareholders.

When you hold that belief up against a lawyer’s obligation that clients come first, there is conflict. American society has never sufficiently grappled with this tension.

The legal profession has ethical rules precisely because lawyers occupy positions of trust. Clients share information they would never share with anyone else. They rely on lawyers to tell them hard truths. They depend on lawyers to put their interests first even when doing so is inconvenient or unprofitable.

Private equity does not work that way. The model is to maximize returns as quickly as possible, extract value, and exit within three to seven years. Client outcomes are relevant only to the extent they affect the financial model.

The Moat That Matters

This is where the Rules of Professional Conduct become relevant.

Every state bar requires lawyers to follow ethical rules. These rules are not suggestions. They are enforceable obligations that can result in discipline, suspension, or disbarment. Among other things, they require lawyers to exercise independent professional judgment on behalf of clients, to keep client information confidential, to avoid conflicts of interest, and to charge reasonable fees.

Rule 1.7 requires loyalty. Rule 1.6 requires confidentiality. Rule 2.1 requires candor. Rule 5.4, in most states, prohibits sharing fees with non-lawyers and prevents non-lawyer ownership of law firms.

These rules exist because the legal profession learned, over centuries, that certain practices destroy the trust on which effective representation depends. They are not arbitrary barriers to innovation. They are the accumulated wisdom of a profession that has seen what happens when lawyers prioritize their own interests over their clients.

Private equity will argue these rules are outdated. They will claim technology changes everything. They will point to access to justice and claim that loosening ethical constraints will make legal services more affordable.

Do not believe them.

The same arguments were made about healthcare. Private equity promised capital, business acumen, and efficiency. What they delivered was higher prices, worse outcomes, and hospital closures in communities that could least afford to lose them.

The Path Forward

Law firms face a choice. They can chase the private equity model, treating legal services as a commodity to be optimized for extraction. Or they can double down on what makes the profession valuable.

The firms that will thrive are those that embrace legal as a profession and not just a business. They will build trust in their communities. They will exercise independent judgment even when it costs them clients. They will tell people what they do not want to hear.

This is not romantic nostalgia. It is strategy.

When AI handles research and drafting, what remains is judgment. When clients can access basic legal information through technology platforms, what they pay for is wisdom. When everyone has access to the same tools, differentiation comes from how you use them.

The lawyers who act as trusted advisors, who know their clients and their communities, who put client interests first as a matter of conviction rather than marketing, will have something private equity cannot replicate. They will have relationships built on demonstrated integrity over time.

Private equity can buy technology platforms. They can buy marketing companies. They can buy the infrastructure that lawyers use to practice. What they cannot buy is the trust that clients place in lawyers who have earned it.

The Stakes

Make no mistake about what is at stake.

If private equity succeeds in doing to law what it did to healthcare, the consequences will extend far beyond law firms. The legal system depends on lawyers who act as honest brokers, who facilitate transactions in good faith, who represent clients zealously within the bounds of the law.

When lawyers become instruments of financial extraction, the entire system suffers. Contracts become less reliable. Disputes become harder to resolve. The trust that lubricates commercial and personal transactions erodes.

The Rules of Professional Conduct are not just a moat for individual lawyers. They are a moat for the rule of law itself.

Act With Integrity

The advice for lawyers is simple to state and difficult to execute.

Act with integrity. Not because it is required, though it is. Not because it is good marketing, though it can be. Act with integrity because it is the only sustainable competitive advantage in a world where private equity is buying everything else.

Engage with your community. Know your clients as people, not as revenue sources. Build the kind of relationships that cannot be replicated by an algorithm or acquired by a private equity fund.

The rent is going up. The parking lots are being purchased. The infrastructure of legal practice is passing into the hands of investors who have no obligation to put clients first.

Your ethics are all you have left. They may be enough.

_______________

Ryan McKeen is an attorney, a law firm consultant, and an adjunct professor of law.

To paraphrase Noah Kahan “it’s the season of the quits.” The holidays end. People reassess. Resignations land on desks. Partners who thought everything was fine discover their best associate is leaving. Associates who thought they’d finally get recognized discover they’re still invisible.

The legal profession handles this poorly because lawyers operate on a flawed assumption: that how you treat people determines how they treat you.

It doesn’t.

