The AI-enabled 100x Lawyer.

Lawyers are commandos. Lawyers are artisans. Software is about standardizing the common denominator. This doesn’t make sense when lawyers are about how you handle edge cases.

AI can now be used to map out how lawyers handle edge cases. But I am uninterested in finding out the most common denominator workflow for handling edge cases. Instead, I want to use AI like a Spartan’s armor. I find the best high-performance lawyers who want to use technology, build custom, individualized software for individual lawyers that reflects the way they specifically think and work. I don’t care (and almost prefer) if they have a more unique way of doing things, and have the performance to show for it.

Selling SaaS to law firms is painful. Law firms are basically a collection of independent contractors, each individual with their own way of doing things. Let’s lean into this! Do not sell technology to 1,000 people and increase their efficiency by 30%. Instead, sell technology to 1 person, increase their efficiency by 10,000%, and capture a clip of their efficiency gain. One exception is any software or process that directly leads to revenue gains, and not cost-savings. You can imagine the best case scenario is custom revenue-generation technology.

Simply put — the way experts look to automate themselves is different from how software companies are traditionally built, especially before AI. To be clear, a law firm is going to need both general and specialized software. Just like generalized software is going to be helpful for a lot of general work, a specialized software tool is specifically going to be helpful for extending work that not many others are doing — which basically describes a lot of a lawyers job.

Why This Makes Sense Economically

Cost and Flexibility of Development: AI has drastically lowered the barrier of code generation and natural language processing. Software that took millions to build before can be built in hours and for thousands of dollars.

Lawyer Adoption: This is the hardest bit because you need to completely understand one lawyer’s idiosyncratic workflow in extreme detail, and they need to be both patient enough and willing to share. However, in this model, one does not need to convince 10,000 lawyers that automation makes sense. One just needs to convince 1 high-performing lawyer per business sector / specific valuable workflow that this is the future. This business model can take 9,999 no’s.

Is There a Precedent for This?

Yes! This is how some quant funds are run. My cofounder, Tom, who briefly worked at Optiver, shares some of his experience in the industry:

Small Cross-Functional “Pod” Teams: Many quant funds use small, cross-functional teams (often called pods) that include a portfolio manager/trader plus quantitative researchers, data scientists, and software engineers​

For example, Citadel embeds engineers directly into trading teams, allowing technologists to build and iterate on solutions side by side with portfolio managers​. This real-time partnership means a researcher can devise a model, an engineer can code it, and a trader can deploy it quickly, all in sync

Quant funds heavily customize technology for each trading strategy or team. Over 50% of employees at a firm like Two Sigma are engineers, building internal systems and tools to solve “problems unique to financial services”​. Rather than one-size-fits-all software, these firms develop proprietary analytics platforms, data pipelines, and execution algorithms that fit the needs of specific traders or strategies.

Quantitative developers often tailor the software to their portfolio manager’s trading style, providing bespoke analytics, risk models, and automation

Imagine if quant funds were run as a partnership of individual traders that had a barely functioning centralized software procurement function. That’s basically the current state of law firms.

What would be reasons this could work for quant funds but not for lawyers? The main reason is that each trader can make tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, while a lawyer might only be able to bill say up to 5m. This also doesn’t apply to specific areas of non-contingency legal practices like plaintiff litigation where individual lawyers can make 9 figure incomes. Furthermore, this is the old model of a lawyer without leverage. With technology, and the ability to refer cases to other lawyers, it is possible to imagine a 100x lawyer.

A New Playbook for AI-First Law Firms

Most importantly, this approach breaks the false trade-off between quality and scale. In the current system, the best lawyers are expensive, limited in capacity, and reliant on inefficient firm structures. In this new model, they are empowered with AI and automation, allowing them to maintain elite quality while expanding their reach at an unprecedented scale.

This is where the legal industry is headed — whether existing firms recognize it or not. Just as finance was transformed by quant trading and manufacturing was reshaped by automation, law will be redefined by AI-augmented professionals who leverage technology not as a tool, but as a fundamental extension of their expertise.

The first AI-native legal platform will not be built by selling software to firms. It will be built by identifying and equipping the best individual lawyers with an infrastructure that turns them into 100x lawyers.

This is the future of law firms.