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Expanding Fault Lines in Legal Technology

The Team at TheFormTool — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:32:55 +0000

Expanding Fault Lines in Legal Technology

This article was originally published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Division’s publication, Law Technology Today in The Professional Infrastructure Series — Article I.

This article is the first in a four-part series examining what may be a growing fracture within legal technology itself: a separation between technologies optimized primarily for convenience and scale, and technologies optimized for professional manageability, accountability, and control.

For more than two decades, the legal profession has been engaged in an accelerating technological transition. What began as relatively straightforward digitization—word processing, email, searchable databases, and electronic filing—evolved into workflow automation, cloud collaboration, software-as-a-service platforms, and now increasingly AI-driven systems capable of drafting, summarizing, recommending, and even giving an appearance of reasoning.

Much of this evolution has been presented as inevitable progress. Faster systems. Smarter systems. More integrated systems. More automated systems.

And in many respects, that progress has been real. Legal technology has unquestionably improved access to information, reduced administrative burden, accelerated document production, improved searchability, enabled remote collaboration, and expanded the operational capabilities of firms of every size.

But alongside those advances, another development has quietly emerged — one less discussed, but potentially more important. The legal profession is becoming increasingly dependent on systems it does not fully control.

This is not an argument against artificial intelligence, cloud systems, automation, or technological modernization. Nor is it a defense of nostalgia or institutional resistance. The legal profession has always evolved alongside technology, and it should continue to do so.

The issue is not whether technology should assist professionals; it’s whether professionals remain capable of meaningfully controlling the systems on which they increasingly rely. That distinction may become one of the defining professional questions of the next decade.

How Automation Became So Heavy

Modern legal automation did not begin with AI. It began with structure.

The earliest generations of document automation systems emerged from a relatively straightforward professional problem: legal documents contain large amounts of repeated structure, repeated language, repeated logic, and repeated information. Firms handling high volumes of transactional or procedural work needed ways to standardize drafting, reduce repetitive labor, and minimize clerical inconsistency.

The solution was enterprise automation.

These systems were powerful, often extraordinarily so. They could generate highly sophisticated documents, assemble packages of forms, manage conditional language, and standardize work across large organizations. For major firms and institutional users, they represented a substantial operational advantage.

But the defining characteristic of enterprise legal automation was not merely capability. It was institutional weight.

The traditional enterprise model often assumed dedicated implementation cycles, specialized consultants, centralized infrastructure, and long-term organizational commitment. These systems frequently mirrored the operational assumptions of the broader enterprise software era of the 1990s and early 2000s: large organizations, centralized IT governance, expensive deployments, and highly structured workflows, which many of today’s tech vendors continue to carry.

For many firms, particularly smaller and mid-sized practices, the burden increasingly became part of the problem.

Over time, the market’s dissatisfaction was not necessarily directed at automation itself. Firms still wanted efficiency, standardization, and scalability. What they increasingly resisted was friction: implementation friction, infrastructure friction, consultant dependence, technical complexity, and operational heaviness.

The market did not abandon automation. In many ways, it abandoned infrastructure fatigue.

The Rise of Convenience Infrastructure

Into that environment came the modern cloud workflow model.

Browser-based systems promised rapid deployment, simplified onboarding, lower technical barriers, integrated collaboration, subscription accessibility, and increasingly broad workflow ecosystems. The new generation of platforms emphasized ease rather than institutional complexity. The appeal was obvious.

Organizations no longer needed to build or maintain large internal systems merely to automate routine workflows. Firms could subscribe rather than deploy. Infrastructure became abstracted. Complexity became externalized. This shift was not irrational. In many contexts, it represented genuine progress. But it also quietly changed the nature of professional dependence.

Historically, firms operated systems they largely understood, controlled, and managed internally. Increasingly, however, they work within ecosystems built on external infrastructure, continuous software updates, cloud processing layers, integrated services, and operational chains extending far beyond the firm itself. As those layers expand, older priorities such as local control, auditability, infrastructure independence, and professional manageability become harder to preserve.

The Arrival of AI-centric Systems

The newest phase of legal technology evolution has accelerated this transition exponentially.

