Insights
Long-form analysis, working notes and arguments we are willing to put a name to. Everything here is built on the same evidence base as the Signal and the Radar, so the sources are always in the open.
Cards marked working preview link to readable articles. The remaining cards come from the content plan and are marked forthcoming until an article exists behind them.
11 pieces
AI is absorbing the legal work the profession wrote down. Most of what it protects as judgement was never uncodifiable, just unwritten, and that turns the automation curve from a forecast into a choice.
Mike Kennedy · 18 August 2026 · 14 min read
Changing how you pay for AI changes who decides how much of it gets used. The licence may sit with procurement, but the consequential decisions are the allowance, the work it can be spent on, and who can approve more.
Mike Kennedy · 14 August 2026 · 7 min read
Firms keep running model bake-offs, but the model stopped being the variable that matters. Quality lives in the scaffold and the organisation around it, and there is now independent published evidence for that.
Mike Kennedy · 7 August 2026 · 11 min read
Nobody can prove legal AI ROI because nobody counts the cost of checking. The right unit is cost per verified outcome, and on that measure a lot of successful deployment is negative.
Mike Kennedy · 24 July 2026 · 9 min read
Associate enthusiasm is a quality argument. The firm's business case is a throughput argument. The two are being measured against each other and only one of them is winning.
Mike Kennedy · 10 July 2026 · 8 min read
Fifty-eight per cent of GCs say their firms never raise AI benefits. Sixty-one per cent of firms say they discuss efficiencies constantly. Someone is wrong, and nobody has named the gap.
Peter Duffy · 26 June 2026 · 5 min read
A nominal approval click is not a defence. The replacement is assignable, named duties: who configures, who approves, who verifies, who decides, who signs.
Mike Kennedy · 12 June 2026 · 10 min read
The middle of due diligence commoditised while everyone was shopping for it. The defensible value moved to the two ends: scoping the data room, and building the report.
Mike Kennedy · 29 May 2026 · 9 min read
The institutional AI narrative says the firms with the biggest programmes will win. The longbow says otherwise: the advantage came from a generation who grew up with the thing in their hands.
Mike Kennedy · 15 May 2026 · 12 min read
The reasoning layer is commoditising. The frontier moved to the context layer: live, matter-specific knowledge of how this deal, this client and this team want the work done.
Mike Kennedy · 1 May 2026 · 10 min read
Every list of what lawyers need next is a list of things a model already does. The one that survives is the one no tool supplies: wanting to know why.
Mike Kennedy · 17 April 2026 · 7 min read
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