The Geek In Review

What does legal AI value look like once speed stops serving as the headline metric? In this episode of The Geek in Review , Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer speak with Nikki Shaver , co-founder and CEO of Legal Technology Hub and a member of the inaugural Financial Times Law 50 . Shaver argues that law firms need to move beyond time saved toward efficacy: stronger output, stronger client outcomes,...

For law firms, artificial intelligence has often arrived as a choice between speed and control. Stephen Costigan , founder of Atlas AI , argues that choice deserves a rethink. In this episode of The Geek in Review, we speak with Costigan about private legal AI infrastructure, knowledge graphs, and why a firm’s internal work product may become its most valuable long-term asset. Atlas AI focuses on...

This week we welcome American Association of Law Libraries leaders Jenny Foster , AALL President for 2025-2026, and Jessica Whytock , AALL Vice President and President-Elect. The conversation offers a preview of the 2026 AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, along with a thoughtful look at how the association is supporting legal information professionals during a period of insti...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we welcome Greg Dickason , Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis , for a wide-ranging conversation on agentic legal AI, Lexis+ AI Protégé, and the movement from AI chat toward AI work. Dickason frames the shift through a simple contrast: earlier legal AI answered questions, while agentic workflows take on multi-step assignments, conduct research, create draf...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer welcome back Joel Hron , Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters , for a timely conversation about the shifting relationship among foundation models, legal content providers, legal tech platforms, and the lawyers trying to make sense of the mess. Recent moves by Anthropic, including Claude’s legal practice area tools and M...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Abdi Shayesteh , CEO of AltaClaro , and Jeanine Conley Daves , Littler’s New York office managing shareholder, about a different question in the legal AI conversation. Instead of asking whether AI will write the brief, summarize the contract, or replace the junior associate, they focus on whether AI might help lawyers learn how to practice law. Their r...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Ryan McClead of Sente Advisors about his new book on AI agents, written in collaboration with Claude. McClead explains how a short best practices guide grew into a full book after his work with Claude Cowork revealed something larger than tool tips or prompt advice. The result is part field guide, part warning label, and part first-person report from t...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Alex Su and Andy Chagui of Latitude about the shifting economics of law firm talent, the rise of flexible legal staffing, and the pressure AI is placing on traditional leverage models. Su, known across legal circles for his sharp commentary and creative legal industry videos, brings his background as a former Sullivan & Cromwell litigator and feder...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Keith Maziarek , founder of Lucratic Method and Bodhi Solutions , about the shifting economics of legal work, AI’s impact on pricing, and why law firms and clients need better commercial conversations. Keith brings more than two decades of experience in pricing, profitability, legal project management, and business-of-law strategy from firms including...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Lennie Nuara , co-founder of Flatiron Law Grou p, about what it means to build a talent-first, AI-powered legal practice. Nuara brings a rare mix of lawyer, technologist, operator, and systems thinker to the conversation, drawing from decades of experience using technology to improve legal work, from early portable computers and databases to today’s ge...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Andrew Thompson , CTO of Orbital , about why legal AI built for a specific practice area has a strong claim in a market crowded by general-purpose models. Thompson explains how Orbital focuses on real estate law, using AI, spatial intelligence, and legal workflow design to support transactions involving property portfolios, title review, survey analysi...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Greg Mazares Sr., CEO of Purpose Legal, about what it takes to lead through one of the most important transition periods in legal services. Drawing on decades of experience across business, litigation support, and e-discovery, Mazares brings a steady, practical view to a market flooded with AI claims and rapid change. His message is clear from the star...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Kristina Satkunas of CounselLink about what the numbers are saying in a legal market that still talks about change while clinging hard to old billing habits. Kris discusses the hard data behind outside counsel spend, drawing on CounselLink invoice data and Harbor survey results to compare what legal departments say they expect with what the bills are a...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Gregory Mostyn , CEO of Wexler.ai , about how his company is building a sharper form of legal AI for litigation. In a market crowded with broad platforms that aim to handle every legal task at once, Mostyn describes Wexler as a focused system built for one of the hardest problems in disputes, understanding the facts. He shares how the idea grew from wa...

The latest episode of The Geek in Review finds Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer back from Dallas with a sharp, grounded recap of the Texas Trailblazers conference, an event that stayed close to the daily realities of legal work instead of drifting into glossy predictions. Their conversation centers on a legal industry trying to sort out what AI means right now, in billing, workflow, training, pric...

This week we welcome Paula Reichenberg , founder of Neuron , for a sharp and thoughtful conversation about legal translation, artificial intelligence, and what happens when professional expertise collides with tools that look polished but still miss the mark. Paula shares her path from M&A and capital markets law into business school, legal services, machine learning, and finally legal tech en...

This week, we sit down with two guests from Anthropic , Matt Samuels , Senior Product Counsel, and Den Delimarsky , a core maintainer of the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. Together, they unpack why MCP is drawing so much attention across the legal industry and why some are calling it the USB-C for AI. For law firms long burdened by disconnected systems, scattered data, and the infamous integratio...

This week we welcome back Niki Black to unpack the findings from the newly released 2026 Legal Industry Report from 8am The conversation centers on a legal profession moving into a new phase of AI adoption, where individual lawyers are embracing general purpose AI tools at a striking pace, while many firms still lack even basic policies or training. Niki explains that this disconnect is especially...

Anastasia Boyko joins us this week for a wide-angle conversation about AI adoption, leadership, and the uncomfortable truth behind “we are watching what peer firms do.” A Yale-trained tax lawyer with experience spanning Axiom, legal education, and innovation leadership, Boyko argues that precedent-driven instincts are turning into a liability when the underlying rules of the market are shifting in...

This week we go “talk show mode” for a special episode where Marlene recaps her trip to the Women + AI 2.0 Summit at Vanderbilt Law, hosted by Cat Moon , and shares why the event felt different from the standard conference grind, more energy, more structure, and yes, a DJ. The summit’s core focus sits right on a tension point in the wider AI conversation. There’s a persistent narrative that women...

The billable hour has survived a lot of threats, from alternative fee arrangements to client procurement, but this episode makes the case that AI changes the pressure level. We open with a blunt assessment, time compresses, clients push back, and the old strategy of “work more to earn more” stops scaling. Enter Stefan Cisla, co-founder and CEO of Ayora, who frames the moment as less a tech problem...

A fresh Anthropic announcement set off a week of market jitters and existential questions: what happens when the big model shops ship “legal productivity” features and the public markets flinch. This week, we bring Otto von Zastrow back for a rapid-response conversation, with a front-row view from New York and a blunt take: software grows cheaper to reproduce, so value migrates. The discussion lan...

Ray Brescia joins The Geek in Review this week to unpack a role with peak academia vibes, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Albany Law School . Greg frames the title as “Chief Curator of Smart People Ideas,” and Ray embraces a “player-coach” approach, coaching faculty scholarship, unblocking stalled projects, and connecting peers across disciplines. The throughline is community,...

Sateesh Nori joins us on The Geek in Review for an episode that flips the usual legal innovation conversation away from law firm efficiency and toward survival-grade help for people stuck in housing courts and legal aid queues. They open with news from Sateesh himself, he has started a new role with LawDroid , working with Tom Martin , and he frames the mission in plain terms. Legal tech should st...

Quinten Steenhuis brings a builder’s mindset to legal innovation, rooted in early Indymedia activism where scavenged hardware became community infrastructure. That scrappy origin story carries through a dozen years of eviction defense at Greater Boston Legal Services, with a steady focus on tools that help people solve problems without waiting for a savior in a suit. Along the way, Quinten also li...