In just two years artificial intelligence systems have been promoted from research tools to functions once associated primarily with human reasoning: summarization, analysis, organization, recommendation, drafting, and even argument formation.

Again, many of these tools are genuinely useful. AI-assisted research can dramatically accelerate information review. Summarization tools can reduce administrative overhead. Language models can help professionals process enormous quantities of material more efficiently than ever before. The issue is not whether these systems possess utility.

The issue is the degree to which professional responsibility is being delegated to systems that are probabilistic, opaque, and difficult to meaningfully supervise. Recent sanctions involving fabricated authority have made the risk visible.

For years, AI in legal environments was largely discussed as an assistive technology — a research aide, a productivity enhancer, or a support layer operating under direct human supervision. Increasingly, however, the profession appears to be moving from “AI as supervised assistant” toward “AI as operational participant.”

That transition is profound because professional systems historically depended not merely on outcomes, but on inspectability. Lawyers supervised junior attorneys, paralegals, clerks, and assistants whose reasoning, sources, and work processes could ultimately be examined and understood.

Probabilistic systems change that relationship.

A language model may generate persuasive language without exposing the reasoning structure behind it. An AI-generated draft may appear authoritative while embedding subtle inaccuracies, unsupported assumptions, fabricated citations, or unverifiable conclusions. Even when outputs appear convincing, professionals may remain unable to fully inspect the internal processes that produced them.

This creates a new category of professional dependence: dependence not merely on software, but on abstraction itself.

As the Boundaries Disappear

Public discussions about cloud systems and AI often focus on visible events: outages, hallucinated citations, vendor breaches, ransomware attacks, compromised accounts, or sanctions involving fabricated authority. These events matter. But they may not be the deepest issue. The deeper issue is dependence.

More specifically, modern firms increasingly depend on external infrastructure, vendors, connectivity, cloud operations, and AI systems in ways that can be difficult to fully see or manage.

Modern professional systems are becoming extraordinarily layered. Firms increasingly operate within environments where the boundaries between internal systems, cloud infrastructure, AI processing, and third-party services are becoming progressively more difficult to distinguish.

Control boundaries are dissolving.

And importantly, this transition is occurring extraordinarily quickly.

The Economic Accelerators Driving Legal Technology

Part of the speed of this transition is technological. Part of it is economic.

Law firms face growing pressure to reduce costs, increase throughput, respond to client resistance over fees, and deliver work more quickly. At the same time, legal technology vendors face their own pressures to expand markets, justify subscription models, attract investment, and position themselves around artificial intelligence.

Those pressures now reinforce each other. Firms want efficiency and scale. Vendors want adoption and recurring revenue. AI companies, after enormous infrastructure investment, need professional markets to absorb increasingly capable systems.

None of these incentives is inherently improper. But together they create a powerful acceleration effect. Technology is not merely being adopted because it is available; it is being pushed forward by converging economic expectations.

That matters because professional responsibility does not move at the same speed as software deployment. Duties of competence, confidentiality, supervision, accountability, and judgment require time, structure, and institutional understanding. When economic pressure accelerates technology faster than firms can meaningfully manage it, speed itself becomes a professional concern.

Convenience Infrastructure Versus Professional Infrastructure

One way to understand the current fracture in legal technology is to distinguish between two increasingly different optimization models.

Convenience infrastructure optimizes for accessibility, integration, speed, abstraction, synchronization, and frictionless use.

Professional infrastructure optimizes for accountability, manageability, inspectability, continuity, reproducibility, and professional control.

Neither model is inherently illegitimate, but they are not identical. And different legal tasks may tolerate different levels of abstraction and uncertainty.

A marketing workflow may tolerate substantial automation variability. General research assistance may tolerate probabilistic support. Privileged client drafting, court filings, and formal legal analysis may tolerate far less.

This distinction may become increasingly important as firms attempt to determine which technologies belong in which professional environments. Because not every professional task can tolerate substituting probabilistic infrastructure for professional judgment.

Driving Versus Riding

Perhaps the clearest way to understand the present transition is this: the profession increasingly risks becoming a passenger inside systems it neither fully controls nor fully understands.

That does not mean the systems lack value. Nor does it mean professionals should reject technological progress.

