Niha

Building, writing | I think out loud at a few places, mostly about frontier tech and business | Past: Cofounder @Tavaga

[Niha @niharikar]

https://t.co/NLSAy1wIQS

[David Fishman @pretentiouswhat]

I am pleased to introduce the Chinese Invisible Cities Index (CICI) - some Friday fun. 😏

These aren't the smallest or poorest cities. These are the cities with the least aura vs. their population.

They make you say: "wait, I've never heard of it and it has HOW many people?"🧵

[Niha @niharikar]

@dillidallying Fact. Though it’s also a fact that history there is dense and documented better there than in other major Indian cities.

[Niha @niharikar]

It feels like the crazy pace of legaltech news has slowed down since Legora’s consumption based pricing announcement. Summer slump?

[Niha @niharikar]

@samelliottsam @sarthakgh It’s a decent measure as a counterpoint to time spent in Word or their firm’s DMS

[Niha @niharikar]

@CuriousLuke93x Yes, agents becoming defendants will take some time but the liability transfer and assumption of legal personality is obvious. Just like companies have their own legal personality

[Niha @niharikar]

who owns the agent? every AI agent is a non-human identity with API keys and access to data. microsoft and google have agent identity frameworks in place. feels like the first wave of agents-as-defendants lawsuits is coming - the arms of justice are never too far behind.

[Niha @niharikar]

@paarugsethi Isn’t all of this Traitors inspired? Which in itself is not earth shattering

[Niha @niharikar]

the tension is in the duty to supervise AI. it's going to be interesting for pricing purposes - right from in-house decisions to private practice and up the chain to indemnity insurance

[Ira Rothken @rothken]

That is because AI is largely probabilistic, so there is some percentage risk of errors like hallucinations & lawyers have a duty to supervise AI - over delegation to AI can lead to a parade of horribles from sanctions to malpractice to unauthorized practice of law complaints. One should look to a total productivity of AI metric that includes the required gestalt amount of human in the loop. That is the gating issue on AI productivity enhancements.

[Niha @niharikar]

@shl that's way too much context switching

[Niha @niharikar]

The bellwether outside-capital-in-law bill is in. Illinois now limits investor control of law firms, especially via MSO (Management Service Organization) structures. It targets firm with revenue <$300m, clearly aimed at the personal injury plaintiff bar - a fertile hunting ground for all manner of investors.

The business and regulatory environment for investors across the legal ecosystem - PE, VC, litigation funding, other legal assets strategies - continues to tighten as limits are drawn around economic influence.

Interesting times for how capital continues to participate in practice and business of law.

[Exec Sum @exec_sum]

Illinois passed a bill to prevent PE firms from controlling law firms

The bill closed legal loopholes that allowed PE firms and other investors to control law firms without technically owning them

It is already illegal for non-lawyers to control law firms

[Niha @niharikar]

@rwalk_xyz Yes, interesting to look at what’s happened in the UK since the introduction of ABS for law firms

[Niha @niharikar]

re 9 in particular, this is certainly happening more aggressively with business model innovation in law with MSOs in the US. the UK has been a pioneer here (!) with the ABS structure - in existence since 2012-13

[FleetingBits @fleetingbits]

some thoughts on kirkland building its own harvey

1) kirkland is spending $500m over four years in order to build its own internal ai legal tools; kirkland intends to spend $100m this year

2) i suspect that kirkland is doing this because they have told themselves that they have valuable data and because they want to appear differentiated

3) i think the first issue is that kirkland probably does not have differentiated data from other elite law firms; at least, not at the level a harvey would absorb

4) all the elite firms probably have similar internal workflow data and so long as some of them defect, that is enough to commoditize the data kirkland wants to use for its platform

5) and, to the extent that they do have different internal workflows, harvey and legora will end up representing a better version of them and this will put kirkland at a disadvantage

6) moreover, companies like kirkland will have difficulty building their internal legal platforms because they do not have experience with software development

7) and, there are both cultural and structural issues with them managing software developers, like they cannot give non-lawyers equity in the firm due to regulation

8) so, i think firms like kirkland are better off using tools like harvey and legora and then looking to focus on where their value really is now: client relationships, local knowledge (litigation, regulation) and legal r&d (novel structures, etc...)

9) anyway, this seems to me like a phenomenon that ai creates across a lot of industries, where firms that were previously vertically integrated become unbundled due to ai because part of the intelligence gets moved to the labs or otherwise gets commoditized

10) and so, a new set of companies are created whose job it is in order to provide services complementary to the labs: forward deployed like harvey and legora and data providers like mercor, surge and handshake

[kasra @kasratweets]

now that AI makes information consumption and transformation easier than ever I would like to bring back this old banger by Sasha Chapin about how books are not information transfer devices but subjectivity-merging devices

in fact I would say content consumption in general is more about subjectivity-merging than information transfer, which is why I am generally much more interested in writing by humans than by AI

[Niha @niharikar]

@heyitsalexsu On your way to F 30 under 30, surely

[Ajit Pai @AjitPai]

Law professors reading about this case after struggling for weeks to come up with a final exam question.

[Niha @niharikar]

@scottastevenson @jmwind Congratulations! What a win

[Niha @niharikar]

This one is a real beachhead as Harvey moves out of BigLaw's backyard into the much longer tail of the in-house world. The DocuSign deal makes sense with all actionable contract risk and intelligence living inside companies, not law firms

[Harvey @harvey]

Introducing Contract Intelligence.

Contract agents take first pass on inbound contracts, apply your playbooks, and generate redlines.

See how clauses and negotiated positions are trending across your business.

Escalate what needs legal judgment, while agents handle the rest.

[Niha @niharikar]

Foreseeable, especially in small law. The temptation to tldr is just too great, going to take a lot to fight it and review documents properly

[Eli Albrecht @Elialbrecht]

We have been seeing way more aggressive markups and rewrites of our purchase agreements. A ton of lawyers seem to be using AI to redraft their documents. This produces a maximalist redraft and usually the lawyers has no idea why they are negotiating certain issues.

[Niha @niharikar]

@soupcanarchist I wish my baby were anything like this

[Niha @niharikar]

amazing to use AI to check if something is AI

[Addison Zeller @amhcrane87]

Granta's response is truly breathtakingly insane