Friday reading for the rest of the week.

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.

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

Litigation funders price risk against a cost base — and AI is compressing that cost base in real time. What happens to funding models, ATE premiums and costs budgets when the hours a case was budgeted to take are no longer the hours it takes? Closing Series 1, this piece follows the AI dividend into the funded-litigation market, where the question of who captures the saving is at its sharpest.