For Lawyers · Published Free

Practice Lab

How this firm actually runs — the systems, the workflows, the software, and the mistakes. Written for solos and small firms whose bottleneck is hours, not talent.

Publication cadenceone mark per article · area ∝ word count

articles: 41
words: 111K
tracks: 03
span: 208d
median_gap: 7d
price: 0.00

GitHub RSS corpus.json

Start Here

The short way in

4 articles·56 min· read in order

Essay
Stop Buying Software. Start Describing It.
For ten years, firm management was an integration project — assembling a stack of SaaS tools that mostly talked to each other. That era is ending. Five concepts from before I was a lawyer that decide whether you can build your own.
14 min
Essay
Clio Was the Best Thing to Happen to Small Firms. You Can Now Build Your Own.
Strip away the interface and a practice management system is a relational database, a set of views, and an API. That used to be worth every dollar. Now the database is a weekend, the connectors reach anything, and the honest question is which parts you should still rent.
16 min
Essay
Your Firm Fits in One Folder
Everything in this section — the wiki, the agent briefs, the checklists, the eval set — lives in a single directory of plain text. That one architectural fact is what lets you change models on a Tuesday afternoon, including to one running on the machine under your desk.
12 min
Essay
Six Windows: The Hidden Cost of Practicing Law With AI
AI can draft, research, and summarize. It cannot tell you what you were doing. A working attorney on the mental load of parallel work — and the kanban board built to carry it.
14 min

Latest

Essay

Sep 5, 2026 · 22 min read

Minnesota Stopped Sending Warning Letters

A sentence in Minn. Stat. § 325M.20(a) expired on schedule on January 31, 2026, and since that day the Attorney General has been able to sue a Minnesota business with no letter and no cure period, at $7,500 per violation plus the state's litigation expenses. Every client alert written in 2024 and 2025 describing a Minnesota cure period is now wrong — and the Legislature wrote the reason to bring this work to counsel rather than a consultant into § 325M.18(f).

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§01 · Corpus Map

How the articles relate

Each article is reduced to a TF-IDF vector over its own vocabulary; every pair is scored by cosine similarity, and each article keeps its two strongest links. The layout is a Fruchterman–Reingold force simulation run to convergence at build time — deterministic, so the same corpus always yields the same map. Clusters are emergent, not assigned.

essay/ 20tool/ 7workflow/ 14

41 nodes · 82 edges · 198 distinctive terms · 215 external sources cited

§02 · Similarity Matrix

The same data, undrawn

The graph is a projection; this is the object it projects. Cell (i, j) is the cosine similarity between articles i and j. Rows and columns are ordered by agglomerative hierarchical clustering with average linkage over 1 − cosine distance, so the dendrogram's leaf order puts related articles adjacent — the dark blocks along the diagonal are the clusters, not an artefact of ordering.

0%31%

mean 6.2% · max 31.0% · graph density 10.0% · vocabulary 6,786 terms

§03 · The Archive

Everything in the Lab

Search the archive

Essay

The Layer That Does Not Relocate

The economic development pitch writes itself: Minnesota should go win an AI consortium the way Austin won MCC and SEMATECH. Both of those died or moved out. What left Austin was the part that had been purchased — and what stayed was the part that had been built into people and institutions. Assurance, the capacity to prove an AI system does what its seller says, is entirely the second kind.

Sep 4, 2026 · 18 min read

Essay

Executable Code You Are Calling a Model

A claim precise enough to test: a downloaded model checkpoint is an untrusted executable, not a document, and the three-year Hugging Face record is not one hack but an escalation — a code-execution exploit, a scanner bolted on top of it, an evasion of that scanner, and finally a backdoor one layer up that no scanner reaches. Patching a layer is not closing a category.

Sep 2, 2026 · 17 min read

Essay

The Gap Between Intended and Proven: Ethics Is an Engineering Property

The paperclip maximizer is the famous frame and the wrong one to lead with — it has drawn serious, published, recent criticism, and it postpones the problem to a superintelligence that does not exist. The unsolved problem is here now: we can prove narrow properties of small networks and nothing broad about large ones, and the gap between what a vendor intended and what anyone can prove is precisely where a negligence claim gets built.

