🐸 Take 1: Law firm investing $500M in proprietary AI is a wakeup call?
Kirkland & Ellis (one of the world’s largest law firms) is reportedly investing $500 million over the next three to four years to build its own AI platform instead of buying it from vendors.
What does this mean for EU lawyers?
Kirkland & Ellis treating AI infrastructure as a strategic asset, instead of an administrative automation tool, is a signal to other law firms about the value of their own data and templates. Most firms will not build a $500M platform but every firm should start asking the same question: are we investing in reusable internal intelligence?
🐸 Take 2: OpenAI to enter the legal space and disrupt all legaltech
Artificial Lawyer reports OpenAI is building a legal-specific offering, which could be branded 'Codex for Legal', joining Anthropic and Microsoft in targeting the vertical directly.
For EU firms, this is a signal: the foundation-model makers now want the lawyer relationship, not just the API underneath your vendor. If your current tool is a thin layer on someone else's AI model, what exactly are you paying the layer for?
🐸 Take 3: AI will become more expensive!
Goldman Sachs has predicted that AI token consumption will increase 24-fold by 2030. Gartner has also warned that even if the unit price of tokens drops by 90%, total corporate AI costs will actually increase. Read this opinion piece for more information - AI token costs are surpassing labor costs.
Today, you are probably paying a fixed monthly fee for your AI tools, but soon that cost might increase as these AI tools rely on the models that are now increasing their prices.
The question for the future will be: which AI workflows are worth paying for?
The Spryngbase community offers some frameworks to help you map your workflows.
