The Argument · Ins7ghts Daily, Thursday 29 October 2026
On a call with the project manager, a salesman from the implementation side, somebody I had known for years who always tried to put me in a bad light, said: "You never stay long." I said: "I don't need that long to fix things, as you guys do."
He had his facts right. In his model the time on the clock was the product, so a short engagement was a small sale. In mine the fix was the product and the clock was overhead. Two businesses, one invoice, and we were each reading our own off it.
That argument reached the law firms yesterday. The Obligations Checker inside Claude came from Foley & Lardner, and an AI Governance Benchmark from Goodwin. Latham & Watkins agreed to develop fund-formation tools with Harvey. On 26 October OpenAI launched Astra for Law. In insurance the same move came with a figure attached: Guidewire agreed to pay up to $2.1 billion for hyperexponential.
A professional firm has two things to sell: the judgement, and the hours it takes to apply it. For as long as anybody has been in practice, the hours were how the judgement got paid for. A checker inside Claude cuts that wire. The judgement ships once and runs a hundred thousand times, and nobody bills for the reading.
The best case against: this is marketing, not a business model. The firm gets its name on a tool, the partners get a slide, and the revenue stays exactly where it was, in the engagements the tool brings through the door. Nobody has yet shown a licence line in a law firm's accounts.
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