Certum Group is pleased to announce that Chris Seidl has been named to the 2026 IAM Strategy 300: The World’s Leading IP Strategists list. IAM Strategy 300 is a global ranking of IP strategists who are leaders in developing and implementing strategies to maximize the value of IP portfolios. IAM identifies individuals through extensive research annually. Chris leads Certum’s IP finance strategy, including IP licensing, litigation funding, and acquisitions. This is the fifth consecutive year Chris has been included on the IAM Strategy 300 list. Click here to see the complete rankings.
Artificial intelligence is quickly changing how legal work is researched, drafted, reviewed, and delivered. But while AI can improve efficiency, it also creates serious risks, including inaccurate analysis, fabricated citations, and potential court sanctions. In this webinar, Certum Group brings together legal and business experts to discuss how lawyers can use AI to strengthen their work without compromising accuracy, professional judgment, or accountability.
Artificial intelligence is transforming all corners of the economy, and the legal profession is no different. At first it seemed the stories about AI and the law were all negative, as many lawyers , even those at some of the most prestigious firms , found themselves sanctioned for filing briefs with hallucinated cases. More recently, the news cycle has turned, as existing law firms embrace AI and new firms sprout to deliver AI-first legal services. Just recently, top lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis and Quinn Emanuel each left to launch their own law firms. Meanwhile, Kirkland, the AmLaw 1 firm, announced it would invest $500 million to develop its own proprietary AI system. [ Click here to read a Bloomberg article by Certum’s Will Marra on what Kirkland’s AI announcement means for the future of third-party legal finance.] This can be dizzying for many lawyers. Clients want them to use artificial intelligence. Competitor law firms are using AI. But the risks of misusing AI are high and can even include sanctions and media coverage that gives lie to the old adage that “all news is good news.” A Transformative New Tool To help lawyers navigate this landscape, Certum Group recently hosted a webinar to help lawyers navigate the landscape. Our featured speaker was Michael Showalter , founder of Showalter PLLC, a litigation firm built around AI tools, and a former appellate lawyer at Gibson Dunn and Wiley Rein. The conversation was led by Suneal Bedi , Certum’s Scholar in Residence who is a professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. This was the first in a series of conversations that Professor Bedi will lead designed to help Certum’s clients navigate the toughest challenges they face today. In the webinar, Showalter demonstrated the power of AI by sharing several moments that “blew his mind” over the past year: A first draft of a law review article that was better than what he’d get from most junior lawyers. T urning a project that once took 100–150 hours into roughly only 15. A flawless table of authorities, table of contents, and cite-check on a brief, produced in about ten minutes. He noted he’d never once received a flawless table of authorities from a human paralegal. Sophisticated legal reasoning; identifying an overlooked antecedent argument in a forthcoming Yale Law Journal article showing the tools do real analysis, not just “automatable” formulaic work. He now estimates he accomplishes in a single day what would have taken him 40 hours of work back in 2022. Three key takeaways emerged from the webinar. To Be a Good Lawyer With AI, First Be a Good Lawyer AI cannot replace legal judgment, but it can amplify it. Lawyers should not outsource the job of lawyers to an AI model. They should treat the models instead like highly capable but error-prone junior associates. This means they should ensure the model has sufficient context about the legal issue they’re asking it to address. And you should give senior-lawyer leadership and oversight to its work. You should also treat AI errors as inevitable, the same way junior lawyers will inevitably make mistakes. Be vigilant to when the model gets something wrong, fix the error, and do what you can to avoid the error from recurring in the future. And you should iterate constantly. AI workflows cannot be completed in a single prompt. Lawyers should consistently redline and comment on the AI’s outputs to refine and perfect the work product. Guard Against Hallucinations and Errors Lawyers are rightly concerned about the prospect that AI may rely on fabricated cases. The webinar offered some candid commentary on this issue: First, the technology has changed dramatically between 2024 and 2026. The incidence of hallucinated and fabricated cases is much rarer today than in the past, partly because the frontier labs have focused on addressing this problem. Second, verification tools now exist. Tools like Veritas now exist to compare every quote in a brief against its primary source, catching errors rather than predicting text. Third, senior oversight remains non-negotiable. Lawyers should not assume an AI will accurately describe a case any more than they should assume a junior associate will do so. Lawyers should read and review every case they cite for accuracy and reliability. Meet Your Clients’ Expectations and the Courts’ Requirements Finally, it is clear that the market is shifting towards the expectation that lawyers will use AI. Even the most sophisticated clients are now demanding that their clients use AI. And they are relying on the existence of AI to push down rates and demand that simpler tasks get outsourced to artificial intelligence. For example, Sebastian Niles, the President and Chief Legal Officer of Salesforce, recently published an article arguing that the integration of AI into law firms should be a baseline expectation. [Harvey AI’s CEO, Winston Weinberg, was recently the keynote speaker at an NYU Law School conference co-organized by Professor Bedi and Certum’s Will Marra. Click here to learn more about the takeaways from that conference.] At the same time, courts have stepped in to closely police how law firms are using AI. Some courts are even amending local rules to regulate the use of AI in legal filings. To be a great lawyer today and tomorrow, lawyers need to stay on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. Clients demand it, and courts do too. Lawyers should continue to educate themselves about how to best use AI to improve and amplify their work, but not to replace it.