Jordan Furlong

@jordanfurlong.com

1939 Followers 136 Following

Legal sector analyst, consultant, author, speaker, and reformer (he/him). I publish a free bi-weekly Substack newsletter: https://jordanfurlong.substack.com/ "We have the chance to turn the pages over." Luke 12:24-32.

A quote from a senior executive at Anthropic: “I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.”
An image of a calculator on a lawyer's desk, but the buttons, rather than displaying numbers and mathematical symbols, display legal symbols such as a scale of justice, a courthouse, a casebook, and so forth. The digital display of the calculator reads: NOT AI.
An illuminated cog hovering over a pair of hands in front of a techno-colourful abstract backdrop. Title and subtitle: Redefining productivity in legal services Generative AI doesn't have to cause mass unemployment or mass overwork in the legal profession. We can use it to free lawyers from task performance and enter a new era of client-centred productivity.
Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse T-shirts, modified by maple leaves and with each character saying “Eh!” It’s just as awful as it sounds.
Abstract image of a professional overseeing a broad array of client concerns and issues. Title: Stewardship and the post-AI legal profession Subtitle: Gen AI is climbing the "legal skills ladder" with alarming speed. What if lawyers responded with comprehensive “legal-plus” oversight of their clients’ affairs? Welcome to Peace Of Mind As A Service.
The classic "domino meme," in which a man prepares to knock over a tiny slab that will in turn knock over successively larger slabs until the largest inevitably falls. The smallest is labelled "Generative AI." The largest is "New legal pricing mechanisms."
Excerpt from article by Adam Tooze: Something has happened to American political culture that divorces large parts of it from social reality. The result is that “cultural experiments” of the type that Trump and his gang are undertaking with the US economy are no longer shot down. The bubble is not burst. The madness is now everyone’s reality. The analogue that is brought to mind is not so much the gerontocracy of the late Soviet Union as the delirium that followed in the post-Soviet 1990s. Back in the early 2000s an aide to George W. Bush famously boasted to Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” That was then. They were talking about laying Iraq to waste. In 2025, as the empire decomposes, with Mar-a-Lago as the “Green Zone” that delirious sense of unhinged world-making has come home.
Image of Samuel L. Jackson from Jurassic Park saying “Hold on to your butts.”
A still from the movie "Speed," with Keanu Reeves standing at the front of the bus flashing his police badge, with the caption: "I'm on the bus right now and there isn't much time."
A four-quadrant diagram setting out the following four activities that I believe will, or hopefully ought to, still be available for lawyers to perform even after AI cleans out all of our traditional cognitive tasks: – Provide advocacy – Deliver advice - Facilitate solutions - Chart strategies
Excerpt from the article: "The lawyer regulatory process is like a periodically refurbished old house. It has never been razed and replaced, but it is continually repaired to replace worn out or obsolete parts and to refresh for technological and societal changes. It has received makeovers, but not do-overs, perhaps because starting from scratch would be too costly or because judges and lawyers have grown accustomed to its essential attributes and have built their professional lives around them. If courts built a regulatory process for a different category of legal professionals, should it resemble what we now have?
The title and subtitle of my newest Substack: Your law firm needs a Situation Room. In a chaotic world, you can't sit back waiting for the next bombshell to drop. You need to anticipate, analyze, and address critical new developments — before they affect your firm and its clients. Image: A diverse group of lawyers engaged in an intense discussion around a conference table in a modern, dimly lit office setting. A man in a light gray suit appears to be leading the conversation, gesturing as he speaks, while his colleagues, dressed in professional attire, attentively listen. Their serious expressions and body language suggest that they are addressing a pressing legal matter or strategizing in response to an urgent situation. The scene is illuminated by sleek overhead lighting, adding to the high-stakes and professional atmosphere of the meeting.
An image from The Simpsons, when Mr. Burns is fined a million dollars in court for a grave environmental offence and tells Smithers, “My wallet is in my right front pocket.” Similarly, fining a massive law firm 300K pounds for failing to follow anti-money laundering laws is the rough equivalent of a parking ticket. It’s not a deterrent, it’s a fee.
A closeup of a map of the western United States showing several states with remarkably straight-line borders, almost like they were drawn with a ruler.
Excerpt from an article about large law firms that've developed their own internal Gen AI systems: When it comes to Davis Wright’s billing model, honesty with clients is key when AI comes into the picture and provides faster results. "We bill honestly for the time that we spent, and if we're obligated to disclose that we used AI on something, we absolutely will, but we don't inflate the numbers to recoup hours we've eaten because we've figured out how to do something in five minutes instead of five hours,” Szabo said. Lach said that in his case, there are slightly fewer billable hours depending on how AI is used, but Hogan Lovells has figured out how to supplement this. “You add a license fee for the tool, or you work with flat fees and say, ‘listen, this is going to be a different approach now, we're going to move away from the billable hour a bit more, but we can basically fulfill your legal task for price X, which is going to be less than we would pay for if we would do it manually,’ and you basically allow the use of AI and we manage kind of how we solve the puzzle on our end … it's going to be a flat fee,” he said.
An AI-written Alt text for an AI-generated image: What a time to be alive. "In a dimly lit, grand chamber, a long rectangular table takes center stage. At one end of the table sits a figure with his back to the viewer, his posture rigid and authoritative. Lined along the sides of the table are nearly identical men in dark suits, each one leaning forward with hands resting on papers, poised as if in a solemn council meeting. Above them, a single chandelier casts a sparse glow, highlighting motes of dust in the air. Thin, web-like wires stretch from the portrait of a man mounted on the wall, branching out to smaller, faceless figures perched at various points around the room. These figures dangle overhead, connected by the threads as if manipulated or observed from on high. The overall atmosphere is tense and foreboding, with the subdued color palette emphasizing a sense of secrecy and control. Subtle shadows dance across the walls, amplifying the painting’s dramatic, almost theatrical mood. The scene evokes themes of power, hierarchy, and the unseen forces that may guide important decisions behind closed doors."
