Legal Tech Just Split in Two
Mind the Money
AI agents could dissolve the friction that keeps justice expensive
It restructures who holds legal power, where authority comes from, and when law intervenes.
When engineers define "AI-ready," legal inherits the error
Encoding contracts is a legal choice
Compliance used to mean documentation. For AI agents, it means something else entirely
Governance needs to be in the architecture conversation, not the incident response.
The vibe coding guy says vibe coding is passé
Karpathy says vibe coding is passé. The new term is "agentic engineering" — and for legal and product teams, the distinction is a governance question, not a branding one.
2026 means stabilizing AI tools, not launching new ones
2026 isn't about new AI capabilities — it's about stabilizing the ones we already have. For product counsel, governance built on shifting tools is governance built on sand.
Law-following AI turns legal compliance from afterthought into architecture
The authors suggest treating AI agents as "legal actors" — entities that bear duties — without granting them legal personhood.
The feature you refuse to ship says more than the one you launched
Legal AI vendors should publish what they refuse to build, not just what they ship. Architectural constraints aren't limitations — they're competitive differentiators. The first privilege breach will prove who got this right.