This is one of the hardest lessons in practice. It contradicts everything we learned about fairness and reciprocity. It feels wrong. But understanding it will make you a better leader, a better employee, and a better human.

The Bonus Trap

Every December, law firm owners write big checks. They’re not just compensating performance. They’re buying something. They expect the money to translate into commitment for the next year.

It won’t.

A bonus is payment for work already done. That’s it. The moment it hits the bank account, it becomes the employee’s money. It carries no future obligation. It creates no loyalty. It doesn’t lock anyone in.

Firm owners who think otherwise set themselves up for betrayal that isn’t actually betrayal at all. When the associate who got a $50,000 bonus announces in February that she’s leaving for another firm, the owner feels cheated. But no cheating occurred. The bonus wasn’t a deposit. It wasn’t a contract. It was compensation.

Give bonuses because people earned them. Give bonuses because you want to run a firm that rewards good work. Give bonuses because it’s the right thing to do. But don’t give them expecting to purchase next year’s loyalty. That transaction doesn’t exist.

The Above and Beyond Trap

Employees fall into the same thinking from the other direction.

Associates bill impossible hours. They sacrifice weekends. They miss their kids’ events. They believe this dedication is building something. Surely the partners notice. Surely this investment will pay off.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The partner might be dealing with a client who won’t pay. The firm might be navigating a cash flow crisis. The compensation committee might be constrained by factors the associate knows nothing about. Going above and beyond doesn’t create an entitlement to recognition because the firm’s ability to recognize effort depends on variables completely disconnected from individual performance.

This isn’t fair. Associates who work themselves ragged deserve acknowledgment. Their feelings of frustration are valid. But validity and outcome are different things. Feeling you deserve something doesn’t mean you’ll get it.

The Reciprocity Illusion

We want the world to work on a simple exchange. Be good and good comes back. Treat people well and they treat you well. Invest in relationships and the relationships invest in you.

Sometimes this happens. Often it doesn’t.

The associate you mentored for five years might leave the moment a competitor offers more money. The partner you covered for during his medical leave might vote against your equity stake. The client you saved from disaster might take their next matter to someone cheaper.

These aren’t moral failures. They’re humans being human. People make decisions based on their own circumstances, their own needs, their own calculations. Your treatment of them is one factor among many. Sometimes it’s not even the most important factor.

This is hard for lawyers because we’re trained in precedent. We believe past patterns predict future outcomes. We build cases on the principle that what happened before tells us what will happen next. But relationships don’t work like case law. People are not bound by their prior behavior toward you.

What Actually Works

Stop treating generosity as investment. Start treating it as identity.

Be kind because kindness is how you want to live. Be generous because generosity reflects your values. Do excellent work because excellence matters to you. Help people because helping people is good.

Then let go.

Detach from outcomes you can’t control. Your firm gave out bonuses and people still left. That’s fine. The bonuses were right to give. Your associate worked overtime and didn’t get promoted. That’s painful. The work was still worth doing.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s freedom. When you stop expecting reciprocity, you stop feeling cheated when it doesn’t come. You stop keeping score. You stop building resentment. You stop being surprised by human nature.

The lawyer who understands this leads differently. She promotes people who deserve it without expecting gratitude. She pays fairly without expecting loyalty. She builds culture because culture matters, not because it guarantees retention.

The associate who understands this works differently. He does excellent work because excellence is the standard he holds for himself. He advocates for his compensation but doesn’t tie his self-worth to whether the firm agrees. He stays because the role serves him and leaves when it doesn’t, without guilt.

The January Reality

People will quit this month. Some departures will feel like betrayals. They’re not. They’re people pursuing their own interests, just like you pursue yours.

Relationships will end. Bridges will burn. Former colleagues will become competitors. Partners will feel abandoned. Associates will feel exploited. Both feelings will be genuine. Neither will tell the whole story.

Here’s what you control: your integrity, your effort, your generosity, your standards.

Here’s what you don’t control: how anyone responds to those things.

Work hard. Be generous. Have integrity. Expect nothing.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity. And clarity is the only thing that gets you through January.

___________
I’m Ryan McKeen. I’m an attorney, law firm consultant, and adjunct professor of legal entrepreneurship.

The AI revolution in law is no longer coming. It arrived. The debate about whether artificial intelligence will transform legal practice has become as relevant as arguing about whether email will catch on.

