Best Practice

George Hannah

Best Practice delivers the world's best insights in Legal AI bestpracticeai.substack.com

  1. Sep 21

    Will Chen on What Open Source Changes for Legal AI

    * Guest: Will Chen * Role: Founder, Mike OSS & LawProf * Website: mikeoss.com This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline’s trusted and verified legal AI today for free. I spoke with Will Chen, a former Latham & Watkins lawyer who is now building Mike OSS, an open-source legal AI platform, alongside LawProf, the legal education platform he originally built while at university. Will has become one of the most-followed voices in the Legal AI space; particularly around open source, the economics of legal AI platforms and whether law firms should be building more technology themselves. We discussed: → Why Will decided to open source Mike OSS, and whether open-source legal AI can become commercially sustainable. → Whether legal AI platforms are really differentiated products or, in Will’s words, increasingly competing on deployment, distribution and access to models. → Why law firms may need to start hiring and paying top engineering talent very differently if they want to build serious technology internally. → The rise of open-weight and Chinese AI models, and what a rapidly moving model frontier means for companies trying to post-train their own legal models. → Will’s advice for junior lawyers entering the profession as AI becomes significantly more capable. We also spoke about vibe coding, why lawyers still need strong fundamentals even as AI improves. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email me at george@georgehannah.com Timestamps: 01:03 Introduction and Will’s background in law and AI 03:34 Why Open Source Legal AI Matters 08:17 Coding, AI, and Legal Judgment 14:17 The Value of Legal AI Vendors 22:47 Build vs. Buy for Law Firms 29:10 The Rise of Chinese AI Models 33:02 Career Advice for Future Lawyers Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Will Chen on What Open Source Changes for Legal AI

  2. Aug 18

    Why More Companies Are Using Fractional Lawyers

    * Guest: Kenzo Onumonu * Role: Founder, Correm * Website: correm.ai This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline's trusted and verified legal AI today for free. I spoke with Kenzo, a former Bird & Bird lawyer and in-house GC who is now building Correm, a platform for companies to access and manage fractional legal talent. Having sat on both sides of the legal market, Kenzo has seen first-hand how difficult it can be for businesses to get the right legal support at the right time. Correm is built around a different model, combining flexible legal talent with technology, automated billing and AI tools to make it easier for companies to build legal capacity around the work they actually have. We discussed: → Why fractional legal teams are becoming a viable alternative to traditional hiring. → What Kenzo learned going from private practice to becoming a GC, and then a founder. → How AI changes the economics of flexible legal work and what the legal team of the future could look like. → Why lawyers may increasingly need to think about their careers as a collection of skills and experiences rather than one linear path. → Kenzo’s tips for junior lawyers navigating their career in an AI landscape. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email me at george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Why More Companies Are Using Fractional Lawyers

  3. Jul 10

    Are you selling Software or a Service?

    Guest: Jake Jones Role: Co-founder and COO, Flank LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-jones-b8769b75/ Website: flank.ai This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline's trusted and verified legal AI today for free. Sources mentioned in the episode: * Flank — flank.ai * Insights portal — insights.flank.ai * The Intake (Substack, Flank's team blog) — intakezero.substack.com I spoke with Jake Jones, co-founder and COO of Flank. He’s spent years at the forefront of legal AI across what he counts as four different paradigms and half a dozen hype cycles. He started the business in 2018 as Legal OS, modelling how experienced lawyers make decisions as knowledge graphs, built on his co-founder's father's academic work, and sold it to German law firms doing M&A. In 2021 he moved the business in-house, rebuilt it on LLMs, and now Flank runs agentic legal work inside enterprise legal teams under a model where they don't get paid until the outcome is live. We discussed: → Why vendors are already moving beyond "agentic AI" to full end to end outcomes. → The difference between selling software and selling an outcome, and why so many legal AI vendors are stuck between the two. → His theory that legal is heading toward the same moment retail banking hit with digital challenger banks in 2015, and what Big Law should do about it before it's too late. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it! Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Are you selling Software or a Service?

  4. Jun 15

    How this ex GC's frustration with legal software turned into a startup

    Guest: Brent FareseRole: CEO and Co-Founder, AlineWebsite: aline.co This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline’s trusted and verified legal AI today for free. I spoke with Brent Farese, CEO and co-founder of Aline, an agentic legal AI platform built exclusively for in-house teams. Brent trained as an IP attorney with a mechanical engineering and computer science background, then worked as Assistant General Counsel one of the world’s leading enterprise blockchain companies. We discussed: → The three tiers of document search (keyword, semantic, agentic) and why getting this right is the hard engineering problem nobody talks about→ Why legal AI is roughly two years behind agentic coding — and what infrastructure still needs to be built before it catches up→ Why frontier model providers entering legal is actually a tailwind for specialist platforms→Why making legal work cheaper and faster is likely to produce more legal work, not less→ Why “building the GitHub for law”, with proper version control, is needed in 2026. I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it. Want to feature in the next Best Practice podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    How this ex GC's frustration with legal software turned into a startup

  5. Jun 5

    Is owning the data still the moat in Legal AI? Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis Legal

