Tool-agnostic notes from AI-enablement work — the “fights with the AI” and what building and shipping governed legal AI is actually teaching me. Newest first.
Building the AI, not billing an hour — three things any solo can use: a research tool that may already be free in your bar dues, why a citator’s red flag is a lead and not a verdict, and the one check that stays human.
Nº 4 · 2026-07-08A retracted update taught me to test the agents, not just trust their output — a self-test each agent runs before it’s believed, a cite gate that checks where a citation points, and a blind panel for the one thing with no answer key: judgement.
Nº 3 · 2026-06-22Three more lessons from building a governed legal-AI operating system — why a number in a statute is not a constant, why the model would rather create than check, and why you ship the scrubbed copy and not the source.
Nº 2 · 2026-06-12Three more lessons from building a governed legal-AI operating system — when your tools report false success, why rules that can’t run don’t hold, and giving the system a memory of itself.
Nº 1 · 2026-06-08Six things shipping a governed, 50-state legal-AI brief single-handed is teaching me — verification as the product, governed agents over clever prompts, ethics as architecture, and why shipping live is where the learning happens.
Field Notes are written for licensed attorneys and are not legal advice. The companion 50-State Brief — the governed legal-AI product these notes are drawn from — lives on the weekly catalog.