What remains uncertain is not the technology. The technology works. What remains uncertain is us.

2026 will be defined by fear, loss, growth, and opportunity. All happening simultaneously. All happening fast. The firms and lawyers who thrive will not be those with the best AI tools. They will be those who understand what matters when the ground shifts beneath their feet.

Here are ten things that actually matter this year.

1. Show Your Face

When everything becomes digital, presence becomes premium. Get out of your office. Go to where your clients gather. Attend the conferences you have been skipping. Have the lunches you have been postponing.

Community is not a nice-to-have. It is infrastructure. The lawyers who maintain and build real relationships will weather this storm. The ones hiding behind screens will find themselves increasingly replaceable by better screens.

Listen more than you talk. Share what you are learning. Connect people who should know each other. This is the work that cannot be automated.

2. Expand Access to Justice or Admit We Never Cared

Here is the uncomfortable truth about legal AI: if only large corporations and powerful firms have access to the best tools, we have not achieved innovation. We have achieved oppression with better marketing.

Courts, firms, bar associations, and society must ask the hard question: How do we use this moment to expand the arc of justice rather than narrow it?

The technology exists to provide meaningful legal help to people who have never been able to afford it. If we fail to deploy it for that purpose, we will have revealed our profession’s true priorities. And they are not pretty.

3. Read Fiction, Not Business Books

The biggest gains in 2026 will not come from incremental improvements. They will not come from reading another book about productivity or leadership frameworks.

They will come from imagination.

The lawyers and firms willing to completely reimagine dispute resolution, client service, and firm structure will capture disproportionate value. Business books teach you to optimize what exists. Fiction teaches you to envision what could exist.

The legal profession needs fewer productivity hacks and more wild ideas about what law could become.

4. Ethics Are Your Competitive Advantage

Private equity and big tech are flooding into legal services. They care about one thing: money.

The legal profession must be different to survive. Our rules of professional conduct are not bureaucratic obstacles. They are the only thing differentiating us from the bots and the money people.

In an age where anyone can generate legal-sounding documents, moral clarity becomes essential. Clients will pay for judgment they can trust. They will pay for someone bound by duties that transcend the transaction.

Honor those rules. They are your moat.

5. AI Education Is Not Optional

Lawyers, law schools, and courts must invest heavily in AI education. Not next year. Now.

Stop treating AI as a tool to be tolerated. It is the future of legal work. Those who understand and master it will have extraordinary opportunities. Those who resist will find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

This means real training. Hands-on experience. Experimentation with actual client problems. The time for watching webinars and feeling informed is over.

6. Teach Judgment Like Your Survival Depends On It

Here is what AI cannot do: exercise professional judgment.

Here is what most law firms have no idea how to teach: professional judgment.

Traditional models relied on grunt work and osmosis. Junior lawyers reviewed documents for years and somehow absorbed wisdom through proximity to partners. That model was never ideal. It is now completely incompatible with the future.

Firms that figure out how to explicitly teach judgment will thrive. The others will find themselves with sophisticated AI tools and no one who knows how to use them wisely.

7. Kill Your Cash Cows Before Someone Else Does

The billable hour model is dying. The traditional partnership pyramid is dying. Denying this is like denying gravity.

Smart firms will cannibalize their own profitable practices before competitors do. They will embrace alternative fee arrangements. They will flatten hierarchies. They will build business models that make sense when AI handles routine work.

The firms clinging to dying models will share the fate of every industry that prioritized short-term revenue over long-term survival.

8. Solo and Small Firm Work Has Never Been More Attractive

The barriers to starting a law practice have collapsed. The technology available to a solo practitioner today would have required a team of associates and paralegals ten years ago.

You do not need an army to compete. You do not need fancy office space. You do not need to wait for partner permission to serve clients the way you believe they should be served.

The money can be better too. When you are not subsidizing layers of partnership overhead, more of what clients pay actually reaches you.

If you have been thinking about making the leap, the conditions have never been more favorable.

9. Lead With Compassion

Nothing is going to prepare us for the disruption ahead. People will lose jobs. Careers will become obsolete faster than anyone can retrain. The human toll will be significant.

Lawyer assistance programs need more support, not less. Mentorship matters more, not less. Helping colleagues navigate career transitions is not charity. It is enlightened self-interest.