But it does raise a serious question: are professionals still driving their operational systems, or are they increasingly along for the ride?

For decades, legal technology discussions focused primarily on capability: What can the systems do?

The emerging question may be different: Can professionals meaningfully manage the rapidly expanding systems on which they now depend?

That distinction may ultimately matter more.

The Beginning of a Larger Discussion

The legal technology market no longer appears to be converging toward a single dominant model.

Instead, it may be fracturing into competing philosophies: enterprise control, cloud convenience, AI abstraction, and professionally managed systems designed around accountability and operational sovereignty.

This series will explore those competing models in greater depth.

The next article will examine the distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems, and why reproducibility, inspectability, and professional manageability may become increasingly important in an era of rapidly accelerating abstraction.

The future of professional technology may depend less on raw capability than on whether professionals remain capable of meaningfully directing the systems on which they rely.

This article was originally published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Division’s blog, Law Technology Today in The Professional Infrastructure Series — Article I.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/resources/law-technology-today/2026/expanding-fault-lines-in-legal-technology/

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ABA Law Technology Today Publishes First Article in Professional Infrastructure Series

The Team at TheFormTool — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:59:23 +0000

ABA Law Technology Today Publishes First Article in Professional Infrastructure Series

ABA Law Technology Today has published the first article in a four-part series from TheFormTool on legal technology, professional responsibility, and control.

The article, “Expanding Fault Lines in Legal Technology,” examines a growing tension in legal technology: the profession’s increasing dependence on systems optimized for convenience, scale, and automation, even when those systems may be difficult for lawyers and firms to fully understand, supervise, or control.

The series is not an argument against artificial intelligence, cloud systems, or legal technology modernization. The profession has always evolved with technology, and it should continue to do so.

The question is different:

Are lawyers still meaningfully directing the systems on which they rely, or are they increasingly becoming passengers inside them?

From the article:

“The issue is not whether technology should assist professionals; it’s whether professionals remain capable of meaningfully controlling the systems on which they increasingly rely. That distinction may become one of the defining professional questions of the next decade.”

The first article traces the evolution from heavy enterprise automation systems to cloud-based convenience platforms and now to AI-driven systems that increasingly participate in drafting, summarizing, recommending, and analyzing professional work.

It introduces a distinction between convenience infrastructure and professional infrastructure. Convenience infrastructure is optimized for speed, accessibility, integration, and scale. Professional infrastructure is optimized for accountability, inspectability, reproducibility, manageability, and control.

That distinction matters because not every legal task can tolerate the same level of uncertainty. Marketing copy, scheduling, and general research assistance may tolerate substantial automation variability. Privileged client drafting, court filings, and formal legal analysis may require much more direct professional oversight.

This article was originally published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Division’s blog, Law Technology Today.

Read the full article at ABA Law Technology Today: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/resources/law-technology-today/2026/expanding-fault-lines-in-legal-technology/

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Who Controls Your Client Data During Document Automation?

The Team at TheFormTool — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:31:32 +0000

Who Controls Your Client Data During Document Automation?

A Practical Question Before Any Automation Project

A professional document can contain far more than words on a page. A lawyer may be working with client names, case facts, financial terms, draft clauses, settlement details, or confidential instructions. An accountant may be preparing documents that include tax records, account numbers, ownership information, or company figures. HR and professional services teams may be working with compensation, employment, personal, or internal business information.

The finished Word document may stay inside the organization. That does not necessarily mean the information used to create it stayed there while the document was being assembled. In a document automation system, information may be entered into a questionnaire, processed by software, used to select clauses, applied to calculations, and then placed into one or more final documents.

Before adopting any automation system, a firm should understand that full path. The central question is simple: who controls the client data while the document is being created?

The Final Document Is Only One Part of the Workflow

Many privacy discussions focus on where the final document is stored. That matters, but it is only part of the issue. Document automation involves several steps, and confidential information may be handled at each one.

A typical workflow may include entering client or matter details, applying document rules, selecting language, completing dates or calculations, generating one document or a full packet, and saving the result for review. Depending on the system, some of those steps may occur on the user’s computer, on a firm server, in a vendor-controlled cloud system, or through a combination of services.