An excerpt from an article about lawyer self-regulation that I wrote in December 2023, and that now has very ominous application with the second Trump Administration: "I want to be very clear here. The ability of the legal profession to remain independent from state control is extremely important. I italicize the modifier because some people who argue for “lawyer independence” don’t specify exactly what the profession is supposed to be independent of or from. Lawyers have no right to be independent of market forces or social norms. We’re part of society, not above it; we defend the rule of law, not the rule of lawyers. But the spectre of state control of, or undue influence over, the legal profession is very real and stark. A government with authoritarian impulses — and there are plenty of examples all over the world, even here in the United States and Canada — understands that lawyers are specifically equipped and authorized to challenge arbitrary or unconstitutional acts of the state, and thus represent a significant obstacle to achieving authoritarian goals. Direct control over the legal profession would be a weapon powerful enough to tempt even moderate democratic governments; authoritarian regimes would not hesitate to use it. Claims that lawyer independence is needed to protect society from malevolent state actors might have seemed overblown just ten years ago. They don’t anymore. The legal profession is right to vigorously defend its independence from the government."
An AI-generated image of a group of young professionals standing in a downtown city space, looking up at a proud and inspiring abstract monument, surrounded by tall buildings. The text is the title and subtitle of the linked article: "And then they build monuments to you. In all this chaos, stop and remember: The legal profession has made extraordinary gains in just a few short years. Change for the better in law is here, and it's real. You can take us even farther."
The now-ubiquitous headshot from the legendary ClickHole article: "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point." Sam Altman rebuffing Elon Musk's unsolicited offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion, offering instead to buy Twitter for 10% of that amount, is objectively a solid burn despite Sam Altman's many, many, many other defects.
A photo of the three primary cast members of Canadian comedy "Trailer Park Boys."
Picture of Bugs Bunny with the caption “He don’t know me very well, do he?”
A picture of the Angry Goose Meme, a two-panel cartoon where a goose poses a question in the first panel, and in the second panel poses a follow-up question while angrily chasing someone. In the first panel, the goose is saying: "What is Canada being recalcitrant about, New York Times?" In the second panel, chasing the man, the goose is saying: "What exactly are we being recalcitrant about?" The reference is to a New York Times headline this morning, whose subhead reads: "With Canada, Mexico, China, Colombia and the Middle East, President Trump has wasted no time threatening to use American might to force recalcitrant countries to back down and do what he wants."
A screenshot of an excerpt from an article today in The Atlantic online, by James Surowiecki: "From one angle, in fact, DeepSeek looks like what the business-school professor Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, dubbed a 'disruptive technology': a product that’s less powerful than the products at the top of the market but also much cheaper, and that has the possibility of improving in quality over time to the point where it offers a superior combination of price and performance for most customers. In this regard, the rapid uptake of DeepSeek by users around the world has been striking.
A chart from the Financial Times news service, which overlays one on top of the other the stock market fortunes of two companies at two different times: Cisco Systems about 20 years ago, and Nvidia today. In both cases, a sudden massive spike in price and popularity occurred, representative of a surge of exuberance around technology: In Cisco's case, the dot.com boom, and in Nvidia's case, the AI boom. The two rising spikes overlap each other very closely. In Cisco's case, the gigantic rise was followed by an equally gigantic fall, as the dot.com boom was revealed as a bubble that led to a bust. Nvidia, of course, has just suffered a massive loss of its own, following the market's absorption of the implications of the recently released DeepSeek AI, which are serving to undermine the general belief that more and more AI investment leads to more and more chip manufacturing. The implication of the chart is that Nvidia might be on course to replicate Cisco's fall. Past performance, of course, is no guarantee of future returns, and similarity does not imply correlation, let alone causation. So much is happening so quickly in the AI space, let alone globally, that the current technology era cannot be usefully compared one-to-one to the dot.com era. Far more volatility, far more complexity, and much more general chaos in the air. Nonetheless, the similarity to date in the two graphs is striking, and worth reflecting upon.
Excerpt from column by Matt Levine of Bloomberg: As a person who writes columns on the internet, I have a lot of sympathy for both sides of the artificial intelligence copyright debate: If you publish words on the internet, you have some proprietary rights to them. If somebody else just took my columns and republished them, under their own name, without credit to me, and sold ads or subscriptions against them, I would be annoyed. If somebody stole my ideas and changed the wording a little, and then republished them in slightly modified form, I would be equally — maybe more — annoyed. And so I have a lot of sympathy for publishers and writers[1] who say: “Look, our words are on the internet. It seems that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies trained their large language models on a corpus of text that includes our words. Effectively what they are doing is remixing our content for their own commercial purposes. This has the potential to destroy our livelihood — if people go to an AI chatbot for information, instead of to a newspaper or a financial columnist — and has also made the AI people extremely wealthy. They should have to pay us!”
Excerpt from an article today in the Financial Times: Many European officials had hoped his comments about seeking control of Greenland for “national security” reasons were a negotiating ploy to gain more influence over the Nato territory. Russia and China are both also jostling for position in the Arctic. But the call with Frederiksen has crushed such hopes, deepening the foreign policy crisis between the Nato allies. “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode,” said one person briefed on the call. Another said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.” A former Danish official added: “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs.”