The profession that takes care of its own will be stronger than the one that abandons people to market forces.

10. Human Matters More Than Ever

In an age of instant everything, where cash rules everything around us, the foundational idea of law becomes more precious, not less.

The idea that anyone can go before a neutral decision-maker. The idea that power and wealth do not determine outcomes. The idea that we are equal in the eyes of the law.

As the rich and powerful become more rich and powerful, as technology amplifies existing advantages, law must be a conservative force for positive change. Not conservative in the political sense. Conservative in the sense of conserving what matters about human dignity and equal treatment.

Technology is not the enemy of this vision. But technology without values will accelerate everything wrong with our system.

The choice is ours. 2026 is here. Let’s go!

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Low-income Americans don’t get any or enough legal help for 92% of their substantial civil legal problems. Ninety-two percent. If any other essential service failed at that rate, we’d call it a catastrophe. When it’s legal services for poor people, we call it Tuesday.

Here’s what that failure looks like in practice. Three out of four low-income households experienced at least one civil legal problem last year. These aren’t abstract legal questions. They’re evictions. Wage theft. Custody disputes. Healthcare access. The fundamental building blocks of a stable life.

And when these problems show up, half of all requests for help from legal aid organizations get turned away. Not because the cases lack merit. Because the resources don’t exist.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and the PayPal mafia are running the AI show. They’re building systems that will reshape every industry, accumulating wealth and influence at a pace that would make robber barons blush. The government watches from the sidelines, occasionally making noises about regulation while doing nothing meaningful to direct these tools toward public benefit.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

The System Works Exactly as Designed

The justice gap isn’t an accident of underfunding or competing priorities. It’s a structural choice that reinforces existing power dynamics.

Think about who benefits when poor people can’t access courts. Landlords who violate housing codes. Employers who steal wages. Debt collectors who pursue invalid claims. The entire ecosystem of predatory actors that feeds on people without resources to fight back.

The legal profession participates in this system. We staff the collection firms. We represent the corporate defendants who bury individual plaintiffs in discovery. We charge rates that make legal services impossible for anyone outside the top income brackets.

Then we wonder why Americans hate lawyers and have no faith in the justice system. The answer is obvious. They have no meaningful access to either.

The data confirms what anyone paying attention already knows. Higher-income Americans are more likely to seek legal help when problems arise. They’re more confident they can find and afford a lawyer. They’re more likely to believe the civil legal system will protect their rights.

Poor people know better. Only 39% of low-income Americans believe they can use the legal system to protect and enforce their rights. They’ve learned through experience that the courts aren’t for them.

AI Could Change Everything

Here’s what makes this moment so infuriating. We finally have tools that could democratize legal services in ways that weren’t possible five years ago.

AI systems can now draft basic legal documents. They can answer straightforward legal questions. They can help people understand their rights and navigate court procedures. They can triage cases and identify which ones need human attention versus which ones follow predictable patterns.

None of this requires billion-dollar legal tech valuations or exclusive enterprise contracts. The underlying technology is increasingly accessible. What’s missing is the will to deploy it for public benefit.

Courts could be building AI-assisted systems for self-represented litigants. They could be creating tools that help people file motions, respond to complaints, and understand what happens next in their cases. They could be expanding access to fact-finders through online dispute resolution and streamlined adjudication processes.

AI assisted dispute resolution needs to happen….and now.

Instead, the legal profession treats AI like a threat to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized. Bar associations worry about unauthorized practice of law while millions of people go without any legal help at all.

The priorities are backwards. We’re protecting a monopoly that serves a shrinking percentage of the population while the majority gets nothing.

What the Legal Profession Should Be Demanding

If lawyers actually cared about access to justice, here’s what we’d be fighting for.

Courts need to adopt AI-assisted tools that help self-represented litigants navigate basic procedures. This isn’t about replacing lawyers. It’s about helping people who can’t afford lawyers and would otherwise get nothing.

Dispute resolution needs to become faster and cheaper. That means online processes, streamlined procedures, and expanded use of administrative tribunals for routine matters. The full trial experience should be reserved for cases that actually require it.

Legal aid funding needs to increase dramatically. But even with more funding, we’ll never hire enough lawyers to close a 92% gap. We need to pair increased funding with technology that multiplies the impact of every dollar spent.

