Rafie Faruq on the Next Big Shift in Legal AI

Dr Heidi K. Gardner is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and the author of Smart Collaboration and co-author of Smarter Collaboration. An organisational behaviour researcher and former McKinsey consultant, she has spent years studying how professionals share expertise, build trust and work together to solve complex problems. Her work explores a question that is becoming more pressing as AI changes legal work: how do you turn a group of talented individuals into a team that delivers better outcomes for clients? In this conversation, we explore what happens when lawyers ask AI questions they would previously have taken to a colleague, why bringing people back to the office doesn’t automatically create collaboration, and how junior lawyers can keep learning from the people around them. We discuss: * What happens when lawyers turn to AI agents instead of colleagues. * Why office attendance alone doesn’t create collaboration. * What juniors learn in the three minutes before and after a client call. * Why the billable hour can discourage teamwork. * How trust and shared goals help law firms collaborate better. Where to find Heidi: Website: smartercollaboration.com Heidi’s LinkedIn Books: Smart Collaboration My biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. Getting an answer isn’t the same as learning from someone. I’m guilty of turning to AI before asking a colleague. It’s convenient, but this conversation made me think more carefully about what that interaction would otherwise have given me. A colleague might challenge my assumptions, explain the context or spot that I’m asking the wrong question. As a junior, I want to keep making room for those conversations alongside using AI. 2. The office is only valuable if we make use of being together. Heidi challenged the idea that attendance alone creates collaboration. If senior people sit behind closed doors and juniors spend the day on Teams, being in the same building achieves much less than it could. That also made me reflect on my own habits: when there’s a meeting room booked, joining from my desk means missing an opportunity to sit with the team and talk afterwards. 3. A three-minute debrief can be a powerful training tool. At McKinsey, Heidi would be invited to listen to a partner’s client call and then discuss it immediately afterwards. What was the client really asking? What did the partner miss? What should happen next? Knowing those questions were coming made her an active listener. I liked how practical this was: a short conversation can help a junior understand decisions they might otherwise just observe. 4. “I don’t know, but I know someone who does” is a valuable answer. It’s easy to feel that credibility comes from always knowing the answer. Heidi’s point was that clients recognise the limits of any individual’s expertise. Being clear about those limits, and having trusted people you can bring in, can build confidence. For me, that makes getting to know colleagues across the firm part of becoming a better adviser. 5. Collaboration depends on the behaviour we reward. If a firm celebrates individual billing and client wins, it shouldn’t be surprising when people prioritise those things. Heidi’s answer to designing a firm from scratch started with shared goals, developing people and valuing different strengths. It left me thinking that collaboration needs to show up in everyday decisions: who gets recognised, who gets promoted and whether helping someone else succeed counts as success too.

Bernadette Bulacan is Chief Evangelist at Icertis and has spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of law and technology. Through her work with some of the world’s largest businesses such as HP and BAE Systems, she sees how legal teams are changing the way they negotiate, manage and learn from contracts. In our conversation, we get into: * Why AI represents a bigger shift for legal work than previous generations of technology * Where contracting actually slows down, and why legal isn’t always the bottleneck * What AI agents need before they can negotiate contracts autonomously * What human-centred contracting looks like, and where legal engineers fit in * Whether AI will give lawyers time back or leave them busier than ever * What junior lawyers should learn now, and how to use AI without surrendering their judgment Where to find Bernadette: • LinkedIn• Icertis: icertis.com Explore more from Best Practice: Legal AI news, interviews and commentary at bestpractice.media. My thoughts from my conversation with Bernadette My biggest takeaway is that agent-to-agent negotiation will depend on how well a business can explain its own position. An AI agent needs to know more than what a clause means: it needs to understand what the company has accepted before, where it can compromise and when to bring a lawyer in. That makes the work of organising precedents, updating playbooks and setting clear boundaries much more important. Otherwise, we risk making poor decisions faster. I also came away thinking about what this means for junior lawyers like me. If agents handle more of the drafting and negotiation, understanding why a business wants a particular outcome becomes even more valuable. Bernadette’s advice to challenge AI as you would a colleague really stuck with me. I think its becoming important to use these tools to explore decisions and develop my judgment, but also whilst making sure I can still explain and stand behind the advice I give.

