The Flank Journal

Field notes on agentic legal work.

Research, product updates, and working patterns from the teams putting legal agents into production.

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Showing 42 posts
Thought leadership May 14, 2026 · 9 min read

How to turn AI FOMO into a plan

Why the only thing that resolves the AI FOMO is a plan that is yours, by Lorna Khemraz

Customer stories May 12, 2026 · 9 min read

We built the product at her desk

Why faster AI makes being in the room more valuable, not less, by Paul Lacey

Research May 08, 2026 · 11 min read

This week in legal AI - what the first legal agent benchmark means for your next vendor decision

A new benchmark, a Brazilian unicorn, and the moment a law firm started selling AI as a product. [8 May 2026]

Research May 07, 2026 · 8 min read

The build vs. buy answer every GC needs right now

What coding agents changed about the build vs. buy decision, and why the answer is still buy, by Martin Lukac.

Legal ops May 05, 2026 · 7 min read

Your team reviews every NDA twice

52% of legal teams use AI. 7% have moved the spend number. The architecture explains the difference, by Taariq Ismail.

Research May 01, 2026 · 10 min read

This week in legal AI - Further attacks on the billable hour

The hyperscaler’s first cheque into legal, RELX buys the French corpus, the omnibus trilogue collapses after twelve hours, and more [30 April 2026]

Legal ops Apr 30, 2026 · 6 min read

The eight principles of a highly effective legal team

What an enterprise legal function should look like when headcount stops being the constraint, by Flank Co-founder Jake Jones

Thought leadership Apr 28, 2026 · 11 min read

The end of the billable hour

Output is no longer scarce. The question is what the lawyer's hour was always for. By Lorna Khemraz.

Research Apr 24, 2026 · 9 min read

This week in legal AI - The end of "just check the AI's work"

A white-shoe apology, the content moat race, and 43% of firms still flying blind. [24 April 2026]

Legal ops Apr 23, 2026 · 9 min read

What your legal ops dashboard is actually measuring

The data is there. The surface to make it useful isn't, by Paul Lacey.

Thought leadership Apr 21, 2026 · 7 min read

The one question to ask every legal tech vendor in 2026

Most legal ops leaders aren't asking it yet. In two years, it's the only one that will matter, by Taariq Ismail.

Research Apr 17, 2026 · 8 min read

This week in legal AI

Privilege cracks, the agentic race widens, and the EU buys itself time. [17 April 2026]

Thought leadership Apr 16, 2026 · 11 min read

Your juniors aren't learning

Legal training worked through proximity, observation, and correction. All three are breaking. Lorna Khemraz investigates.

Thought leadership Apr 14, 2026 · 3 min read

The Weakest Square (pt. 2)

The erosion of human endeavour by agentic automation. An exploration continued by Jake Jones.

Thought leadership Apr 10, 2026 · 7 min read

"Faster NDA review" is the wrong job

Why most legal AI pilots solve an activity, not a need, by Taariq Ismail

Thought leadership Apr 10, 2026 · 7 min read

Try something worth breaking

Why the absence of failure in legal AI is itself a failure of ambition, by Martin Lukac

Thought leadership Apr 09, 2026 · 10 min read

Legal AI doesn't scale without a front door

The front door is how legal AI stops being a pilot and starts being a production system, by Paul Lacey

Legal ops Apr 08, 2026 · 6 min read

Your AI rollout has a people problem

Change management is the variable nobody budgets for, by Taariq Ismail

Research Apr 07, 2026 · 8 min read

Most legal agent failures are not actually agent failures

Why the deployments that 'failed' were never built to succeed, by Lorna Khemraz

Research Apr 02, 2026 · 7 min read

Legal AI has an infrastructure problem

Why 52% of legal teams adopted AI but almost none reduced costs, by Martin Lukac

Thought leadership Mar 30, 2026 · 6 min read

The Weakest Square (pt. 1)

A nine-year-old beats six boys with a four-move algorithm. Decades later, machines prove that even intuition is computable.