Bar associations need to stop treating access to justice as a pro bono problem that individual lawyers should solve in their spare time. It’s a structural failure that requires structural solutions.

The Excuses Need to Stop

I’ve heard every excuse for why we can’t do better. Courts don’t have the budget. Technology isn’t ready. We need to protect people from bad legal advice. The rules of professional conduct don’t allow it.

Every one of these excuses accepts the status quo as inevitable. They treat the current system as the only possible system, when in fact it’s a choice we make every day.

The technology is ready. AI tools are drafting contracts, conducting research, and handling routine legal tasks across the corporate world right now. The question isn’t capability. It’s deployment priorities.

The budget objections ignore the cost of the current system. Every eviction that could have been prevented. Every wage claim that goes uncollected. Every custody dispute that escalates because neither party understood their rights. We’re already paying for the justice gap. We’re just paying in human suffering rather than dollars.

The professional responsibility concerns have it backwards. The current rules protect a system where 92% of low-income legal problems go unaddressed. That’s not protecting the public. That’s protecting a cartel.

Fifty million Americans live in households below 125% of the poverty threshold. Fifteen million of them are children. Nearly eight million are seniors. They deserve a legal system that works for them. They deserve access to courts that can resolve disputes fairly and efficiently. They deserve lawyers who fight for structural change rather than accepting structural failure.

The opportunity has never been greater. The need has never been more urgent. The excuses need to stop now.

We must demand better if we are to have any future at all.

This trend will accelerate in 2026. Every SaaS tool you use, every marketing channel you depend on, every vendor relationship you have cultivated is now a potential acquisition target. The platforms you built your practice on are being bought, bundled, and repriced. Your costs will rise. Your differentiation will shrink.

At the same time, AI is advancing in ways that level the playing field of production. The associate who could once bill 200 hours researching a complex question now competes with a solo practitioner who gets the same answer in 20 minutes. The large firm that once won on volume and manpower now faces boutiques that match their output at a fraction of the cost.

Consumer expectations are shifting just as fast. Clients who once accepted weeks of waiting now expect responses in hours. They have experienced instant service in every other area of their lives. They wonder why law remains the exception.

Being large is no longer safe. Being established is no longer enough. The walls that protected traditional firms are crumbling.

What Medieval Builders Understood

When castle architects in the 12th century designed fortifications, they faced a problem similar to what law firms face today. Attackers were getting better. Siege technology was advancing. Walls that once held were now being breached.

Their solution was the moat.

A moat does not win battles. It does not attack enemies. It simply makes the castle harder to take. It creates distance between the fortification and those who would storm it. It forces attackers to solve a problem before they can even begin their assault.

The firms that will thrive in 2026 will build moats. Not through size or spending or diversification. Through depth.

The Three Moats That Matter

The first moat is vision.

Most law firms cannot answer a simple question: Why do you exist?

They exist because the partners wanted to make money. They exist because someone left another firm. They exist by accident of history rather than intentional design.

A clear vision creates a moat because it guides every decision. It tells you which clients to pursue and which to decline. It tells you which services to develop and which to abandon. It tells you who to hire and who does not fit.

When the winds of change blow, firms without vision scatter. They chase every trend. They panic at every disruption. They have no foundation to stand on.

Firms with vision dig in. They know what they are building. They know why it matters. They can weather storms because they know where they are going.

The second moat is community.

The firms that will win are not building customer bases. They are building communities.

A customer buys a service and leaves. A community member stays. They refer others. They provide feedback. They become invested in the firm’s success because the firm is invested in theirs.

Community is hard to build. It requires genuine care for the people you serve. It requires listening more than selling. It requires showing up consistently even when there is no immediate payoff.

This is exactly why it works as a moat. Private equity cannot buy community. AI cannot automate relationships. Competitors cannot replicate trust that has been built over years.

The solo practitioner who knows every small business owner in her town has a moat. The boutique that has become the go-to resource for a specific industry has a moat. The firm that clients call first because they feel known and understood has a moat.

The third moat is competency.

Not general competency. Specific, deep, hard-to-replicate expertise.

The generalist firm is exposed on every front. Any competitor can claim to do what they do. Any AI tool can approximate their output. Any marketing campaign can position against them.

