My 40 Most-Read Blog Posts This Year Tell A Story Of A Legal Industry Consumed With Generative AI

By Bob Ambrogi on December 27, 2023

Look over this list of my blog posts that were most popular this year, and there is no doubt about the topic that most captivated the legal industry. Of my 40 most-read posts of 2023, 30 directly involved generative AI and others implicated it.

Of course, there is a chicken-or-egg aspect to this. Were so many of my most-read stories about AI because that was what most interested my readers, or was it simply because I wrote so much this year about the topic?

Seven of the most popular stories related to Casetext’s launch of its generative AI product CoCounsel last March, its subsequent acquisition by Thomson Reuters in June, and Thomson Reuters’ subsequent roll-out of generative AI in Westlaw.

Similarly, five of the top stories involved LexisNexis’s launch of its generative AI product, Lexis+ AI, starting with its initial release in May to its release for general availability in October.

Four stories about the generative AI legal startup Harvey made my top-stories list, starting from its initial fundraise last November to its firmwide deployment within Allen & Overy in February to its Series A raise in April to a quirky story about a second legal AI startup also called Harvey.

Two popular stories were about GPT taking the bar exam: one in March when GPT passed the bar exam, and the second in November when it passed the legal ethics exam.

My most popular story of all this year, by a long measure, was about the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal’s proposed rule on appellants’ use of AI to create filings. I do not know why that was so popular, but its views far exceeded any other of my posts this year. A related story on the most popular list was about the sanctions imposed on lawyers in New York who cited “bogus” cases in their brief.

Representative of the interest in generative AI this year were the two stories that made my list about the law firm Gunderson Dettmer’s development of its own “homegrown” generative AI, ChatGD. The original story I wrote in August about ChatGD’s launch was my 12th most-read story, while a followup I published just last week quickly rose to be the 13th most read.

Among other popular stories on my blog this year:

The sad and untimely death of Monica Bay, the longtime editor of Law Technology News.
The merger of legal research companies vLex and Fastcase, which, arguably, is an AI-adjacent story, in that the combination of their databases creates a huge learning model for training legal AI.
Two stories related to DoNotPay — one when the American Bar Association canceled an op-ed that used DoNotPay as an example to argue for regulatory reform, and another when a court dismissed an unauthorized practice lawsuit against DoNotPay.
The departure of DISCO cofounder Kiwi Camara.
Thomson Reuters spin-off of Elite.
E-discovery company Reveal’s acquisition of both Logikcull and IPRO.
Clio’s series of product announcements in October that included a personal injury add-on, e-filing, and (you guessed it) generative AI.
Bessemer Venture’s acquisition of Litify.

But I go back to where I started. The dominant story in legal technology this year was generative AI — not so much for what it is already doing in legal, but more for what it might do down the road.