Since they’re offering Packages to retirement aged people or close to it, this will make MSFT much, much more Indian as a consequence, since Gen X is by far the whitest Gen in software.
Date: October 27th, 2026 9:08 AM Author: Rage Problems
Avoiding unemployment seems pretty important right now. Most people aren’t doing layoffs but basically everyone is just not backfilling for people that leave unless they’re in key leadership positions. Standard inhouse counsel seem kind of done here
Date: October 27th, 2026 10:18 AM Author: .- .-. . .-. . .--. - .. .-.. .
In-house bros are the safest because they are cheap. The law firm model is fucked. In-house papers everything internally with Claude now. A $300m M&A deal used to generate a million in fees +/-. Now it’s maybe $300k and you paying most of that for a legal opinion letter, and hand holding through regulatory clearances and basically zero dollars for diligence and zero dollars for drafting docs.
Yeah, law firm usage is definitely plummeting. But in-house headcount is also decreasing. It is just bad news across the board for pretty much everyone.
Date: October 27th, 2026 1:54 PM Author: Rage Problems
No one is drafting the transaction docs in M&A inhouse with Claude. The firm lawyers probably already are though. Diligence is actually probably more costly now because AI can spin up so many new requests so quickly and be anal as fuck. M&A is one of the protected fields.
Yeah, this is really wrong. I’m at a $20bn shop with a 6 person in-house team. We are papering a $300m M&A right now internally and the only thing I need outside counsel for is legal opinion letters and their hand holding me through SFC landmines. Claude is doing everything else. It also built my $1bn private markets book for me with $20k in outside counsel spend for some sanity checks. Our legal spend it down at least 50% in the last year.
Where it’s not saving any money is litigation because pleadings are longer and everything is slop and in-house lit doesn’t have time to spend 4 hours a day taking to Claude the way transactional lawyers do. Litigation spend is actually up.
Anthropic is actually pretty obnoxious in terms of negotiating terms lawyers look for to preserve privilege. Harvey has Claude models as well, btw. At my company I have access to both and Gemini.
They're a 6 person legal team. They probably don't have a "procurement lawyer." He also said they're dealing with increased litigation. This is exactly the sort of detail that gets you fucked in discovery.
In-house litigation is/was always a volume practice. Any shop with enough litigation to bring in an in-house dedicated litigator is saddling the guy with 30 or 40 or 200 cases. The guy is just there to police spend. He is never drafting pleadings or motions. Commercial practice is never that kind of volume game so you have time to work with Claude to paper whole transactions. In-house lit has too much volume to wait the 10 minutes for a Claude turn. The economics aren’t going to be the same.
Date: October 27th, 2026 4:31 PM Author: titus chicken
I’m in a similar position and we’re doing 95% of our term sheets in-house and using outside counsel for first time on deal docs for a new transaction but using AI when it’s similar to something from before.
Long term issue is that some of the non-legal folks are going to start to use Claude to do this stuff on their own and then I’m fucked.
The "no backfills" thing is 100% accurate. Or if someone gets a backfill it will be one person for every 2-4 lost with a preference for an internal hire whose position won't be replaced.