“I told you not to start playing games with that thing”
First published: May 18, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
The movie “WarGames” was released in 1983. I was in college, taking a course in the history of cinema, among other things. Our professor was acquainted with the film’s director, John Badham. “WarGames” and another technologically prescient (if less cinematically enduring) Badham film, “Blue Thunder,” were released that same Spring. My fellow students and I saw both movies in a lecture hall in New Haven, one that was specially re-rigged with appropriate projection equipment and a sound system to rival any commercial theater of the day. (“Blue Thunder”’s helicopters were loud!) I remember thinking: huh. So this is what happened to the director who made “Saturday Night Fever.”
But … talk about a guy who could capture a cultural moment?!
Among the great legacies of “WarGames” is, of course, the “WOPR,” the seemingly sentient “War Operation Plan Response” artificial intelligence, named “Joshua” by its creator (Dr. Stephen Falken, played by the inimitable John Wood), pronounced “whopper” in a winking nod to Burger King, and capable of threatening “global thermonuclear war” for real … or simply as a game. Was it a game? Or was it really happening, at least inside the film?
(As an aside, I wonder what the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of very interesting “The Score” (2026) and “Games: Agency as Art” (2020), might have to say about how “WarGames” portrays the flaws and virtues of games and gaming.)
I clear my throat that way not simply because I have not posted here for several weeks (hello and welcome, new people referred by Hollis Robbins!), and not (as one might imagine) by wanting to litigate the contemporary question of risk (bioweapons? AGI?) posted by Generative AI models. Instead, I want to note and draw together some more or less “ordinary progress of AI” developments in my home world: law.
Welcome, in short, to our new WOPR legal overlords, arriving not with a bang (the threat of global thermonuclear war, stopped by a charismatic high school hacker, and not, as in “Blue Thunder,” with the drama of an airborne government surveillance conspiracy, stopped by the same actor who stopped Bruce, in “Jaws”) but instead with the quiet “whoosh” of frictionless switcheroos. Out go humans, in come AI robots.
First:
At TaxProf Blog the other day, I had a few things to say about the news that a major global law firm has partnered with an AI company to use an AI model and avatars to train junior lawyers in the human-relationship competencies that are often referred to (wrongly and reductively) as “soft skills.”
One of the news stories covering the development included the line, “As technology begins to automate more routine legal work traditionally handled by junior lawyers, firms are placing greater emphasis on teaching skills that are harder for software to replicate,” which is hilarious and idiotic. I could simply stop there. But there is more. This is a story largely about temptation. “WarGames” is a story about temptation. Dial in to a computer network and play a game titled “Global Thermonuclear War.” What’s the worst that could happen? In the real world, in this new story, the firm’s leaders and partners are using AI to eat their seed corn. What’s the worst that could happen? Short term cost and time savings; long term erosion of the firm’s – and the profession’s? – human capabilities.
Second:
Anthropic has gone more in, if not all in, with the newest release of “Claude for Legal,” a suite of tech tools for practicing lawyers that purports to gather in one place almost all of the resources and systems that a practitioner might need: workflow; document review and drafting; legal research (including access to caselaw across much of the world via a partnership with Thomson Reuters); plug-ins that cover 12 practice areas, including both litigation and transactional domains; more than 20 MCP connectors; and much more. It is an operating system and cockpit for legal tech, and if you like the jet aircraft metaphor, then go with this: the plane labeled “mostly automated law practice” is in the air and quickly gaining altitude. For a quick but thoughtful overview, read Stephanie Wilkins at Legaltech Hub. Among the law professors, read Seth Chandler, “Claude for Legal Is Huge!”
And circle back to Jordan Furlong’s reflections, yet to come. A preview: on LinkedIn, Jordan posted that this development represents “Defcon 1,” meaning (I think) that the moment that lawyers have wondered and worried about since November 2022 – will AI eat the legal profession? – may have arrived.
And, of course, for pop culture connoisseurs, has Claude built a WOPR? The “Defcon” reference means: “WarGames” again.
Third:
Harvey, one of the leading incumbent AI-for-legal providers (and a company that has to be on edge, given Claude for Legal), says: hold our beer!
Claude for Legal includes some useful bits for law students but does not move the needle on the forms and formats of legal education. With Claude, students can outline courses, prepare for exams (including the bar exams), and pursue additional “20th century law school cognitive tasks” better (maybe) and faster (likely).
