06/04/2026
Big firms have a ton of resources and for super complex fact laden cases with multiple sets of parties and discovery that requires serious amounts of man hours just to sift through the mountains of documents, only firms of a certain size are capable of responsibly prosecuting or defending those cases. HOWEVER for the other 99.9% of cases those same firms who are optimized up to their necks and have cultures where they are either focused on billing or volume of cases pushed to conclusion. ATTORNEYS IN BIG FIRMS CUT CORNERS TO PUMP UP THEIR NUMBERS and AI has been an all too seductive CORNER CUTTING TOOL, not time saving tool, not work efficiency tool but a tool to Cheat the traditional, time honored , wholistic, roll up your sleeve work that true masters of litigation do, to become familiar with every detail of the case and every contour of the legal landscape where that case exists.
When I am working on a motion, just a motion in a Trial Court (first level) I make sure to read every single case cited by the other side TO THE END. There is no way anyone can cite a case on me that is made up, because I would not only find it out but raise it to the Court early and often in my responsive papers. In appeals I will not only have read every case cited by either side, but I will also have read almost every case that cites every case cited to the point where I can talk about every case as if they are a player on the 86 Mets or 2007 Giants or the 2026 Knicks.
The fact of the matter is that the CRAFTSMANSHIP of motionwork and appellate advocacy has been slipping for at least 20yrs now. As our practice went from running through aisles of books and photocopying reams of caselaw to powerful "optimized" search engines that constantly promised the Attorney that they could spend less time reading and less time writing with all these tools that digested the writings of judges so the Attorney wouldn't have to, the Attorney then began getting further and further away from the actual stiches and seems that bind the law together, and started standing next to increasingly powerful machines simply holding a lever and only occasionally taking a few moments to tinker with the machine, but no longer putting their hands on the fabric of the law.
The average motion that gets filed today has little to no analysis of controlling caselaw, simply regurgitating it with trite and conclusory segways that amount to "Judge, THis, Then This, then This"; Never explaining why, never even attempting to sell the judge on the perfect fit, of the argument, the elegance and sleekness of the way the argument hugs the contours of the law. Frankly its clear to me that nearly 80% of attorneys NEVER READ ANY DECISION THEY CITE FROM BEGINING TO END, how do I know this? Because I do read the cases and many of the cases my adversaries cite actually stand for my client's position, and then I get to revel in using my adversaries own cases against them always throwing in a glib, "Interestingly enough Defendant cites to XYZ, which actually stands for ABC". AI and the Case Law search engines do a great job of finding the most cited cases on a topic, but as machines and not craftsmen, they don't understand the legal question presented by the particular cases; they don't understand which precedents will fit the unique shapes taken by the living breathing cases that walk in the door, cases that need the touch of a human master of legal argument.
If you have a cookie cutter case, or a monster case with thousands of pages of evidence, get a good big firm to work on your case, but keep your eye on them, like every optimized big business, they are thinking more about the bottom line, then your actual needs.
For everything else, get an attorney who is a craftsman, and who can explain to you what is going in in your case so that you understand the nuts and bolts, that person is not going to cut corners and end up using or ignoring AI hallucinations in Court filings.
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