That is why data control is not only a storage question. It is a workflow question. A firm needs to know where information is entered, where it is processed, whether it is transmitted outside the firm’s environment, and who can access it at each stage.

The First Question: Where Is the Data Processed?

The most important privacy question is often the easiest to ask and the hardest to answer clearly: where does the processing take place?

Different automation products use different models. Some operate locally on the user’s machine. Some work inside a private network. Some send information to an outside server for processing. Some combine local software with cloud-based services.

No model is automatically perfect. A local system still depends on secure devices, passwords, permissions, backups, and staff practices. A cloud system may have sophisticated safeguards but may also move client information outside the firm’s direct control. The point is not to assume. The point is to ask and verify.

Useful questions include:

Does client or matter data leave the user’s computer or firm network?
Does the provider process document contents or questionnaire answers?
Are temporary files or saved responses created during assembly?
Can the system work without an internet connection?
Does the workflow rely on outside services to complete a document?

Control Also Means Storage, Access, and Retention

Processing location is only the beginning. A firm also needs to know what remains after processing and who controls it.

For example, completed documents may be saved in a local folder, a document management system, a shared drive, or a provider-controlled platform. Form answers may be discarded immediately, saved for later reuse, or stored as part of a matter record. Templates may be editable by a small group or available to many users.

These choices affect both privacy and management. Firms should understand who can view templates, who can generate documents, who can access completed files, whether saved answers remain available, how backups are handled, and what happens when an employee leaves.

Local control can be valuable because it lets the organization use its own storage, permission, backup, and retention rules. It also requires the organization to manage those duties carefully.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Document Automation System

A practical review does not need to begin with theory. It can begin with direct questions that identify where responsibility sits.

Data movement

Does any client data leave our device, server, or network?
Is document content transmitted during generation?
Does the software contact outside servers as part of the process?
Are questionnaire answers saved after the document is created?

Access

Can provider staff view our information?
Can user access be limited by role or password?
Who may change approved templates or document logic?
Can we control where completed documents are saved?

Storage and retention

Where are temporary files stored?
Can saved answers be deleted?
How are backups handled?
Who controls retention rules?

Operational control

Can the system work when the internet is unavailable?
What happens if the provider’s service is down?
Can we continue using our existing Word templates?
Can we keep the document process inside our existing Word-based workflow?

Clear answers help firms compare systems honestly. They also keep the discussion grounded in the actual movement of information rather than general promises about security.

Why No-Cloud Document Automation Can Matter

No-cloud document automation is not a slogan. For many professional users, it is a control choice.

When document assembly happens inside Microsoft Word and does not require cloud processing, the firm can keep the work within systems it already manages. Client information can remain on the user’s computer, internal network, or chosen document storage location, subject to the firm’s own security practices.

That approach can be especially important for lawyers, accountants, consultants, HR teams, and others who work with confidential professional documents. It may reduce the number of outside systems involved in the document process, make the data path easier to understand, and help the organization apply its own access and retention rules.

No-cloud automation does not eliminate the need for good security. Computers still need protection. Shared folders still need permissions. Backups still need care. Documents sent by email still need judgment. The advantage is that the firm can more clearly identify and control where the information travels.

How TheFormTool® Fits This Question

TheFormTool’s approach is deliberately Word-based. TheFormTool, Doxserá, Doxserá DB, and related products work inside Microsoft Word rather than requiring users to send documents to an outside drafting platform for assembly.

That matters because many professional offices already have a Word-based drafting process, existing template libraries, document management rules, and internal security practices. TheFormTool helps those offices improve the document process without forcing confidential drafting work into a cloud-dependent system.

A clean Word template can hold approved language. A guided form can ask for the information needed for the document. Rules can include or exclude language, repeat information where it belongs, calculate dates or amounts, and generate related documents from the same answers. Completed files can be saved where the firm chooses.

TheFormTool does not replace internal security policies, professional judgment, or final review. It gives firms a practical way to automate repeated Word document work while keeping the path of client information easier to see and manage.