Aug 31, 2026 · 17 min read

Essay

Protectionism in a Safety Costume

Two claims, stated plainly so they can be checked later: the frontier model itself — not just the trailing tier — is a depreciating asset whose durable value rounds to zero, and the campaign to restrict open-weight AI is best understood as incumbents reaching for the only moat that doesn't melt: a regulatory one. Lawyers, of all people, should recognize the costume.

Aug 20, 2026 · 15 min read

Workflow

The Agent Drafts. The Human Sends.

The single most important architectural decision in an AI-assisted practice is not which model you use — it is that agents produce drafts and staged actions while a human fires everything that crosses the firm's boundary, and that rule is not a training-wheels phase to grow out of but a permanent security model that happens to make supervision duties tractable.

Aug 20, 2026 · 15 min read

Workflow

The Assignment Is a Lead, Not a Fact

Over two days this firm published thirty verified articles on Minnesota law, and eight of the legal premises I handed down in the assignment briefs turned out to be false — which is an argument about how to delegate, to agents and to associates, because the senior lawyer's memory is the least reliable component in the pipeline.

Aug 20, 2026 · 17 min read

Essay

The Commons Your Practice Runs On

A solo firm can now verify law like a research department, and the reason is a handful of nonprofits and public offices that almost nobody in this profession pays — so here is the honest structural survey of that infrastructure, the four specific places it is already breaking, and the argument for a donation line item that is not charity but a maintenance bill.

Aug 20, 2026 · 17 min read

Essay

The Direction of the Integration

A legal research vendor offered to put an AI assistant inside their platform. The offer has it exactly backwards — the assistant is the environment now, and the research service is the tool that visits it. What that inversion means for the renewal decision every firm is about to face.

Aug 20, 2026 · 14 min read

Essay

Written to Be Retrieved

The audience for a law firm's website is no longer only a person typing into Google — it is an assistant pulling a passage to answer somebody's legal question, and that reader rewards depth, verbatim quotation, pinned authority, and honest statements of what a statute does not say, which happens to be the same list as writing well.

Aug 20, 2026 · 17 min read

Tool

SQLite Is Enough

A small firm does not need a database server. Choosing one is a decision to take on operational work that produces nothing for a client. One file on your own machine — with WAL, foreign keys, FTS5, and a real migration path — is more capable than most lawyers realize.

Jul 31, 2026 · 13 min read

Workflow

Documents That Actually Open

Generating a .docx or a filled PDF is easy. Generating one that opens correctly on the reviewer's machine, prints right, and does not embarrass you in front of a clerk is a pipeline with five specific failure modes — all of them invisible to the code that produced the file.

Jul 30, 2026 · 12 min read

Essay

Your Firm Fits in One Folder

Everything in this section — the wiki, the agent briefs, the checklists, the eval set — lives in a single directory of plain text. That one architectural fact is what lets you change models on a Tuesday afternoon, including to one running on the machine under your desk.

Jul 29, 2026 · 12 min read

Workflow

A Check That Cannot Fail

A pre-publication link check written as a shell loop reported 'Safe to publish' without ever having checked anything. The bug, why zsh made it invisible, the fix, and the discipline that catches the whole category in thirty seconds.

Jul 28, 2026 · 15 min read

Tool

Run It Yourself, Then Let the Client Choose

The practical stack for running Qwen on firm hardware — models, runtimes, quantization, what fits in how much memory — and the client-facing tier election it makes possible. If the client picks the tier, the routing has to enforce it.

Jul 27, 2026 · 16 min read

Essay

The Model Will Be Free. The Electricity Won't.

A prediction, with the mechanism and the failure conditions: open weights drive the economic value of the model itself to nearly zero, and the durable value migrates to whoever owns compute — and beneath that, power. What a law firm should do differently if that is right.

Jul 27, 2026 · 15 min read

Essay

Clio Was the Best Thing to Happen to Small Firms. You Can Now Build Your Own.

Strip away the interface and a practice management system is a relational database, a set of views, and an API. That used to be worth every dollar. Now the database is a weekend, the connectors reach anything, and the honest question is which parts you should still rent.