Harvey has just released “Harvey Law Schools” that may do more, educationally speaking: it is a suite of modules for law students training up in transactional work, litigation, in-house work, public interest and public sector practice, with exercises, capstone assessments, and – ta da! – a “certificate of completion.” Again, Seth Chandler summarizes the details. “Shall we play a game?,” Joshua asked. Harvey dangles a gold star, a reward for finishing, if not for winning.
Because my interest lies in institutions rather than with the general “robots substituting for humans” theme, I’ll end with two notes. To sum up (because there is too much, as Inigo Montoya once said):
One is that the incumbent institutions that form the “backbone” of the 20th century legal profession – private law firms, corporate or in-house law departments, and law schools and law faculties – are demonstrating themselves to be profoundly ill-equipped to figure out how to adapt or evolve in what I (along with others) have been calling “the AI age.” The story is as much what is not happening in those institutions (macro re-inventions rather than micro adaptations) as what is happening around them.
In law firms and in-house law departments, I look at reviews of “shadow AI” use by individual lawyers and teams, unmonitored for security, confidentiality, and privacy risks, among other things. As I wrote to a colleague recently in an email thread, part of what we observe there is competition for work between private law firm lawyers and their clients’ in-house lawyers; clients themselves are often mostly interested in speed and cost. Relatedly, precisely because of sharp pressure from clients, the availability of flexible and configurable AI tools may have accelerated the now 40-plus year history of law firm lawyers operating more as “free agents” inside a industry still formally structured largely around legacy law firms, rather than as citizens of their organizations.
And then there are law schools, where I see in Harvey Law Schools and Claude for Legal the early stages of what I once (2020) called “Google Law School,” the idea that a sophisticated tech company could assemble a platform of inexpensive trainings and certifications that would assure a “graduate” of entree into a productive professional career – without a formal JD. Who needs law school to be in “legal,” anyway, especially with the opportunity cost and debt associated with the 20th century law school experience?
That is not an entirely rhetorical question. Kyle Saunders’s recent Substack essay, “The Bifurcation (of Higher Education) Continues Apace,” chronicles the many ways in which post-high school education and training are being dis-aggregated. The four- or five-year college degree may carry on for a while as the presumptive route to life and career prosperity, but for how long? And at what point will that dis-aggregation come to graduate and professional education?
For years, US law schools have kept the existence of “legal” professions (as opposed to careers in “the legal profession”) at a safe and respectable distance by labeling jobs in “legal” as “JD advantage” jobs – where the degree gives law graduates an “advantage” in the hiring process but where licensure as a lawyer was not required. Law students, risk-averse as they often are, react accordingly, usually steering away from “JD advantage” roles or accepting that path but adopting the rhetorical marginalization nevertheless. I’ve heard this myself from former students: “I’m doing this thing, which I like a lot but which is only ‘JD advantage.’” Maybe the “JD Advantage” sector, which is defined significantly though not entirely by “legal operations,” or “legal ops,” will remain a niche in the legal “industry.” Or maybe it will grow its share of people and revenue. If you are leading a law school, or leading a university with a law school, or imagining education and training pathways for law, how do you invest resources in existing or new programs?
Two, then, the takeaway is about change. Borrowing Shakespeare, some institutions are born to change, some achieve change, and others have change thrust upon them. And many are, again to borrow the Bard, afraid of change. A now-retired colleague of mine once said to me that law schools do not need to worry about change, because law schools have no competition. He was entirely wrong, and that conversation took place close to 20 years ago. The same conclusion likely applies to law firms, law departments, and more broadly across professional services organizations and fields, with more punch and immediacy to it today.
But the “WarGames” WOPR game metaphor does not help. Unlike the movie’s Hollywood ending, there is no option not to play. And competition is not the only question; AI and robots are not the only threats.
To come: what do I mean by that? WOPR or no WOPR; is this a game or not? And what moves are available? This post has been about law, law schools, and the legal profession; the next one might be about what differs and what stays the same when one steps up a level, from the individual school or department to the college or university. If the (small) question was: “what does a JD buy someone that a certificate from Harvey Law Schools does not, other that access to the rent-extracting guild that is the organized bar?,” then (a larger) question is: “what does a degree from a four-year or five-year university buy someone other than access to the status benefits associated with that university’s reputation? Again, the question is meant to be both rhetorical and substantive. In the AI age, what are the purposes of the institution (with a pointer to the provocative recent New Yorker conversation with Hollis Robbins)?
Thanks for sticking with me.