* Guest: Will Chen * Role: Founder, Mike OSS & LawProf * Website: mikeoss.com This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline’s trusted and verified legal AI today for free. I spoke with Will Chen, a former Latham & Watkins lawyer who is now building Mike OSS, an open-source legal AI platform, alongside LawProf, the legal education platform he originally built while at university. Will has become one of the most-followed voices in the Legal AI space; particularly around open source, the economics of legal AI platforms and whether law firms should be building more technology themselves. We discussed: → Why Will decided to open source Mike OSS, and whether open-source legal AI can become commercially sustainable. → Whether legal AI platforms are really differentiated products or, in Will’s words, increasingly competing on deployment, distribution and access to models. → Why law firms may need to start hiring and paying top engineering talent very differently if they want to build serious technology internally. → The rise of open-weight and Chinese AI models, and what a rapidly moving model frontier means for companies trying to post-train their own legal models. → Will’s advice for junior lawyers entering the profession as AI becomes significantly more capable. We also spoke about vibe coding, why lawyers still need strong fundamentals even as AI improves. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email me at [email protected] Timestamps: 01:03 Introduction and Will’s background in law and AI 03:34 Why Open Source Legal AI Matters 08:17 Coding, AI, and Legal Judgment 14:17 The Value of Legal AI Vendors 22:47 Build vs. Buy for Law Firms 29:10 The Rise of Chinese AI Models 33:02 Career Advice for Future Lawyers

* Guest: Kenzo Onumonu * Role: Founder, Correm * Website: correm.ai This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline's trusted and verified legal AI today for free. I spoke with Kenzo, a former Bird & Bird lawyer and in-house GC who is now building Correm, a platform for companies to access and manage fractional legal talent. Having sat on both sides of the legal market, Kenzo has seen first-hand how difficult it can be for businesses to get the right legal support at the right time. Correm is built around a different model, combining flexible legal talent with technology, automated billing and AI tools to make it easier for companies to build legal capacity around the work they actually have. We discussed: → Why fractional legal teams are becoming a viable alternative to traditional hiring. → What Kenzo learned going from private practice to becoming a GC, and then a founder. → How AI changes the economics of flexible legal work and what the legal team of the future could look like. → Why lawyers may increasingly need to think about their careers as a collection of skills and experiences rather than one linear path. → Kenzo’s tips for junior lawyers navigating their career in an AI landscape. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email me at [email protected]

Guest: Jake Jones Role: Co-founder and COO, Flank LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-jones-b8769b75/ Website: flank.ai This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline's trusted and verified legal AI today for free. Sources mentioned in the episode: * Flank — flank.ai * Insights portal — insights.flank.ai * The Intake (Substack, Flank's team blog) — intakezero.substack.com I spoke with Jake Jones, co-founder and COO of Flank. He’s spent years at the forefront of legal AI across what he counts as four different paradigms and half a dozen hype cycles. He started the business in 2018 as Legal OS, modelling how experienced lawyers make decisions as knowledge graphs, built on his co-founder's father's academic work, and sold it to German law firms doing M&A. In 2021 he moved the business in-house, rebuilt it on LLMs, and now Flank runs agentic legal work inside enterprise legal teams under a model where they don't get paid until the outcome is live. We discussed: → Why vendors are already moving beyond "agentic AI" to full end to end outcomes. → The difference between selling software and selling an outcome, and why so many legal AI vendors are stuck between the two. → His theory that legal is heading toward the same moment retail banking hit with digital challenger banks in 2015, and what Big Law should do about it before it's too late. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email [email protected]