Jul 24, 2026 · 16 min read

Essay

Stop Buying Software. Start Describing It.

For ten years, firm management was an integration project — assembling a stack of SaaS tools that mostly talked to each other. That era is ending. Five concepts from before I was a lawyer that decide whether you can build your own.

Jul 22, 2026 · 14 min read

Workflow

The Quote That Ends Too Early

The most common citation defect in AI-assisted legal writing is not the fabricated case. It is the real quotation that stops one clause too soon — and it is nearly invisible on review. Here is a detector that catches it mechanically.

Jul 21, 2026 · 13 min read

Essay

The Practice of Law in 2035: Predictions, With Failure Conditions

Most legal futurism is unfalsifiable, which is why it is always half-right and never useful. Twelve predictions about how AI reshapes legal practice — each with the mechanism driving it and the specific evidence that would prove it wrong.

Jul 20, 2026 · 19 min read

Tool

Parsing Primary Law Without a Summarizer

If your AI tool reads statutes through a summarizing fetch layer, you do not have a legal research system. You have a paraphrase generator with citations attached. Here is the scraper I replaced it with, and the four bugs it found.

Jul 14, 2026 · 14 min read

Tool

How Do You Know It Works? Evaluating an AI Legal Workflow

Nobody in law builds evaluation sets, so nobody can tell a workflow that got better from one that quietly got worse. Ground truth, the metrics that actually matter per task type, and why cost-weighted error is the only honest score in a law office.

Jul 13, 2026 · 17 min read

Essay

Legal Aid Turns Away Half the People Who Ask. Here Is a Market That Would Change That.

Legal aid can't hire against one-year grants, and volunteer hours consume the supervision they're supposed to add. A forward, specialty-tagged purchase commitment fixes both — and bundles the one input big firms actually have to give.

Jul 6, 2026 · 18 min read

Tool

Retrieval Is the Whole Game

Why dumping a matter file into a context window fails, why embedding search underperforms specifically on legal text, and how to build retrieval that recovers the right paragraph with a citation attached.

Jun 29, 2026 · 18 min read

Essay

An Unattributed Entry Is Honest. A Confidently Wrong One Bills the Wrong Client.

Every system that automatically ties work to a matter faces the same temptation: always produce an answer. In a law office that is the wrong design, and the reason is Rule 1.5.

Jun 22, 2026 · 14 min read

Workflow

Inbound Is an Attention Problem, Not a Volume Problem

Twelve calls, four web inquiries, a portal message and three e-service notices is not a lot of information. It is a lot of interruptions. On classifying inbound automatically, routing it by consequence, and the discipline of suppressing what does not matter.

Jun 15, 2026 · 12 min read

Tool

Running Models on Your Own Hardware: When It's Worth It

The strongest confidentiality posture is client data that never leaves the building. Here is what local models actually cost, what they are genuinely good at, where they fall down, and the hybrid architecture that is usually the right answer.

Jun 8, 2026 · 13 min read

Workflow

The Work You Did and Never Billed

Unbilled time is not a discipline problem, it is a capture problem — the work happened somewhere your billing system could not see. On reconstructing it honestly, why rounding decides whether approved equals billed, and the one rule that must never bend.

Jun 1, 2026 · 12 min read

Essay

The Failure That Says Nothing

The dangerous bug in a firm's own software is never the crash. It is the button that does nothing, the file saved to a default location, the integration that stopped syncing in March and told no one.

May 25, 2026 · 13 min read

Workflow

From the Scanner to the Calendar: A Document Intake Pipeline

The mail arrives as a stack of scanned PDFs and leaves as filed documents, calendared deadlines, and a short list of things somebody has to decide. Six steps, and a clear rule about which ones a human must approve.

May 18, 2026 · 12 min read

Essay

The Discovery of Your Prompts

Every AI-assisted workflow generates artifacts — prompts, retrieved documents, intermediate drafts, transcripts. Are they work product? Are they privileged? Does a litigation hold reach them? Nobody knows yet, and most firms are retaining them without having decided to.

