Ops Brief — 2025-W33 (2025-08-11 → 2025-08-18)
This week, something curious kept happening across conversations that, on the surface, couldn’t be more different—an AI governance workshop in Silicon Valley, a tactical masterclass on co-manufacturing agreements, a reflection on burnout’s ripple effects in high-stakes litigation. From big law to bootstrapped legal ops shops, from ESG supply chain tracing to trust accounting compliance, the same quiet truth kept emerging: legal innovation is hitting the limits of what technology alone can solve. Sophie Best captured it flatly: “We’ve got so much tech, hardly anyone uses it.” But it wasn’t cynicism—it was diagnosis. The real challenge isn’t fewer tools or better tools. It’s integrating them into workflows real people can and will adopt. The bigger headline? This misalignment is no longer about features. It’s about trust, context, and culture. Whether it’s Bridgette Carr coaching her students to say “I don’t know, but I know how to figure it out,” or Chris Grant rebuilding law firm pricing from outcomes instead of hours, the message is the same: we have to unlearn more than we have to invent. The shift this week is from flash to structure. From buzzwords to fluency. From “AI lawyers” to AI-literate lawyering. And it’s not just showing up in forward-looking interviews. It’s embedded in risk conversations: Rio Laine warned that some of the most common malpractice claims—missed deadlines, botched documents—stem from fragmented systems and untrained teams, not rogue attackers or exotic tech failures. Even in the underlying architecture of law practice management tools, the emphasis is falling on integration, governance, and aligning software with everyday human behavior. Adoption isn’t stalling because tools can’t do the job; it’s stalling because no one bothered to ask what job needed doing—or how a lawyer exhausted from a 12-hour grind might actually engage with yet another system. Lexlee Overton called out the cost of this directly: “You can’t innovate, connect and lead when you’re chronically depleted.” Her focus on energy regulation—not in some abstract mindfulness sense, but in terms of physiological performance—resonated more deeply this week because so many legal tech failures turn out to be failures of attention. You can’t transform workflows in a system that trains everyone to triage first, reflect never. And yet, there’s progress. More legal departments are resisting “magic bullet” solutions and demanding governance, clarity, and transparency from vendors. Colin Levy summed it up in an offhand line about CLM sales, but it might as well apply to the whole industry: “We happily tell a prospect, we’re capable of this, we’re not capable of that.” That frankness not only builds trust—it accelerates better-fit adoption. The connective tissue here isn’t any one technology. It’s a maturing acknowledgment that innovation is social architecture as much as it is software. It’s a renewed attention to interfaces—not just user interfaces, but the human ones: across departments, disciplines, and hierarchies. Expect to see more innovation efforts grounded in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and operations design than in engineering breakthroughs. What should we be watching? For starters, how firms re-scope the definition of tech competence. It may look less like “learn prompt engineering” and more like “build a feedback loop that survives fatigue and turnover.” It may mean that the next killer app isn’t an app at all, but an internal pattern of relationships, governance, and accountability that makes tools usable and useful—not just purchased. Because if there’s one message echoing across all ten corners of this week’s legal tech landscape, it’s this: Tools matter—people more.