The firm that goes deep on a specific problem becomes the obvious choice. When someone needs that particular expertise, the generalist is not even considered. The specialist owns the territory.

Going deep means saying no. It means turning away work that does not fit. It means accepting that you will be smaller than you could be in exchange for being stronger than anyone else in your space.

The Strategic Choice

You cannot build all three moats at once. You start with one and let it inform the others.

Start with vision. Get clear on who you serve and why. Let that clarity attract the community that shares your values. Let that community show you where to build deep competency.

Or start with competency. Become undeniably excellent at solving a specific problem. Let that excellence attract clients who need exactly what you offer. Let those clients become your community.

The order matters less than the commitment. What matters is that you stop trying to be everything to everyone. Stop competing on the same terms as every other firm. Stop building on platforms you do not control.

Build your moat. Make your position defensible. Let the siege come.

The firms that survive 2026 will not be the biggest. They will be the ones that are hardest to replace.

__________

I’m Ryan and I’m a law firm consultant at Best Era, LLC. I help firms build moats.

Legal tech startups are actively pitching their vision of automated justice to venture capitalists. Technology companies are building products that will fundamentally reshape how people access legal help. The people making these decisions are optimizing for one thing: profit extraction from a profession that has long resisted outside investment.

This is a problem. Not because profit is inherently bad. But because the people driving these conversations have no stake in the values that make the legal profession worth preserving. They see inefficiency where lawyers see due process. They see friction where lawyers see client protection. They see a market ripe for disruption where lawyers should see an opportunity for creation.

The legal profession is about to be remade. The only question is whether lawyers will participate in that remaking or simply watch it happen.

The Access to Justice Crisis No One Wants to Discuss

Here is an uncomfortable truth that most lawyers would rather ignore: the legal system does not work for most people.

Roughly 80% of civil legal needs in the United States go unmet. Low-income Americans receive inadequate or no legal help for 92% of their legal problems. The middle class fares only slightly better. A straightforward divorce can cost more than many families earn in a month. A simple will costs more than it should. Fighting an eviction requires resources most tenants do not have.

Lawyers have known about this crisis for decades. Bar associations publish reports about it. Law schools host conferences about it. Nothing changes because addressing it would require confronting a business model that depends on legal services remaining expensive and inaccessible.

The billable hour creates perverse incentives. It rewards inefficiency. It punishes the adoption of tools that could make legal services faster and cheaper. It ensures that the people who most need legal help cannot afford it.

Technology companies see this gap and recognize the opportunity. They are not wrong that the current system fails most people. But their solution is to route around the legal profession entirely. Automated document assembly. AI-powered legal advice. Self-service platforms that promise to eliminate the need for lawyers altogether.

These tools will help some people. They will also cause harm when used in situations that require human judgment. They will miss nuance. They will fail to identify issues that a lawyer would catch immediately. They will optimize for speed and cost at the expense of quality.

The Choice Between Disruption and Creation

The legal profession faces a choice. It can resist change and be disrupted by forces that do not share its values. Or it can lead change and create something better than what exists today.

Disruption is passive. It happens to you. Creation is active. It happens because of you.

The barriers to implementing meaningful change have never been lower. AI can handle routine legal work at a fraction of the cost. Cloud-based practice management tools eliminate the overhead that once required large firms. Video conferencing makes geographic constraints irrelevant. A solo practitioner with the right technology stack can serve clients that would have required a team of associates a decade ago.

These tools could expand access to justice dramatically. They could make competent legal help available to people who currently cannot afford it. They could allow lawyers to serve more clients while actually improving quality of life for practitioners.

But only if lawyers choose to use them that way.

The alternative is letting technology companies and private equity firms define how these tools get deployed. That means optimizing for profit extraction rather than access. It means building systems designed to replace lawyers rather than empower them. It means allowing people with no understanding of professional responsibility to make decisions that will affect millions of people who need legal help.

What Lawyers Should Do Now

First, stop pretending tomorrow will look like today. It will not. The question is not whether legal services will change dramatically. They will. The question is who will control that change.

Second, get honest about the profession’s failures. The access to justice crisis is real. The current business model excludes most people from meaningful legal help. Acknowledging this is not an attack on the profession. It is the first step toward making the profession better.

