For the legal tech and broader tech industries, 2025 was a year of consolidation and AI-fueled investment. The pace of merger activity accelerated as the year progressed, with companies trying to strengthen their position in an increasingly competitive market. The volume of funding rounds and acquisitions overshadowed nearly every other announcement as venture capital and private equity firms poured record levels of money into legal tech.
Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Brian Powers, the co-founder and CEO of Markups.ai, a company that created an AI agent called Agent Marko to draft, revise and analyze contracts from clients' inboxes with no new platform required, and Debbie Epstein Henry, the founder of DEH Consulting, Speaking, Writing and the chief strategic adviser to Markups.ai.
Lawyers often make their prose harder to follow than it needs to be. One of the worst culprits is time-toggling—those unannounced leaps from present to past, from recent to remote, from actual to hypothetical.
Previously, I spoke about how artificial intelligence has been here for a long time and how lawyers can use it to help them practice law and run their firms more efficiently. Now, we will focus on how lawyers can use AI well and integrate it into their practice, as well as what they can expect in the future.
Rarely do issues before the Supreme Court make it to commercials during the World Series. But in the first two games between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays, there were commercials from the Province of Ontario consisting of a 1987 radio address from President Ronald Reagan strongly denouncing tariffs. On Nov. 5, the legality of President Donald Trump’s tariffs will come before the Supreme Court in two consolidated cases.
Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Olivia Mockel, the chief brand and market strategy officer at SurePoint Technologies; Debbie Foster, the CEO of the Affinity Consulting Group; and Laura Wenzel, the global marketing and insights director at iManage.
Justice can be defined as the quality of being impartial or fair. In practice, fairness has never been evenly distributed. Access to justice has always been available to those who can afford it, while those without the necessary means were often left to their own devices. That unfortunate reality reflects inherent inequity; when only the wealthiest in a society can afford legal representation, injustice inevitably follows.
The 18th century gave the Western world revolutions of every sort—scientific, political, linguistic—and in America, it gave rise to the most consequential style debate in the nation’s history. The argument was not about punctuation but about the very texture of statehood: what it meant to commit a nation’s founding to paper.
I’ve defended plenty of white-collar crimes throughout my career. For some, the phrase evokes images of high-status business professionals engaging in fraud for financial gain. For me and many others who defend the criminally accused, though, white-collar crimes refer to any nonviolent financial criminal allegation.
In the last couple of years, artificial intelligence has advanced well beyond the wildest expectations of most of us. Generative and reasoning AI is here, and it is transforming industries across the globe, including the legal profession. As lawyers, understanding AI and its applications can significantly enhance our practice, improve client services and streamline operations.
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