A Sensible Data-Control Review

Before automating a document, a firm should map the information path. Start with the data the form collects: names, addresses, financial details, matter facts, employment information, tax records, case notes, or other confidential content. Then identify who enters it, where it is processed, where it is saved, and who can view it later.

The review should also consider which users can edit templates, which users can only run approved forms, whether saved answers are retained, how backups are handled, and what happens when access must be removed. In many organizations, this review should involve both document experts and technology or security staff, because each group sees a different part of the workflow.

A clear review may lead to different answers for different document types. A simple internal form may need one level of control. A client-facing agreement, tax document, medical record, or employment file may need another. The important step is to decide before the process is handed to everyday users.

Conclusion

Document automation privacy begins before the final Word file exists. It begins when a user enters information, and it continues through processing, storage, review, sharing, backup, and deletion.

Firms should ask where data goes, who can see it, who controls it, and what remains after the document is generated. No-cloud, Word-based automation can make those questions easier to answer because more of the process can remain inside systems the firm already controls. The right system should not require a firm to lose sight of client information in order to create better documents.

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Every Firm Has One Person It Can’t Afford to Lose

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:31:43 +0000

Scaling Expertise – Article 1

Every Firm Has One Person It Can’t Afford to Lose

Every professional organization has one.

The attorney everyone consults before filing an unusual motion. The partner who knows exactly how a complex transaction should be structured. The litigator who has refined an argument through years of experience. The assistant who remembers why a particular clause changed ten years ago.

Ask around the office who would be hardest to replace, and you’ll usually hear the same names. Most firms accept that reality.

One firm we worked with decided to change it.

Instead of allowing expertise to remain inside individual lawyers, they asked a different question:

How can the firm’s best lawyers work for everyone?

It was one of the most important management ideas we’ve encountered in nearly twenty years working with professional document systems.

A Different Way of Thinking

The firm was large enough that it didn’t have one “best” lawyer. It had dozens. Each was recognized as an authority in a particular practice area. Estate planning. Litigation. Real estate. Corporate. Employment. Tax.

Traditionally, that kind of expertise creates dependence. Other lawyers ask questions. Drafts circulate for review. The experts become increasingly busy because everyone relies on them.

This firm chose another path. Each expert became responsible for developing and maintaining the firm’s best work product in that area. Not merely writing documents. Capturing judgment. Explaining choices. Refining language. Improving procedures.

The firm’s technical specialists then transformed that expertise into intelligent document systems that every lawyer could use.

The result was remarkable.

A young lawyer could begin with the same carefully developed knowledge that previously required years of experience—or a call to one of the firm’s experts. The experts continued improving the system. Everyone else benefited from every improvement.

Expertise Became Infrastructure

Most organizations think of expertise as something people possess. This firm treated expertise as infrastructure. That single shift changed everything.

Instead of answering the same drafting questions repeatedly, experts improved the underlying system. Instead of correcting recurring mistakes, they eliminated the conditions that caused them. Instead of becoming bottlenecks, they became architects.

Every improvement they made strengthened the work of hundreds of other lawyers. Expertise no longer flowed one conversation at a time. It became part of the firm’s daily operation.

The Real Asset

Many firms believe their greatest assets are their people. That’s certainly true. But there is another asset hiding inside those people. Their accumulated judgment. Their experience. Their understanding of what works—and why.

If that knowledge leaves when someone retires, changes firms, or simply goes on vacation, the organization loses far more than another employee. It loses part of its institutional memory.

The most successful organizations we’ve observed understand that expertise should be captured while it is available, refined while it is current, and continually improved by the people most qualified to improve it. Not because experts are replaceable. Because they are irreplaceable.

The Experts Were Multiplied

One detail from that firm’s experience has stayed with us. The experts never became less important. Quite the opposite. Their influence expanded dramatically. Instead of helping one lawyer at a time, they helped hundreds. Instead of reviewing the same issues repeatedly, they invested their time making the entire organization better.

Their expertise became available every day, on every matter, to every lawyer using the firm’s systems. The experts weren’t replaced.

They were multiplied.

An Unexpected Outcome

Years later, the lawyer who first championed this strategy has become one of the firm’s senior partners. Looking back, that isn’t surprising. He wasn’t proposing a better way to create documents. He was proposing a better way to manage knowledge. He recognized that the firm’s greatest competitive advantage wasn’t software. It wasn’t templates.

