Lawfuel

30/08/2026

What does a very successful trial lawyer do with a $15.5 million mansion next door?

If you're Houston litigation heavyweight Tony Buzbee, you buy it.

Then you tear it down.

The high-profile trial lawyer is combining the River Oaks property with his existing home to create a two-acre estate, English garden and pool house, while salvaging an estimated $4 million in materials for charity.

It’s trial-lawyer money meeting Texas real estate, with a demolition permit thrown in.

LawFuel looks at Buzbee, the extraordinary property deal and the legal career that made this sort of landscaping decision possible.

https://www.lawfuel.com/texas-trial-lawyer-tony-buzbee-buys-15-5-million-mansion-next-door-then-calls-in-the-wrecking-ball/

Power Point - Tony Buzbee's latest River Oaks acquisition isn't simply another trophy-home purchase. The Houston trial lawyer is assembling a two-acre estate by

29/08/2026

Thomson Reuters just built its own AI brain and given their content and money this could seriously bloody the nose of the multitudinous AI 'models' emerging onto the market.

TR CEO Steve Hasker is using his McKinseys nous to do a job on the aspiring legal giants.

It's another legal chatbot, but a proprietary model, Thomson, trained on decades of Westlaw, Practical Law and Checkpoint content for ~$40 million.

They’re calling it “Fiduciary-Grade AI.”

The real story isn’t the model perhaps, but the moat.

While others rent intelligence from OpenAI or Anthropic, Thomson Reuters is turning its data advantage into an AI advantage. Less dependence. More control. And early signs it outperforms general frontier models on hard legal work.

Content is still king. Thomson Reuters just reminded everyone who owns the library.

Worth watching: https://www.lawfuel.com/thomson-reuters-builds-its-own-ai-brain-heres-why-thomson-may-matter-more-than-another-legal-chatbot/

Power Points: Thomson Reuters has launched Thomson, its first proprietary large language model, trained using its vast stores of legal, tax and professional inf

27/08/2026

When a big law firm sues for unpaid fees, it usually hopes for a quiet settlement. Instead, Davis Polk just walked into a masterclass on the risks of fee litigation.

The Wall Street firm is suing clean energy giant Enel North America for $3.3M in allegedly unpaid legal bills.

Enel’s response has been a counterclaims alleging a raft of issues: • Inflated billing and redundant staffing • Unnecessary legal work • A lack of specialized energy-sector expertise

To make things more interesting, Enel retained Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, a firm famous for litigating high-profile fee recovery battles against former clients like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

For major law firms, fee disputes are a double-edged sword. You may be owed the money, but suing invites public, line-by-line scrutiny of your billing practices, partner supervision, and whether multi-million dollar invoices reflect real-world value.

Full breakdown here - https://www.lawfuel.com/davis-polks-3-3-million-fee-fight-gets-ugly-as-former-client-hits-back/

Davis Polk's $3.3 million lawsuit against former client Enel has escalated, with the energy giant alleging inflated billing, inferior work and promising counterclaims against the Wall Street firm.

24/08/2026

Spectacular defeat leaves Prince Harry’s golden lawyer tarnished.

David Sherborne, the long known as the go-to counsel for privacy and phone-hacking claims has suffered a rare and very public setback in his latest High Court action.

The High Court comprehensively dismissed every allegation of unlawful information-gathering brought by the Duke of Sussex and co-claimants against Associated Newspapers.

Earlier wins against Mirror Group and a substantial settlement with News Group had burnished Sherborne’s reputation but this time the evidence did not stack up. The result has been described as an “utter, utter humiliation” for a claim critics say should never have been brought.

The costs exposure is significant. The reputational dent for one of media law’s most visible figures is very real.

Full piece (with links to our earlier LawFuel coverage of Sherborne’s wins and the wider privacy circuit) here: https://www.lawfuel.com/from-phone-hacking-hero-to-courtroom-zero-golden-boy-lawyers-reputation-tattered-by-prince-harry-defeat/

Golden Lawyer Tarnished: Sherborne’s High-Stakes Privacy Battle Ends in Humiliation Celebrity barrister David Sherborne , long the go-to “barrister to the stars

24/08/2026

An academic study screened 218 New Zealand judgments from 2014 to 2024 looking for strategic lawsuits against public participation. It found four. It anonymised all of them.

We are Claim B.

A Russian businessman lost a defamation claim in California under that state's anti-SLAPP statute. He then came to New Zealand, where no such statute exists, and applied for pre-commencement discovery of our sources under rule 8.20. He got it. We disclosed, paid costs, published an apology and gave an undertaking not to republish.