    Is owning the data still the moat in legal AI?I spoke to Sean Fitzpatrick, a senior leader at LexisNexis - one of the largest legal AI companies in the world.Sean Fitzpatrick is CEO of the Global Legal Business at LexisNexis. He has been there for 21 years, growing up through the shifts from digital to cloud to AI, after starting out as a consultant at McKinsey.We discussed:→ Whether 200 billion proprietary documents are still a defining asset - or whether the nature of the moat has changed.→ Why "probably right" is the standard for frontier models, and why that standard fails in law.→ How their partnership with Harvey actually works.→ Sean's thoughts on hallucinations in legal AI.→ What happens to the junior lawyer apprenticeship model when the grunt work that builds judgment disappears.Sean has watched every major technology shift in legal over two decades, and makes the case for why content plus technology is far harder to displace than either alone. It was an honour to speak to Sean, and I hope you take something useful away from this. Know someone, or want to feature on the Best Practise Podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Is owning the data still the moat in Legal AI? Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis Legal

  6. May 12

    Andrew Thompson on What Legal AI Can Learn From Software Engineering

    Guest: Andrew Thompson Role: CTO, Orbital LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmatthewthompson/ Website: www.orbital.tech (company) | www.andrewthompson.co (personal blog) This AI platform powered over 200,000 property transactions last year and raised $60M in January to expand even further. I spoke with Andrew Thompson, CTO at Orbital. Andrew previously built the Caffè Nero app, ran product and tech at Appear Here, founded his own AI company, and now leads engineering, product and a team of in-house real estate lawyers at Orbital. We discussed: → How Orbital mix both generalist LLM’s and their own classical ML into one product. → Why legal is roughly 12-18 months behind software engineering, and how to use that lag. → What “ship early and often” actually looks like inside a regulated industry. → Andrew’s tips and advice for Andrew is an absolute genius in everything LLM’s and how to make the most of it in the physical space around us. I really hope you take away something useful from this. Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com Sources mentioned in the episode: * Orbital’s $60M Series B (Jan 2026, led by Brighton Park Capital): https://tech.orbitalwitness.com/posts/2026-01-23-series-b-announcement/ * Caffè Nero (Andrew’s previous build): https://caffenero.com * Appear Here (Andrew’s previous build): https://www.appearhere.co.uk * Seedcamp (where Andrew was a startup mentor): https://seedcamp.com * ElevenLabs (referenced re: agentic insurance): https://elevenlabs.io * Legalweek New York 2026 (referenced throughout) * McKinsey research on automatable legal work (referenced) * OpenAI ChatGPT and GPT-4 (referenced as the inflection point) * Anthropic Claude (referenced) * Google BERT and T5 (Orbital’s pre-LLM stack) Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Andrew Thompson on What Legal AI Can Learn From Software Engineering

  7. May 1

    Meet The Startup Building AI For The Messiest Part of Law

    “Crack the chronology, crack the case.” That’s what Gregory Mostyn‘s father - a barrister, then judge for 42 years - was told on his first day in chambers. Decades later, it’s the founding insight behind Wexler. I spoke with Gregory Mostyn, co-founder and CEO of Wexler, the fact intelligence platform now used by huge massive circle firms in their litigation teams. Greg isn’t a lawyer. He grew up watching his father - who handled some of the highest-profile family cases in England - come home with ten ring binders to read before court the next morning. That image, plus a stint at Entrepreneur First, became Wexler. The company has 20x’d ARR since pre-seed and just raised $5.3m led by Pear VC. We discussed: → Why Wexler went deep on litigation when every other legal AI startup was going broad → The “verification tax” and where fully agentic legal AI actually breaks down → Why consumption pricing beats per-seat for litigation work (and how they structure it) → How his 67-year-old father is now vibe-coding apps for his tennis club → What it takes to close a Big Law deal in a week I absolutely loved recording this episode and I hope you enjoy listening to it just as much as I did. Know someone that might want to come on the Best Practice Podcast? Email me at george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Meet The Startup Building AI For The Messiest Part of Law

  8. Apr 17

    Meet the Startup Building the Matter Management Layer Legal AI Forgot About

    I keep hearing about legal AI tools that do the work better. What I haven’t heard, until now, is anyone building the tool that remembers what the work is actually for. In this episode I chat with Dillon Hirandiran, founder and CEO of Counsel (gc.inc) Dillon previously worked in investment banking, then built his first startup during Covid. The experience of navigating legal work as a founder - seed rounds, Delaware flips, cap tables - is what first drew him to the problem Counsel is now solving. Counsel is an autonomous matter management system for law firms - reading every email, every message, and maintaining a persistent context layer across everything a firm has going on. We discussed: → Why the hardest problem in legal AI has never really been document generation, but instead it’s CONTEXT retention across matters. → Why clients can’t always evaluate the quality of legal work, only its responsiveness → What a “10x attorney” actually looks like when AI handles the document layer, and why being a workhorse is the worst thing a junior lawyer can be right now → Why the biggest risk to Big Law isn’t pricing pressure from in-house or AI, but is actually their own talent leaving. Want to sponsor or feature on the Best Practice Podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe

    Meet the Startup Building the Matter Management Layer Legal AI Forgot About
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About

Best Practice delivers the world's best insights in Legal AI bestpracticeai.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    George Hannah
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © George Hannah
  • Show Website
    Best Practice

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