It wasn’t even its lawyers. It was the expertise those lawyers had accumulated over decades of practice. His insight was that expertise should become an institutional asset rather than remain an individual possession.

Every Firm Has One Person It Can’t Afford to Lose

Actually, every firm has many. The question isn’t whether those people exist. The question is whether their knowledge benefits only the people who know to ask—or whether it strengthens the entire organization.

The firms that will thrive over the next decade won’t simply hire outstanding professionals. They’ll find ways to capture, preserve, improve, and distribute the expertise those professionals develop. Because the greatest contribution an expert can make isn’t solving today’s problem.

It’s making tomorrow’s professionals better equipped to solve theirs.

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Add Real Christmas Cheer: Precision, Productivity, and the Tools Lawyers Deserve

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:21:17 +0000

Add Real Christmas Cheer: Precision, Productivity, and the Tools Lawyers Deserve

December tends to make lawyers reflective. Court calendars quiet down, inboxes slow just enough to allow thinking, and the year’s accumulated frustrations come into view: the documents that took too long, the numbering that fell apart at the worst time, the tools that promised much and delivered little.

In 2025, the profession confronted a deeper issue: precision is not optional.

Courts issued sanctions for fabricated citations. Judges warned that AI tools were “scheming” to hide mistakes. Lawyers discovered that convenience often comes with invisible risks — especially when cloud tools handle confidential material or generate language without oversight.

Yet the real story of 2025 isn’t about technology gone wrong. It’s about the quiet, powerful ways legal professionals reclaimed control over their documents.

1. Precision Is the New Professional Margin

Across thousands of firms worldwide, one theme dominated: the cost of imprecision is rising. When AI produces text with confidence but not accuracy, lawyers must verify everything. When cloud systems require the upload of confidential client data, privilege suddenly becomes negotiable.

What lawyers want, and what the market increasingly demands, is predictability — tools that do the same thing every time, tools that never improvise, tools that never learn from your private files, and tools that never leak.

That’s why offline, rule-based automation made a resurgence this year. Firms discovered that the safest systems were also the fastest.

2. The Hidden Cost of Word Workarounds

We tallied results from millions of automated words this year. The same patterns appeared everywhere:

Hours lost fixing captions.
Hours lost repairing broken Word numbering.
Hours lost patching reused documents.

These costs accumulate quietly. No single moment seems catastrophic, but the cut-and-paste tax is real — and for many firms it totals dozens of hours a month.

Snapnumbers users often tell us they adopted it for one document and realized they’d been losing time in every document for years. PRO and Doxserá^® users say something similar: they automate one agreement, then a second, then a dozen, then hundreds.

Document automation isn’t just a productivity increase; it’s a quality increase. Lawyers produce more consistent work when the structure is right before they begin.

3. What the Highest-Performing Firms Have in Common

The firms that made the largest leap in 2025 did not necessarily automate the most. They automated the right things:

Captions that adjust themselves.
Parties that switch roles automatically.
Logic that determines which clauses appear.
Structured templates that prevent errors before they occur.

These systems don’t make drafting faster only; they make drafting better.

4. The Gift of a Document That Behaves Itself

Here’s where the Christmas cheer comes in.

Law firms don’t need more holiday platitudes. They need relief. They need fewer frustrating hours. They need documents that stay in line.

Snapnumbers is one of the smallest but most delightful fixes in the profession. It removes a daily irritation — perhaps the most common irritation — for anyone who touches Microsoft Word. And once numbering behaves, everything else gets calmer.

If you want to give your team (or yourself) something meaningful this season, give them stability.

5. Looking Toward 2026

The legal landscape will continue evolving, but two things will remain true:

Clients expect flawless work.
Lawyers must protect confidentiality and privilege with absolute rigor.

Tools that respect those principles — offline, predictable, controlled by the author, in other words rule-based automation — will define the next decade of legal technology.

If 2025 was the year precision returned to the law, then 2026 can be the year it becomes permanent.

