Artificial intelligence is wiping out some entry-level work that trains the next generation of elite lawyers. Why it matters: Big Law's entire business model depends on armies of junior associates learning on the job. If AI erases that rung, the profession faces a long-term talent crisis. The big picture: The legal profession's most important classroom, the early-career grind of junior and summer associates, is quietly reshaping, as the path to partnership is being rewritten in real-time. - Firms are racing to "extract the knowledge of their lawyers" and embed it in AI workflows, client portals and self-service tools, Stanford Law professor David Freeman Engstrom tells Axios. - That could mean "getting ready for a world in which you…
Billie Little had worked for Thomson Reuters for about two decades. She was fired after questioning whether federal immigration agents unlawfully used their products.
Thomson Reuters, best known for its media outlet and legal research tools, provides an investigative tool to immigration enforcers. Its Minnesota employees want that to stop.
Supremacy can be fleeting in the highly competitive AI race. But two months into 2026, Anthropic's Claude is upending U.S. national security, roiling financial markets and redefining how startups are built. Why it matters: The company is in the middle of the most important fight of the era — how much power to give AI in the face of threats, real and virtual. - Anthropic said this week it would soften the central commitment of its flagship safety framework, acknowledging that unilateral safety pledges won't survive a world where rivals have no such constraints. - For a company that has long positioned itself as the AI industry's conscience, it was a remarkable reversal — on the same day that the Pentagon threatened to effectively…
AI promises to make work more productive for lawyers, but there's a problem: Their clients are using it, too. Why it matters: The rise of AI is creating new headaches for attorneys: They're worried about the fate of the billable hour, a reliable profit center for aeons, and are perturbed by clients getting bad legal advice from chatbots. Zoom in: "It's like the WebMD effect on steroids," says Dave Jochnowitz, a partner at the law firm Outten & Golden, referring to how medical websites can give people a misguided understanding of their condition. - "ChatGPT is telling them 'you got a killer case, ' " Jochnowitz says. - But the models don't understand the full context, the actual laws that apply or the full history of certain types of…