Law & Technology, Organizations & Management, Startups, Literature, Mexico & Latin America, New York City, Parenthood and anything in between.
New York City
Joined April 2011
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Carlos Gámez retweeted
Spent the last two weeks in SF and NYC talking to AI native law firms, GCs and academics. Here are my observations:
1. Part of the AI native law firm thesis is to build proprietary software that beats Harvey/Legora. But their most cracked lawyers that I have talked to won't even use the internal tool. They prefer their own harness on Claude Code or Codex.
2. Some people are convinced that certain AI native law firms were built just to become RL environments that generate real dataset for the labs.
3. Ex-BigLaw lawyers at AI natives miss working on headline deals (the ones that get you into Legal500 and Chambers & Partners).
4. BigLaw made its money running billion-dollar cross-border deals with multiple parties that agents can't run unsupervised. No AI native firm is doing that sort of work. BigLaw solved it by sorting out multi-jurisdictional licensing and regulatory issues across offices, with precise staffing. AI can potentially do the staffing part really well, but not the licensing part.
5. No AI native firm has a hiring strategy for 10x lawyers. They prefer hiring partners as their salesforce. The best 10x lawyers I know are still in BigLaw. AI natives need software-like margins so they focus on commoditized work that a model + purpose built harness can finish autonomously. And 10x lawyers enjoy doing non-routine, non-automatable tasks in the fastest way possible using AI.
6. The next frontier, if I am right, is full stack lawyers, lawyers who spot a new area of emerging practice and build productized service around that to monopolize a segment quickly (essentially turn your advice into an API that clients can run by BYOA). It's cheaper and easier than hiring partners to buy their client relationships. Specialist practices like tax, ERISA and regulatory have best chance of winning here.
Carlos Gámez retweeted
I'm just back from 48 hours at #ILTACON. I went to 0 panels but did ~20 calendared meet-ups with people over that time, plus lots of hallway conversations
Here are my takeaways:
- the scale of vendor spend was incredible. Apparently the total weight of the exhibit hall was 3x last year. The The Harvey and Legora booths were like 5x the size of big vendors like TR. Even some vendors I had never heard of had massive, extravagant booths. Then the massive teams there - I heard of some with >100 employees there. Then the events. Sheryl Crow. Lady A. Coaches wrapped in Legora branding to get people to their event. Legora probably won the visibly-extravagant spend battle.
- weird to think that law firms (who make tons of money and have some clients paying >$50m; admittedly very different businesses/valuations) would have a client revolt if they ever did anything equally extravagant at a client event. Instead, their KM or IT infrastructure manager is rocking out at a private concert 😁🎸
- the Harvey and Legora valuations and spend and whether it could continue was a topic of discussion in nearly every meeting
- law firm KM/IT people feel almost uniformly overwhelmed. Firms with strong, longstanding KM/IT teams seeing their junior people get poached by other firms and - especially - clients
- discussions about ROI of efficiency tech for hourly-billing firms, and a feeling that (while lawyers are using AI), ROI is often unclear
- a lot of general optimism by vendors about the opportunity to use AI to do more and more legal work, and maybe to seize client legal spend. similarly, worries over clients trying to cut law firms out and replace spend with in-house/AI. discussion over whether clients had budgets structured to do this
- lots of interest in what companies hold what pools of data, and a feeling like these pools might hold a lot more value today than they would have been perceived to 2 years ago
- obvi "AI" was everywhere, but it felt more settled in now - not just AI for the sake of AI
- lots of excellent people in legal tech. despite the massive growth in the industry, still seems friendly, collaborative
I have gone to every ILTACON since 2014 (excepting 2020/2021), and this was very one to remember!
Carlos Gámez retweeted
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani announce Central Park will host a free watch party for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final with space for 50,000 fans reut.rs/43UDO0x
Carlos Gámez retweeted
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR
The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric
The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage.
The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M).
They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now.
The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract.
In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation.
On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins.
At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing.
And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
Carlos Gámez retweeted
Extremely specific life advice: you can convert Fahrenheit to Celsius with the stops on the 6 train.
33 St =0°
42 St=5°
51 St=10°
59 St=15°
Works to 96th St!
Carlos Gámez retweeted
It’s inevitable that contracts will be negotiated by agents within the next decade.
Business will speed up so much that humans won’t be able to keep up with day-to-day contracts between companies.
Lawyers will set the policies and audit— agents will be trusted to do the rest.
This sounds irresponsible, until you realize what the error rate is for human contract managers—fairly high.
I believe agents will be a safer way to negotiate rudimentary agreements within the decade, just like self-driving is now safer than human driving.
This chart will exist for basic business contracts:
Carlos Gámez retweeted
This is the 'platform risk' era of AI. If your startup is just a thin wrapper or basic workflow automation, you are essentially doing free product research for Anthropic and OpenAI. The only moats left are proprietary data and deep physical integrations.
Carlos Gámez retweeted
“The problem isn't product-market fit.
The problem is that the switching costs in AI agents, at least in many cases, are much lower than what we've seen in SaaS before.”
Carlos Gámez retweeted
For the umpteenth thousandth time in football TV history, Tony Romo calls a play while the teams are waiting for the snap and then it is perfectly executed. This is his special talent as an analyst. 🐐
Carlos Gámez retweeted
My Wife: “Why did the Yankees take the good pitcher (Max Fried) out?”
Me: “He was at 102 pitches.”
My Wife: “Well, he should’ve thrown more.”
Honestly, can’t argue with her.
If @elonmusk is Iron Man and @realDonaldTrump is Captain America, who is Hawkeye? #civilwar #marvel #whoneedscable
Watching sports in the USA is a broken nightmare. To watch @yankees and @ChampionsLeague games, one must have: @AppleTV, @gothamsports, @FOXSports, @paramountplus, @espn and @PrimeVideo! Who else thinks @elonmusk should do something about it?
Hey @Yankees and @MLBTV - this is ridiculous! I have @PrimeVideo, @AppleTV, @MLBTV , @espn+, and @gothamsports, and still can’t watch #subwayseries tonight bc it’s only available on cable, @fuboTV or @YouTubeTV. You are alienating fans! Skipping to watch #TheLastOfUs on @hbomax
Reminds me of the boiling frog analogy. @grok / @howardlutnick - is this paper true?
📈 Prices of Chinese goods at major U.S. retailers keep rising.
Our updated paper has data until May 7 and covers 276K+ products — including 15K with country of origin identified using GenAI.
Full paper: pricinglab-rw7gfm.s3.us-east…
#Tariffs
