Today on the AI Daily Brief, Anthropic drops Claude Opus 4.8 and here are everyone's

first impressions. Before that in the headlines, one of the biggest law firms in the world

is heading in a very different direction with their AI strategy. The AI Daily Brief is a daily

podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, robots and pencils, section, and bolt. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And if you want to learn more about sponsoring the show or really about anything else in the

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or just head on over to A.I.dailybrief.aI. where you can read about all the things we have

going on. With that, though, let's talk about some surprisingly relevant news from the world of

legal AI.

We kick off today with a story that honestly is a little surprising with how much traction

it's getting. And I think that the resonance of it actually says a lot about where we are in this

AI cycle. The short of it is that the Financial Times reported this week that mega law firm

Kirkland and Ellis, which is the world's

biggest law firm, is planning to spend a half billion dollars building their own AI platform.

The company will spend $100 million this year and plans to continue to pour money into the project

over the coming three to four years. Now, to be clear, that spend is in addition to licensing costs

for third-party tools. This isn't just a bunch of lawyers getting a huge Claude Code budget. Chairman John Bayliss told the F.T., the ideas that we're going to take the collective intelligence of our institution and be able to deploy that throughout the firm. I'm sure you now feel like you know exactly what he's talking about with that incredibly clear and not big at all. Quote, Bayliss said that the wide distribution of third-party tools like Harvey,, and Thompson-Royter's co-counsel have raised the floor for everyone, but added, we don't get hired for the floor. Now, among the elite white shoe law firms in the U.S., Kirkland Ellis is right at the top of the heap. They have almost 4,000 attorneys spread across 11 regional offices and consistently bring in the most revenue among their peers with $10.6 billion last year.

They specialize in corporate and transactional law, advising on large IPOs, mergers and acquisitions,

and private equity deals. Now, to be clear, Kirkland's new platform will be purely internally

facing. This is not meant to be a commercial product. Around 180 outside tech professionals

have been contracted to work on the system, which, while we don't

have a ton of details, it appears that partly it will function as an extensive knowledge base,

aggregating information gathered from hundreds of Kirkland lawyers and partners, with Kirkland

...