Welcome to Law://WhatsNext - the show where we catch up with leading practitioners (lawyers; technologists; educators and more) who are leveraging emerging technologies to pursue their passion and objectives, and as a by product we get nerdy trying to understand the implications for the future of legal practice (and more broadly, knowledge work). To keep up with the pace of change and developments subscribe to this channel or to our newsletter at: https://lawwhatsnext.substack.com/
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In this episode, we've distilled a year of extraordinary dialogue into one 20-minute highlights reel. We've spent 2025 in conversation with legal industry pioneers โ the general counsels, technologists, and educators redefining how law is practised, learned, and delivered.
These are some of our standout moments from a series of compelling global conversations.
What made the reel (this could honestly be a multi-part series):
Part 1: Hype vs. Reality โ Is AI progress real?
- Kevin Cohn (the soon to be CEO of Brightflag) provokes that the trough of disillusionment is coming but that shouldn't blight the reality that the value in the skills and expertise we used to highly prize are dramatically eroding
Part 2: Agency, authenticity & trust
- Dana Rao (the former GC & Chief Trust Officer at Adobe) demonstrates that we can be the agents (rather than mere subjects) of positive change, and we loved learning more about the work he and his team at Adobe invested to build the Content Authenticity Initiative (to counter the ever increasing proliferation of deepfakes)
Part 3: Leading in disruptive times
- Jessica Block (EVP at Factor) used a recent read (Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise) as the lens through which she explained the importance of cultivating the right environment (over systems) for the emergent properties of transformational change to "bubble" up.
Part 4: Evaluating what's actually working
- Sigge Labor (President at Legora) explained for us the work that Legora performs to understand frontier model performance and how they react to new developments and assess leaps in capabilities. We anticipate that in 2026 more and more legal teams and firms will invest in their evaluation capabilities, and this conversation (that accompanied the release of GPT5 in the summer) is one to check out if you haven't already.
Part 5: The skills we might lose
- Dan Hunter (Executive Dean, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London) talked of the "terrifying bind" we encounter as we offload more and more cognitive work to compute - the work may get easier and more efficient but our cognitive development doesn't replicate (in terms of resilience) the old training training pathway. He has immediate concerns in the classroom and anticipates a coming gap in law firm talent pipelines.
These are just glimpses. Check out our Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Substack pages for the full conversations.
Thank you for listening, supporting, and championing the show.
We wish you a happy new year โ Series 2 is coming soon ๐