The Client Side

Clients are rewriting outside counsel guidelines, cutting budgets, and insourcing AI-powered work. The data on what they expect – and where law firms are falling short.

Corporate legal departments are done paying law firms to relearn what they already taught them. AI-powered knowledge management is turning institutional memory into a weapon against duplicate billing.

Every other industry rewards productivity. The billable hour punishes it. AI is forcing that contradiction into the open.

AI processing costs ~3% of an AI-enhanced eDiscovery workflow. The real savings come from restructuring leverage – shifting volume QC from $750/hr associates to $50/hr contract attorneys. Here's the math.

A new working paper ran generative AI document review and a managed active-learning workflow head to head on the same 45,004-document corpus. Same review protocol, same reference labels, same scorecard. The GenAI system won on recall, and the paired test backs it up. The rest of the scorecard – precision, the 62-to-1 effort gap, the population extrapolation – needs more qualification than the headline suggests.