Happy Friday!
📚 This week's resource: The Best AI Courses & Resources for Legal Professionals
Our 2026 guide to the credible, mostly-free places to actually build AI fluency — straight from the labs building it, the law schools teaching it, and the ABA and state bars setting the rules.
Two stories from the past few weeks captured where we are with AI in law. The U.S. government ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its newest model, Fable 5. The same week, a Mississippi judge sanctioned lawyers on both sides of a case for filing briefs built on AI-hallucinated citations.
The lesson isn't "AI is dangerous" or "AI is unstoppable." It's that the gap in our profession is no longer access to these tools - everyone has them now. The gap is fluency: knowing what the technology actually does, where it breaks, and what the rules require of you when you use it.
That's what we built our new guide to close - the best places for legal professionals to actually learn AI, straight from the labs building this technology, the law schools teaching it, and the ABA and state bars setting the rules. All credible, most of it free.
AI won't replace lawyers, but lawyers who understand it will have an enormous edge over those who don't. That's why we treat this as a human-capital business first - the value on our platform has always been the people, and the best investment any of us can make right now is in our own judgment about these tools.
The tools will keep changing. We're long on humans.
— Pieter Gunst
CEO & Co-Founder, Legal.io
Also from Legal.io:
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📊 Data-Driven Legal
$1.77T
SpaceX's valuation in its June 12 Nasdaq debut, the largest IPO in history - pricing at $135/share, raising ~$75B, and closing its first day up 19%.
$235K
The new BigLaw first-year base after Milbank reset its scale. McDermott, Quinn Emanuel and others matched within days.
52%
Share of U.S. in-house counsel now using generative AI - double last year's 23%. 64% expect to lean less on outside counsel.
📰 Industry Snapshot
U.S. orders Anthropic to cut foreign access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
In the first-ever U.S. export-control directive on a large language model, the government told Anthropic to bar all foreign-national access - citing a suspected jailbreak - forcing the company to disable both models for everyone.
Morgan & Morgan explores stake sale, eyes a long-term IPO
The largest U.S. personal-injury firm has hired JPMorgan to weigh a $1B+ minority-stake sale, as private equity circles law firms - though John Morgan calls the talks early and the regulatory hurdles real.
Judge cancels trial after lawyers on both sides filed AI hallucinations
A Mississippi federal judge disqualified all four attorneys in a fee dispute after both sides cited nonexistent cases, barring two from her court for two years and fining each lawyer up to $3,500.
Silent Ransom Group targets law firms with fake IT-support calls
Mandiant and the FBI warn that the extortion gang is hitting U.S. law firms via callback phishing, stealing client data within hours and demanding ransom within 30 minutes of breach.
Sandstone raises $30M to bring AI to in-house legal teams
The Lightspeed-led Series A - just six months after a $10M seed - targets workflow and relationship management for corporate legal departments, with customers including Wayfair, Mercury and ElevenLabs.
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