Purpose-Built AI vs. General AI: The Bonfire vs. Blowtorch Analogy Mathew shares a powerful analogy from Daza Greenwood about the difference between general AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and purpose-built legal AI. General AI is like a massive bonfire-incredibly powerful and versatile, but not specialized. Purpose-built legal AI is like taking that fire and harnessing it into a blowtorch - you can now weld with precision.
Market forces such as rising attorney salaries, persistent inflation, and unrelenting demand in premium practices are giving firms the confidence to push hourly rates beyond historical norms.
Earlier this month, we released our 2025 Outside Counsel Rankings, highlighting the go-to law firms for in-house counsel. In addition to telling us which firms they engage for legal services, in-house lawyers were also asked to share some feedback about these firms: "What are the firm's particular strengths (or weaknesses)? Would you recommend hiring the firm(s) to peers?" In this brief quiz, we've included a selection of comments about the firms featured in the Top Tier of the latest rankings.
The speed of AI development gets most of the headlines, but the law is running a race of its own. Legislators and regulators are releasing new rules at a pace that can surprise even the most seasoned compliance teams. For in-house counsel, this creates a constant challenge: how to give sound, forward-looking advice when the ground under your feet is shifting.
According to a new report from the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), the number of in-house counsel in the United States has been consistently growing at a far higher rate than the number of lawyers working in either private practice or government. The report, which analyzed data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics report, finds that the in-house counsel population rose by almost 90% between 2008 and 2024, from 78,000 to 145,000.
Private practice lawyers were more than five times as likely as their in-house counterparts to choose hourly billing, while in-house counsel were more than twice as likely to choose value-based or outcome-driven pricing.
