Extract from Melina Efstathiou’s article, “Two Empty Chairs.”
There is a version of this moment in legal AI that gets told constantly: Hallucinated citations, sanctioned lawyers, vendors overselling, courts catching up case by case. I have written a great deal of that story myself this year, because it is real and it matters. But underneath all of it sits a quieter failure that I think deserves its own reckoning, because it is the reason so much of the rest keeps happening.
Two chairs that should be occupied at this moment are empty.
The regulator’s chair. The educator’s chair.
Everything else the profession is currently improvising around is, to a significant degree, downstream of both of them failing to show up with the pace, pragmatism and clarity this moment actually requires.