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The Human Advantage: Why AI Will Always Need a Supervisor

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:59:14 +0000

The Human Advantage

Why AI Still Needs Will Always Need a Supervisor

Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming a fixture in legal drafting—from contract clauses to court filings. But as the tools evolve, a hard truth remains:

AI doesn’t know what it’s saying.

And it certainly doesn’t know what it means.

Which is why lawyers—real lawyers—must stay firmly in the loop

When AI Fails Loudly

We’ve all seen the headlines: AI-generated court briefs citing non-existent cases; legal assistants drafting with tools that “hallucinate” clauses or invent facts.

Fortunately, litigators discover these errors quickly. Filings are public. Opposing counsel reads them. Judges push back. There’s a built-in correction mechanism—even if it’s embarrassing.

But what about the legal work that’s invisible until it’s too late?

- Wills and trusts that sit in a drawer for a decade
- Health care directives that emerge only in crisis
- Commercial contracts with buried errors
- Real estate documents with quietly missing protections

When AI creates those, and no one checks the work?

That’s not a correction mechanism — it’s a time bomb.

HITL Isn’t Good Enough

In tech circles, the phrase “Human in the Loop” (HITL) is offered as a safety valve: a person, somewhere, monitors the machine.

But in legal practice, not just any human will do.

And passive oversight isn’t enough.

Confidentiality. Judgment. Responsibility. These aren’t tasks that can be outsourced to an untrained user or anonymous reviewer.

The law demands more than HITL.

It requires something better:

Introducing LITL – Lawyer in the Loop

Lawyer in the Loop (LITL) is a professional standard for the ethical use of AI in legal work.

It means no AI-generated content enters the legal record—or reaches the client—without being directly reviewed, supervised, and signed off by a licensed attorney.

It’s not an obstacle to progress. It’s the only path forward that protects:

- Attorney-client privilege
- Ethical accountability
- Human judgment
- Legal integrity

Why This Matters Now

Some in the legal tech world are quietly promoting HITL as the way forward: hire non-lawyers to review AI output, let junior staff handle the oversight, or worst of all—let clients verify their own documents.

That’s not scalable.
It’s not ethical.
And it’s not professional.

Clients rely on lawyers to apply training, experience, and judgment. If we’re not in the loop—really in the loop—we’ve outsourced more than work.
We’ve outsourced responsibility.

LITL Sets the Standard

LITL ensures that:

- A real lawyer makes the call
- The client’s data stays protected
- Privilege and ethics are preserved
- Errors are caught before they explode

It’s a standard for professionals.
A defense against carelessness.
And a stake in the ground for legal ethics in the AI era.

No LITL, No Trust.

We don’t let AI argue in court.
We shouldn’t let it sign off on a will, either.

If you’re a legal professional using—or thinking about using—AI for drafting, document automation, or legal intake:

- Stay in the loop.
- Be the loop.

LITL is how we build trust in the tools we choose to use.

Formal Definition for LITL:

Lawyer in the Loop (LITL) is a professional standard for the responsible use of AI in legal work. It requires that a licensed attorney—not a machine, not a paralegal, not a non-lawyer reviewer—directly supervises, reviews, and accepts responsibility for any AI-generated or AI-assisted legal output before it is relied upon or delivered to a client.

To review the white papers we’ve published on this subject, please click here.

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Scaling Artificial Intelligence

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:34:23 +0000

Scaling Artificial Intelligence

A zettabyte is 2⁷⁰ bytes or 1 billion terabytes, which is 1 billion gigabytes

History of Data

Six years ago we commented to a Webinar audience, “2,300 years ago, Macedonian information workers gathered all the knowledge in the world into the great Library of Alexandria. Its 200,000 books were made available to the fewer readers than that in the whole world.” Six years ago Forbes estimated that total world knowledge amounted to about 44 zettabytes, 44 trillion gigabytes of data, a previously unimaginable amount.

In addition to an unimaginable amount of information, it was also nearly useless, with usage rates declining precipitously as gross amounts of data exploded. Bernard Marr estimated that collectively we were using only about .5%, one-half of one percent, of the available data. He added that increasing average usage to merely .55% would dramatically increase individual company profits, productivity and the economy.

