(32) Legal AI Live, June 2026, Part 2

1. Right-size your AI tools. You don’t need the most powerful model for every task. Use precise, task-appropriate tools (even Excel) rather than defaulting to the biggest, most compute-heavy options. “Speedboat over battleship.”

2. The junior lawyer pipeline is in crisis. As clients refuse to pay for junior work and firms automate routine tasks, there’s a real unresolved question about how new lawyers develop judgment and discernment without the traditional “cut your teeth” experiences.

3. AI in legal education needs guardrails, not bans. Law schools are shifting from banning AI to teaching students how to critically evaluate AI output. The goal is developing judgment alongside using the tools, not instead of using them.

4. Agentic workflows are the current frontier. Mathew’s Comet browser workflow (chaining a legal analysis AI with a document AI assistant to auto-redline contracts) exemplifies where practical AI use is heading: multi-model, multi-step automation without burning tokens on unnecessary heavy models.

5. Big Law’s AI investments may not align with the profession’s future. Kirkland & Ellis spending $500M on a proprietary model reflects a for-profit firm optimizing for its own margins, not for how the next generation of lawyers should be developed. The profession needs to think critically about whose vision of the future it’s building toward.