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From the Docket

Reading on legal AI, ethics, and the all-in-one shift.

Substantive analysis from a working litigator. New essays every other week.

Park v. Kim and the Second Circuit's AI warning shot

Seven months after Mata v. Avianca, a federal appeals court referred a New York attorney to its Grievance Panel for the same offense — a fabricated ChatGPT citation in a reply brief. Here's what Park v. Kim added to the AI sanctions landscape, and why appellate practice raised the stakes.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 8 min read

State bar AI guidance: a 50-state survey

Roughly half of U.S. state bars have issued formal guidance on lawyers' use of generative AI. The other half haven't — but the duties still apply. Here's what each state has said, where the framework diverges, and what multi-jurisdiction practitioners actually need to do.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 12 min read

Why bolt-on AI doesn't solve hallucinations

The legacy practice management and research platforms are all racing to add AI features. The features look new. The underlying architecture isn't. Here's why bolting generative AI onto an existing platform doesn't solve the hallucination problem — and what would.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 9 min read

The true cost of the legal tech stack

Most firms don't actually know what they spend on legal technology. When you add up the case management subscription, the research databases, the AI add-ons, the e-discovery platform, and the dozen smaller tools nobody tracks, the real number is consistently larger than firms expect — and the cost isn't only in dollars.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 10 min read

The practice management AI failure

Every major practice management platform has launched an AI feature. None of them were built for litigation. Here's why the AI features inherit the limitations of the underlying products, and what that means for trial lawyers.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 8 min read

How DDEAS prevents the Mata v. Avianca scenario

The Mata v. Avianca sanctions happened because four specific defenses were missing. Here's exactly what they were, and how the DDEAS framework was designed to make that scenario structurally impossible.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 8 min read

Built by a litigator, for the platform litigators actually need

Most legal technology is built by software people who have never tried a case. They get what's hard about running a firm. They don't get what's hard about practicing in one. After twenty-five years on the litigation side of the equation, I built the platform I wanted to use.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 8 min read

The case for ethical AI in litigation

The legal profession is in the middle of the largest expansion of the competence duty in a generation. The question is not whether lawyers will use AI. The question is whether the lawyers using it will be the ones who can defend the work afterward.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 9 min read

Modern solo practice — 25 years in

I started practicing in an era of fax machines, hardback case reporters, and physical court filing. I'm finishing it in an era of AI-drafted motions and electronic dockets. The technology has changed almost everything. The work has changed almost nothing. Here's what I've learned about the parts that don't change.

Chris Waters · June 9, 2026 · 9 min read