Not a week goes by without a story about a legal matter that has been badly run. Budgets out of control. Cases called hopeless by the people who took them on in the first place. Costs arguments that feel like a trip back to before the CPR existed. Meanwhile the profession argues about how to charge. Fixed fees, capped fees, value pricing, subscription — whatever is in this year’s conference programme. It is a real argument, and I have taken part in it.

Or Why "we're end-to-end encrypted" and "our vendor holds ISO 27001" are not the same thing as being secure A number of headlines have caught my eye in the legal press of late. Aside from a seemingly endless litany of funders unable to invest wisely, sensibly, or both, it is the stories about security and AI that reliably bring a smile to my morning espresso. Security for law firms is paramount. And yet the volume of open information sent daily by email never ceases to amaze

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 5: The Human Factor · Fact-verified June 2026 Early in my career I spent the better part of a fortnight reading a complete run of correspondence on a dispute that, on paper, looked simple. Nobody told me why. The partner just handed me the file and said “get to know it.” Somewhere around day nine I noticed that two letters, six months apart, contradicted each other on a date — and that contradiction turned out to be the case. I did not learn that

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 5: The Human Factor · Refreshed June 2026 Let us start with an honest confession. I have watched the same dysfunction play out in litigation cost budgeting for twelve years — and I have watched it with increasing bewilderment, because it is so unnecessary and so persistent. Two sets of solicitors, representing parties in a commercial dispute, are required to produce cost budgets and exchange them, discuss them, and where possible agree them. The P

Voice AI or effectively voice control of your favourite bot may well be the next big thing.

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 5: The Human Factor · Refreshed June 2026 There is a ritual I want you to understand before we talk about AI. It begins with switching on the amplifier. Then the wait — the warming of valves, that faint smell of something electrical and warm, the low hum that tells you the system is coming alive. Then the approach to the shelf. Running your fingers along the spines — the order you have imposed on them, the familiar titles, the ones that need no la

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 4: Practical AI for Legal Operations · Fact-verified June 2026 Every costs consultant/costs lawyer knows the file that arrives like an archaeological dig. The matter settled six months ago. The partner who ran it has moved on. The time narratives read “review file” and “consider documents,” the attendances do not obviously match the procedural events, and somewhere in there is a counsel fee note nobody can quite account for. The job is no longer t

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 4: Practical AI for Legal Operations · Refreshed June 2026 Published as part of the "Practical AI for Legal Operations" series If there is one lesson the past twelve months have delivered with unusual clarity, it is this: the regulatory framework for AI in legal practice does not need to be fully formed before it starts to bite. Courts are already making wasted costs orders. The SRA is already authorising AI-driven firms — and setting the conditio

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 4: Practical AI for Legal Operations · Refreshed June 2026 Published as part of the "Practical AI for Legal Operations" series It is 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. Your phone buzzes. It is Counsel. The CCMC is Monday morning. The costs budget — the Precedent H that should have been filed 21 days before the hearing — has not come in from the other side's solicitors, their own fee earner has not been sent their figures, and someone has helpfully forwa

There is a moment in most technology transitions when the thing stops being interesting and starts being inevitable. We are at that moment with agentic AI in legal services. And if you are still treating AI as a clever search engine or a faster way to draft a letter, I say this with professional respect: you are already behind

The old boutique bargain is changing Digital experience is not decoration

Written by Will Whawell. Human intelligence throughout; AI assisted with the drafting. T3PS Legal Dynamics · Refreshed June 2026 There is a paradox at the heart of the current AI revolution that tends to be glossed over in the rush of enthusiasm about productivity gains and efficiency frontiers. AI is, by its nature, borderless — a technology developed in the valleys of California and the server farms of Virginia that can be accessed equally from a laptop in Edinburgh or a de

The AI-Native AdvantageThe Numbers Behind the Narrative

Phase, task and activity coding has been mandatory since April 2018. Eight years on, files still land uncoded. That is not a software gap. It is a workflow gap — and it is why AI cannot build your bill. It will build the structure. It cannot invent the note you never made. Where it earns its keep is upstream: capture at the point of work, not archaeology ten years later.

The Human Skills Upgrade: Why AI Without Expertise is Just Expensive AutocompletePrompt Engineering is a Genuine SkillThe Dictation Culture Problem

Funders, PACCAR and the Regulatory Reset

ISO 42001 and the AI Governance ImperativeThe UK Governance LandscapeISO 42001 and the EU AI Act

T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 2: AI Readiness — It’s Not a Technology Question · Written by Will Whawell. Human intelligence throughout; AI assisted with the drafting. Fact-verified June 2026 A managing partner told me, not long ago and with some pride, that his firm had “gone all in on AI.” I asked which tools, and on what data. There was a pause. It turned out the fee earners were pasting client documents — witness statements, heads of terms, a settlement position or two — i

The High Court rejected the vast majority of the allegations that the vehicles contained prohibited defeat devices. Where the court found a calibration strategy served a legitimate engineering purpose — protecting components, managing temperature — it was not a defeat device, and claims built on it fail at the first hurdle

Once a month I take myself off to a barn between Shrewsbury and Whitchurch. Part husband break, part catching up, mostly rest. The case for stepping away isn't that you come back faster. It is that you don't arrive at Thursday having quietly become worse at your job. So could a law firm run a four-day week without stalling its matters? Of course it could. Nothing in litigation moves faster than a ward round. What stops it isn't the work — and a hospital ward showed me exactly