Legal ops Mar 27, 2026 · 6 min read

Just pick one thing

Why most legal AI pilots fail to move out of pilot stage, by Taariq Ismail

Thought leadership Mar 26, 2026 · 7 min read

Why your AI rollout will stumble and why that's the plan

The real risk profile of scaling AI agents: the jagged edge is structural, not temporary, but recovery is measured in minutes.

Legal ops Mar 25, 2026 · 11 min read

Your external legal spend is the budget for agents

The services line item that enterprise legal teams are starting to reallocate. Jake Jones explains.

Research Mar 25, 2026 · 7 min read

These legal tech investments will still matter in three years

The same capability that makes legal software better eventually makes it unnecessary. The question is which layer you're buying.

Research Mar 24, 2026 · 8 min read

Same engine, different machine

Why better AI doesn't mean a better model, by Martin Lukac

Legal ops Mar 24, 2026 · 10 min read

Knowing what to automate is the easy part

Legal teams can name what to automate instantly. The hard part is building the reliability and scalability infrastructure around it.

Research Mar 23, 2026 · 9 min read

We gave an agent our hardest problem

Why enterprise contract complexity is no longer a ceiling for AI agents, by Paul Lacey

Thought leadership Mar 23, 2026 · 9 min read

What “it depends” is hiding

How operational chaos masquerades as legal complexity, and what happens when you separate the two, by Lorna Khemraz

Research Mar 20, 2026 · 8 min read

Same engine, different machine

Every legal AI product runs on the same handful of LLMs. The staggering difference in output quality is entirely a product problem.

Research Mar 19, 2026 · 9 min read

The complexity ceiling is higher than you think

Enterprise contract complexity is no longer a ceiling for AI agents. The boundary is moving fast.

Thought leadership Mar 16, 2026 · 8 min read

The ChatGPT Moment for Legal Agents

The week legal AI stopped being theoretical

Research Mar 13, 2026 · 8 min read

Three economic models, one technology

The legal services market is three markets with different economic engines. Agents will hit law firms, ALSPs, and in-house teams very differently.

Thought leadership Mar 12, 2026 · 5 min read

The Throughput Problem

The throughput problem nobody is measuring

Thought leadership Jan 05, 2026 · 3 min read

Beyond hype: why ROI will define Legal AI in 2026

For the past few years, the legal industry has been in a phase of exploration. We have seen firms and in-house teams adopting Generative AI tools largely for the novelty factor – testing the waters to see what is possible.

Thought leadership Jan 01, 2026 · 2 min read

Eating mashed potato: why AI will save lawyers from boredom, not their jobs

There is a pervasive fear that autonomous AI replaces the need for legal expertise. The reality is the opposite: it clarifies the value of true expertise by stripping away the drudgery.

Legal ops Dec 30, 2025 · 2 min read

How to scale legal operations without hiring a single lawyer in 2026

For decades, the economic model of the in-house legal team has been broken. It was a linear equation, but not any more.

Thought leadership Dec 29, 2025 · 2 min read

Silence in the inbox: the rise of 'invisible' autonomous agents

The ultimate measure of success for a legal AI deployment in 2026 is not how many lawyers are logging into a tool. It is whether the business users even know the tool exists.

Research Dec 28, 2025 · 2 min read

Why reasoning models are the missing link for transforming legal

For the last two years, lawyers have been told that AI is "almost there". Yet, in private, the reality has been different.

Product Oct 30, 2025 · 5 min read

Introducing Flank: agentic legal AI that resolves legal requests autonomously

Flank is the first enterprise-ready agentic system built for legal work. Instead of assisting lawyers; it handles the work itself: reviewing, drafting, redlining, triaging, and filing across the systems your team already uses such as Outlook, Teams, Jira, and Salesforce.

Research Jul 15, 2025 · 4 min read

Legal AI Alignment: Why Judgment, Not Just Automation, Matters

This post explores how to build aligned legal AI agents that reflect context, escalation paths, and layered decision-making - not just outputs. That's because useful legal AI isn’t just about automation. It’s about understanding how lawyers think.

Company Jun 05, 2025 · 6 min read

Flank Raises $10M to Scale Autonomous Legal Agents — Embedded, Invisible, and Built for the Enterprise

Trusted by DeepL, Bolt, SumUp, TravelPerk, Axel Springer and more.

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