Third, examine what actually matters. Strip away the business model considerations and ask what values sit at the core of legal practice. Zealous advocacy. Confidentiality. Competence. Loyalty. These matter. The billable hour does not. The partnership track does not. The corner office does not.

Fourth, start building. The tools exist to create legal services that are accessible, affordable, and high quality. They require lawyers who understand both the technology and the professional obligations that technology companies routinely ignore. They require people who see the opportunity to expand access rather than simply cut costs.

The legal profession can let this be an era of disruption. Outside forces will reshape the profession without input from the people who understand what makes it valuable. The result will be a system optimized for profit that fails to serve the public interest.

Or lawyers can choose creation. They can use this moment to build something that actually works for the people who need legal help. They can preserve the values that matter while discarding the structures that do not.

That choice is being made right now. Most lawyers are not paying attention. The ones who are will define what the profession becomes.
______________

Ryan McKeen is an attorney, legal consultant, and adjunct professor of legal entrepreneurship.

Personal injury sits at the leading edge of legal disruption for one reason: there is no billable hour to protect. When every dollar earned comes from contingency fees, technology investments become obvious. Efficiency translates directly to profit. This creates an environment where innovation thrives rather than threatens. The partner who finds a way to handle twice the cases with the same staff doubles their income. The partner who resists technology in a billable hour firm just works more hours.

This dynamic means that investments in legal technology start in PI and branch out to the rest of legal as a result. The margins can be high. The incentives are aligned. The capital follows.

The capital flowing into PI legal tech proves the point. In October 2025, EvenUp raised $150 million at a valuation exceeding $2 billion. The company has raised $385 million total. Their platform now processes 10,000 cases per week and has helped secure over $10 billion in damages across 200,000 cases. Twenty percent of the Top 100 PI firms in America already use their platform.

These numbers should terrify every lawyer who thinks AI is just a productivity tool.

The Marketing Arms Race That Got Us Here

Here is what most people miss about PI technology gains: they have not reduced costs per case. They have increased them.

According to the American Tort Reform Association, spending on legal services advertising hit $2.5 billion in 2024 across more than 26.9 million ads. Spending increased 39% between 2020 and 2024. Morgan & Morgan alone spent $218 million on advertising in 2024, accounting for 8% of all legal services ads in the country. Radio advertising for legal services increased 261% from 2017 to 2024. Billboard and outdoor spending jumped over 260% in the same period.

Every efficiency gain from technology gets poured back into marketing. The economics are simple. If you can process a case faster and cheaper, you can afford to spend more to acquire it. The firms with the best technology have the highest marketing budgets. This creates a flywheel that smaller firms cannot match.

The winners in PI are not the best lawyers. They are the best marketers with the best technology. This combination crowds out everyone else.

Private Equity Smells Blood

Where there is margin, there is private equity. And PE has decided that personal injury law has margin.

According to recent reporting, personal injury attorneys are “at the forefront of a movement to bring private equity investment into U.S. law firms.” Multiple major PI firms are actively seeking PE financing, including Dudley DeBosier in Louisiana, Rafi Law Group in Arizona, and the Dominguez Firm in Los Angeles.

Why PI specifically? One law firm consultant explained it clearly: “I think private equity investment in plaintiffs’ personal injury firms is a near-term reality because they are marketing machines in pursuit of valuable cases that can scale successfully with investment.”

The attraction is obvious. PI firms have predictable revenue from high volumes of fast-settling cases. Auto accidents and slip-and-fall matters do not disappear in recessions. People still get hurt regardless of the economy. This stability is catnip for investors seeking returns uncorrelated with stock market volatility.

The PE playbook is consistent across industries. Roll up smaller players. Standardize operations. Pour capital into marketing and technology. Extract returns through scale. The legal profession has no structural immunity to this strategy. Ethics rules create friction but not barriers. Managed service organization structures allow investors to own the non-legal portions of law firms and collect profits from them.

Recent years have seen several major PI digital marketing agencies sell to private equity. The infrastructure that feeds cases to law firms is consolidating. It is only a matter of time before the firms themselves follow.

Human in the Loop Does Not Mean What You Think

The legal industry loves to comfort itself with the phrase “human in the loop.” Lawyers hear it and imagine themselves doing what they do now, just faster. AI writes the first draft. The lawyer reviews and improves it. Everyone keeps their job.

This is a fantasy.

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