Because the growth and growth rate of new information are both increasing exponentially, it’s impossible to estimate current usage, but our somewhat informed guess is that it hasn’t moved appreciably even though total Internet users have increased from about 1 billion 20 years ago to more than 5 billion today. Data growth has been that extreme.

Comparisons Over Time

The numbers are truly staggering. From the Library of Alexandria with its 200,000 volumes holding the complete knowledge of the world to the Library of Congress, with its estimated 200 terabytes of digital and physical data, is both quite a leap and not even a drop in the bucket.

Eric Schmidt posited that from the very beginning of humanity to the year 2003, an estimated 5 exabytes of information was created, about 0.5% of a zettabyte. Today we produce that much in a couple of hours.

Today we have dozens of million-square foot data-centers that can and do move a significant percentage of Forbes’ estimate all by themselves. Artificial Intelligence centers, with far fewer people working than in manufacturing, transportation, retail and services, deliver high economic output through automation and optimization.

The old saying was “Knowledge is power.” The new one is “Data is riches and growth.”

In 1955, U.S. manufacturing employment was 16.6 million, or 32% of the total. There was tremendous popular anxiety that automation would create unemployment at an existential level. Instead total employment has grown from 65 million to 161 million, who enjoy a standard of living almost unimaginable 70 years ago.

We believe the hype on AI as a competitor to knowledge workers is overblown. Its real value is its ability to empower them, and all of us.

At TFT our role is to enable customers to put all that information to good use more efficiently and accurately than through “copy, cut and paste.”

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What does AI think of Document Assembly Firms?

The Team at TheFormTool — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 22:50:49 +0000

Most of us have seen thousands of articles on Artificial Intelligence. As always aspiring “experts” in document assembly and automation, we’ve been required to read far too many of them.

Fair is fair, so we thought it would be interesting to ask the leading large language model AI what it thinks of the firms in our business.

We found Open AI ChatGPT 4.0’s first answer a bit unsettling until it explained how it came to it’s conclusion. We wouldn’t have answered the way it did, but realistically, it’s answer was better. Two of its follow-on answers were a complete surprise.

If you’re interested in document assembly and automation or artificial intelligence, you’ll find this white paper interesting and informative.

Click to download

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Naming Our Newest Technology

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:09:34 +0000

We’ve named the new Artificial Intelligence helper in the Diagnostic Portal our Diagnostic Assistant.

We’re starting to think this technology may have a real future helping people filter huge amounts of information to find the specific bits and pieces they’re looking for. Our Diagnostic Assistant is being used by customers every day, is learning quickly, and already helping provide customers increasingly fast and accurate information.

Before long we’ll be adding another AI asset in the Knowledge Base to help customers easily access the enormous amount of information available to help increase productivity through subject-specific texts and videos.

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Is Artificial Intelligence Really Smart or Just Really Slick?

The Team at TheFormTool — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 23:39:08 +0000

Smart or Slick?

In our last newsletter we predicted that the effects of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) chat bots on the legal profession will be substantially less than the current hype.

Last week, three researchers at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley reported that the “intelligence” demonstrated by leading large language model services (“artificial intelligence” agents, in this case ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0) may not be so much intelligent as facile. Like the many smooth human talkers we’ve all known, GPT can put up an appearance of intelligence that is only skin deep, a facade. In this test, GPT’s cognitive abilities declined in selected areas both across generational versions and over time, sometimes substantially and without warning.

Yes, that’s right. AI has gotten dumber.

At TheFormTool we sell tools that leverage real intelligence, to help our customers’ real smarts compete efficiently against the artificial players.

The practical effect was illustrated in a Southern District of New York case where sanctions were ordered against two attorneys and their firm after they offered a brief that contained six citations “made up out of whole cloth” by ChatCPT and included in their filings. Opposing counsel researched the citations and found them non-existent. The judge was not pleased.

An additional concern not directly addressed in the case is a worry about disclosure to others of information relating to representation of a client. Reuters reported, “‘That’s one reason why some law firms have explicitly told lawyers not to use ChatGPT and similar programs on client matters,’ said Holland & Knight partner Josias Dewey, who has been working on developing internal artificial intelligence programs at his firm.”

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