He never filed a defamation claim at all.

The piece covers what the High Court did not do: no proportionality analysis, no second-stage section 68 balancing, no mention of section 14 NZBORA anywhere in the judgment, and a one-line pass at Jameel. It also covers the holding nobody has written about, that writers under house bylines are not "informants" for source-protection purposes.

And it covers what we got wrong too.

Link in comments.

A new study finds four likely SLAPPs in a decade of NZ judgments. LawFuel was one. What the High Court got wrong on source protection, and what we got wrong.

21/08/2026

Kirkland just spent $500 million to make the billable hour optional.

While most of Big Law is still licensing the same AI tools, Kirkland & Ellis is building its own proprietary platform to encode the firm’s collective intelligence.

The firm's Jon Ballis put it bluntly: off-the-shelf AI is “raising the floor for everyone.” Kirkland doesn’t get hired for the floor.

The key is turning lawyers into “intelligence lawyers”, professionals who deploy institutional judgment at scale and price on value rather than hours.

Kirkland is already leaning into value-based pricing and expects the shift to accelerate. Partners are taking a short-term hit to distributions so the firm can own the asset instead of renting the same tools as everyone else.

This is one of the clearest signals yet that the firms willing to invest in proprietary intelligence (not just tools) will start pulling away.

The question now is how many other large law firms are quietly preparing the same move, or still hoping the billable hour holds.

Here's the read - https://www.lawfuel.com/kirklands-500-million-ai-bet-isnt-about-speed-its-about-killing-the-billable-hour/

Key Points: Kirkland & Ellis, the first law firm in history to break $10 billion in revenue, is putting half a billion dollars of its own money into a propr

21/08/2026

Can a global law firm use a Geneva arbitration clause to sidestep New York’s lawyer-mobility protections?

Clifford Chance is seeking to send its nearly $5.76 million clawback dispute with former US partners Clifford Cone and Michael Sabin to confidential arbitration in Geneva.

Cone and Sabin, who joined Sidley Austin in January, say New York law should govern and that the firm’s retrospective compensation mechanism operates as an unlawful financial penalty on lawyers who join competitors.

Clifford Chance’s answer: the dispute-resolution process was agreed in advance, and an arbitral tribunal—not a New York federal court—should decide the governing-law question.

The fight highlights whether global partnership structures can impose significant exit costs on US-based equity partners through English-law agreements and foreign-seated arbitration.

The key issue is partner mobility—and whether law-firm clawbacks can survive the protections embedded in New York’s professional conduct rules.

But it also provides an interesting insight into big law partnership pay deals

Here's the link - https://www.lawfuel.com/clifford-chance-goes-to-war-over-5-8-million-partner-clawback-behind-the-high-stakes-geneva-battle/

Key Points: Clifford Chance has asked the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to dismiss a declaratory-judgment action brought by former par

19/08/2026

Legal AI is getting cheaper. And considerably more crowded.

Australian-built BarristerAI has launched with a fairly direct proposition: serious AI-powered legal research shouldn’t require a BigLaw budget.

Built by barristers, it starts at $30 a month, with research charged as you use it, and puts verifiable authorities and pinpoint citations at the centre of the product.

Another AI tool? Yes. But the combination of price, verification and barrister-specific research makes this one worth watching.

Read more on LawFuel.

Australia’s increasingly crowded legal AI market has another challenger, with Sydney-based BarristerAI has launching an AI legal research platform built specifi

17/08/2026

Whanganui’s Parisian vibe

10/08/2026

A recent report said that major law firm Paul Weiss was talking to private equity.

But maybe that was the wrong story.

What is actually happening is more subtle, involving -

• Lawyers keeping the firm that gives legal advice. Rule 5.4 stays intact.

• A separate, investor owned company owns the tech, billing, marketing, data and premises.

• Private equity invests in that second company and collects the fee.

Private equity does not own the law firm but everything around it.

In the US, watch Morgan & Morgan: $2.4bn in revenue, JPMorgan hired, a minority stake north of $1bn on the table and an IPO in the frame.

In the UK, the argument was settled years ago. The ABS regime already lets outside investors own firms outright, and nearly £1.2bn has gone in since 2019. The next British deal will be another regional bolt on, not a City giant.

The major law firms will commission the feasibility study, but then wait for someone else to go first.

Full analysis on LawFuel

https://www.lawfuel.com/private-equity-law-firms-guide/

Paul Weiss, Quinn Emanuel and Proskauer have quietly talked to private equity. The real story is the MSO structure, and the firm most likely to move first.