Smyth & Marmalade LLP was one of the oldest law firms in London. It had also once been among the most profitable. How things had changed! It was far from having fallen upon hard times, but everyone knew it was not what it once was.
Rumours of merger talks spread daily – most of them true. Key partners were jumping ship to the far more remunerative UK outposts of the New York elite. While for the first time in their recent history they had not immediately met the same annual pay rises for associates that their peers had chosen.
And then, just when its managing partner, Timothy Marks, had felt he was going to get through it all and successfully complete the last year of his four-year term – which would lead to his blissful retirement, a house in Tuscany, and the overconsumption of fine Chianti – along came AI in full force.
Couldn’t it have just waited one more year!? Ever since he could remember people had been talking about AI, the ‘end of lawyers’, and the whole rotten chimera of computers doing his job. But, now – so he had been told far too many times – it was real at last. This monster from Silicon Valley had come for their billable hours, like a modern-day Grendel come to devour the good people of Heorot.
‘AI, AI, AI’ – it sounded like the death rattle of a wounded animal, Timothy often thought, like something out of a David Attenborough documentary showing a desperate antelope brought down by a pack of hyenas. He could hear those paradoxically dulcet tones describing it all.
The image came back to him again as he marched along the 14th floor of the building that the firm had occupied for far too long, on his way to the most important ExComm meeting of his tenure. He was followed closely by Debbie, his primary assistant, and then Jasper, the new assistant to his assistant.
Debbie he liked. She was very efficient and more perceptive than most of his partners. Jasper on the other hand, he detested. But, he was the nephew of an important client. Why, oh why, couldn’t they have had a nephew who just wanted to be a junior associate? That would have been so much easier and he’d never have had to see him.
‘Sir, do you want me to tell them you’re delayed?’ asked Debbie, now in front of him in the art-lined corridor.
Timothy realised he had somehow stopped.
‘No, no. We must go on,’ he replied, coming back to the moment.
Yet, for some reason he could not get his well-worn Church’s leather shoes to take another step toward the meeting room door.
‘They’ll understand. You’re the managing partner,’ Debbie intoned supportively.
‘No, we….must…’
‘Tim…..Sir?’
He turned now to look at her. She could clearly see the deep stress furrow in his forehead.
‘Is this the big meeting? Or the meeting about the big meeting?’
‘It’s the big meeting.’
Tim nodded and swallowed.
‘Well, we must proceed. This AI thing cannot wait any longer.’
He shook off the paralysis and marched on, abruptly slamming open the meeting room door, nearly squishing the head of the tax department’s lead partner; which would have been a pity as he was one of the few colleagues who still won new clients of any size.
‘Right!’ Timothy announced with all the confidence he could muster, ‘Our future is in the balance. I believe you all know which way we must go.’
It had not been difficult to get the partners in ExComm to agree. The consultants they’d paid an arm and a leg for had got the message and had been informing them regularly with a series of reports that ‘something must be done’.
The project had dragged on longer than had been hoped, but it seemed as if every week there was another story in that blasted Artificial Lawyer news site about another twist or turn in what their peers were doing. And that in turn meant scrapping whatever strategy they’d devised so far and then drafting a completely new one.
They’d spent a month just considering whether Harvey or Legora was a good match – initially based on the overall colour palette of their websites. Then his daughter and wife had pointed out that Jude Law was a ‘very, very nice man’. Meanwhile he had watched an episode of ‘Suits’ many years ago. The characters’ actions didn’t seem to connect to his experience. He had never once shouted at another lawyer. He’d sent some very mean emails, but never raised his voice.
Tim didn’t know how he felt about all of the marketing. Should one of the most prestigious firms in London decide its fate based on the reputation of TV and movie stars? It really was confusing.
The decision was tabled for another time.
Then came Claude for Legal. My God! What on Earth is a ‘skill’? And he had not even tried to figure out what a ‘markdown file’ was.
Then came OpenAI’s Codex for Legal – although that was still a bit blurry. Not to mention those ‘vibe-coders’ – what was that really all about?
And on it went. He and everyone else on ExComm, including their long-suffering Innovation chief, Katie Downer, felt like their heads were spinning. Meanwhile the consultants were starting to get a bit annoyed at having to rewrite the strategy every two weeks. They’d agreed to a fixed fee, and this was not working out well for them.
What to do? How to do it? It felt like no matter what they did it would be less impactful than they hoped. They needed something massive. Something – dare he say it – shocking. A move so impactful it would put Smyth & Marmalade back at the top of the tree where it had reigned for most of the late 20th century.
So, it had been quite inspiring when Kirkland & Ellis – an American firm that had PEP they could only salivate over – announced they were going to build their own AI systems. They were going to bottle their own secret sauce, with the help of a company called Palantir apparently. But, who they worked with was not the point. It was the message.
Yes, he and nearly everyone else on ExComm – although Katie not so much – loved that message: ‘We are special, we are unique, AI is subject to our greatness. We will not be subject to it. AI will project our sometimes idiosyncratic, but nonetheless, luminary brilliance!’
And so it was decided, with Katie protesting as much as she felt politically wise, that the firm would build its very own AI system, or whatever the correct wording was, and they would rule the legal waves once more.
Katie’s team saw her face when she returned from ‘the big meeting about AI’ and knew something was up. They had seen her annoyed before, like the time a group of legal AI platforms had lowballed each other so wildly they’d ended up offering not just to give the firm a contract for free for two years, but to send someone over to her house to mow the lawn every Sunday.
She wasn’t annoyed at the legal AI companies. She was annoyed because she detested mowing the lawn and her husband feigned a bad back every time the subject came up – and bloody Timothy had then suddenly dropped the whole idea of bringing in an all-in-one platform at all.
No, this time it wasn’t mere annoyance, this was something else. Emily, one of the more empathetic members of the team, correctly guessed what that emotion was on her face: fear.
Later that day, team members reported that Katie had phoned an innovation friend at a rival firm to lay out her misery.
‘How in God’s name are we going to do this?’ she loudly vented from her glass-walled mini office. ‘It will be a total mess! No-one here has the slightest idea how to post-train an open source LLM – and don’t even get me started on the whole GPU thing! And from what I’ve read the one firm doing this is spending $500m on it! And that’s about 100 times more than our whole innovation budget.’
Later that day an ‘All hands – Urgent’ email made its way to everyone in the innovation, KM, and IT groups. They had never seen one of those before. Something truly was up. They could feel it in the air.
‘Dear All, we are about to embark on what is without doubt the biggest and most strategically important legal technology project in this firm’s history. We must not fail.’
—
( ‘The Innovators – A Legal Tech Saga’ will continue. )
–
[ Copyright © 2026, Richard Tromans, Published by Artificial Lawyer Limited in the U.K. All rights reserved. This work of fiction may not be republished or reproduced without permission. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to any persons living, dead, or virtual, is purely coincidental. ]
Discover more from Artificial Lawyer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.