May 11, 2026 · 14 min read

Tool

Connecting Claude to Clio — and Why I Had to Build It Myself

There is an open standard for exactly this problem. My practice management vendor does not implement it. So the connector is four hundred lines of my own Python, and the interesting part is not the code — it is why every firm is writing it separately.

May 4, 2026 · 15 min read

Workflow

Ask for the Matter, Not the Path

The software you build for your own firm will be used by lawyers and legal assistants, not engineers. The single fastest way to make it unusable is to inherit the vocabulary of the tools you built it with.

Apr 27, 2026 · 12 min read

Workflow

Build a Firm Wiki Your AI Can Query

The reason AI gives you generic legal work is that it has no idea where it is. A structured Obsidian knowledge base — plain markdown, real schema, provenance on every fact — turns a general assistant into one that already knows your practice.

Apr 20, 2026 · 15 min read

Essay

What You Owe the Client You Automated

Do you have to tell a client you used AI on their matter? What happens to the fee when a task takes twenty minutes instead of two hours? The disclosure question is genuinely unsettled — the fee question is not, and it cuts against the lawyer.

Apr 13, 2026 · 12 min read

Workflow

Never Compute a Deadline From Memory

Minnesota's three-day mail rule moved in 2020. Rule 6.05 was abrogated; the text now lives in Rule 6.01(e). If you learned it the old way you have been carrying a wrong rule for years — and so has every AI you ask.

Apr 6, 2026 · 11 min read

Workflow

Verifying Form Is Not Verifying Truth: Building a Citation Gate

A fabricated case is the easy failure — it does not exist, so somebody notices. The dangerous one is a real case, correctly cited, standing for something it never said. Here is the four-pass verification gate that catches it.

Mar 23, 2026 · 12 min read

Workflow

Hire Specialists, Not an Assistant

One general-purpose AI assistant gives you a capable generalist with no limits and no handoffs. A real office is not organized that way, and neither should this be. On writing agent briefs, and why the limits matter more than the capabilities.

Mar 9, 2026 · 13 min read

Workflow

Your Templates Are Your Real Knowledge Base

Every firm's institutional knowledge lives in its form file, and every firm's form file is quietly wrong in places nobody has checked since 2014. On template hygiene, stale-rule propagation, and why generation should populate a template rather than rebuild one.

Mar 2, 2026 · 11 min read

Essay

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good: How Lawyer Regulation Prices People Out of Justice

Nine of every ten ethics complaints in Minnesota close with no discipline at all — and every one of them was answered by a lawyer. A look at what our regulatory apparatus costs the people who never get a lawyer in the first place.

Feb 23, 2026 · 16 min read

Essay

Six Windows: The Hidden Cost of Practicing Law With AI

AI can draft, research, and summarize. It cannot tell you what you were doing. A working attorney on the mental load of parallel work — and the kanban board built to carry it.

Feb 9, 2026 · 14 min read

The Premise

Why this exists

Most people with a real legal problem never see a lawyer. Not because they have no claim, and not because no lawyer would take it — but because an hour of legal help costs more than they have. Legal aid is chronically underfunded; pro bono is essential and will never scale to the size of the gap.

If we are serious about opening the courthouse door to the people currently standing outside it, there is one lever with enough leverage to matter: the cost of producing legal work has to come down. A lawyer who can carry more files well is a lawyer who can say yes to files the economics would otherwise rule out.

So everything here is written for other lawyers — solos, small firms, anyone whose bottleneck is hours rather than talent — and everything here is free.

The only thing we ask

There is no signup, no course, no subscription, and nothing for sale. We are not asking for donations.

If something here saves you time, spend some of it on people who could not otherwise afford you.

Take the case at a rate that works for someone on a fixed income. Keep a sliding scale. Say yes to the file you would otherwise have to turn down on economics. That is the entire price.

A note on what you will not find here

Nothing in this section discusses a client, a matter, or a real case. Screenshots use invented clients and file numbers. Everything here is general commentary on practice management — it is not legal advice, it is not ethics advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Every lawyer is responsible for their own compliance in their own jurisdiction.

Practice Lab

The short way in

Get new articles as they land

How the articles relate

The same data, undrawn

Everything in the Lab

Get new articles as they land

Why this exists

The only thing we ask

A note on what you will not find here

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