Without Limitation

I meet Nishat Ruiter, GC at TED, the world's most influential ideas platform, and learn how TED Law is asking us to question what it means to be a lawyer. What we cover * How TED grew from a conference to become the world’s #1 ideas platform. * Nishat’s unconventional path, via the Netherlands, the Brooklyn family court, and the self-taught IP licensing work that helped launch her GC career. * How...

In the latest episode of Without Limitation, I meet Michael T. Brown. When I sit down with Mike, it has been around three months since he won the Anthropic global hackathon, beating 13,000 applicants, most of them career engineers, with a project built in six days from his home in Orange County. We’re also chatting on the day before he takes the main stage at Code with Claude in San Francisco, one...

Shreya Vajpei built the community for legal tech in India. Now she's connecting that community with the rest of the world. India has more legal tech startups than almost anywhere on earth. I did not know this until I sat down with Shreya Vajpei, but India has around a thousand legal tech startups, which Shreya tells me puts it second only to the US and ahead of every other market, including the UK...

Dazza Greenwood has been building agents for longer than several legal tech founders have been alive. In the 1980s, as an undergraduate computer science student, he encountered AI assistants for the first time. His module introduced a then-new paradigm: human language, chat-based systems. The exercise was to build something modelled on ELIZA, the MIT chatbot whose therapist module ran on a simple...

Michael Kennedy, Addleshaw Goddard Michael Kennedy left university swearing off being a lawyer. He went to work in restaurants and retail for a while, and finally came back to it as a paralegal at Addleshaw Goddard. When he started his training contract, it was very much focused on innovation and technology - a rarity at the time, and Mike was one of the first in the UK to follow this path. Since...

When I sit down with Fiona Phillips, Anthropic has just announced that it won’t be releasing its Mythos model - at least not yet - because of the cybersecurity implications of a system that appears uniquely capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Talk about good timing for a podcast with a leading expert on cybersecurity. But before we get to that, let’s talk about Fiona’s stor...

When I sit down with Elliott Portnoy, it has been just over a year since he stepped down as Founding Global CEO of Dentons, the firm he scaled from a foundation in a mid-sized US firm with no global presence and ultimately became the world’s largest law firm. 12,000 lawyers, 200+ offices, 87 countries, through 61 mergers in just over ten years. Just think about this for a moment. A merger every tw...

We discuss how he actually uses AI day to day, how he thinks about the security and privilege considerations, and what happens to the billable hour when you scale your work with AI. Side note: for a demo of Claude on legal use cases, watch this LinkedIn Live recording I posted last week. Introducing Zack Zack Shapiro went to Yale Law School thinking he’d become an academic. If not law, it would ha...

In this episode, I meet Dr. Sarah Stephens and learn how an AI Assistant in WhatsApp is solving real problems for women in Tanzania Introducing Dr. Sarah Stephens Dr. Sarah Stephens isn’t your typical legal technologist. She started her career on a traditional path, training at the global law firm, Linklaters. But a summer volunteering on grassroots access to justice projects in Kenya, working wit...

When I sit down with Richard Tromans, he has just published a piece on the Anthropic legal plugin, along with a flurry of other updates on the day’s legal tech developments - another busy morning in the world of Artificial Lawyer. He started the business in 2016 after a career in journalism and consulting - inspired by the change he saw coming and wanted to be a part of shaping. Nearly a decade la...

Michael Bommarito ran GPT through the bar exam over Christmas 2022 to prove it wouldn’t pass. He’d been working with language models for years and had never had a moment where he thought they were really useful. Dan Katz kept asking. A little eggnog was involved. So Mike did it to shut him up. By the time they published the second paper a few months later, it had passed. That story kicked off one...

What We Covered * General Legal’s founding story and its roots in Casetext * JP’s unusual career path from iOS developer to Harvard Law to Big Law (WilmerHale, Cooley) to legal tech engineer * What makes a firm “AI native” versus a traditional firm that’s adopted AI tools - and the corporate structure and reinvestment philosophy that distinguishes the two * The practical workflow: how clients enga...

What We Covered * The rise of vibecoding in the legal industry * Bird & Bird’s recent rollout of a vibecoding solution within the firm * Governance and compliance considerations, including how to give everyone a safe sandbox to prototype, with clear pathways to enterprise deployment with the appropriate safeguards when something proves valuable * The maintenance question * Opportunities for vendor...

What We Covered * Richard’s 40 years of working with law firms on pricing * His viral LinkedIn post from January 2026 that sparked debate: a fictional partner’s letter explaining why AI may not mean lower fees - we get into the arguments for and against * Richard’s view that transparency and benefit-sharing between firms and clients is the only sustainable path forward * The difference Richard has...

What we covered * Mary’s journey from law student and litigator to founder , sparked by her own struggle to secure a training contract and the obvious disconnect between eager junior talent and firms needing support * How she made the leap into entrepreneurship , including raising external funding to create a real proof point before leaving practice * What Flex Legal is and how it evolved: from a...