A research program Harvard Law School · using Dragonfly Thinking

AI isn't being adopted by law. It's restructuring the profession.

A living essay-and-visualisation series on how artificial intelligence is reconfiguring how legal services are delivered, who delivers them, how lawyers are trained, and what professional judgment becomes — read as a system, through many lenses at once.

Project leads
Start reading Explore the topic network
The series

Seven essays, seven lenses

Each reads the same transformation through a different lens — and each pairs with an interactive visualisation.

The topic network — 170 sources across 39 topics
Series · Introduction

Series introduction

Why this series exists, what each of us brings to it, and how AI, complex decision-making, and the structure of the legal profession intersect. Start here.

Read the introduction16 min
01Systems map of law's structural centrality
Structure

Law is the gateway drug

Law's structural position — at the centre of business, connecting every function — makes it the natural entry point for AI across professional services.

Read essay10 min
02Concentric model of Harvey's evolution
Strategy

Harvey's strategic evolution

What the most-discussed legal-AI company actually appears to be building — and why reading it as a "ChatGPT wrapper" misses the strategic thesis.

Read essay11 min
03Director, coach, editor — modes of human–AI collaboration
Practice

Getting your hands dirty

From analysing the system to experiencing it — what it actually feels like to work with AI agents on complex intellectual tasks, and why that gap matters.

Read essay18 min
04The scrambled competitive map
Competition

The scrambled competitive map

AI is scrambling the competitive map so thoroughly that the old categories of incumbent and challenger no longer hold. The kinds of player on the field.

Read essay12 min
05The four ingredients quadrant
Training

The training crisis

The four ingredients of good AI outcomes — and why the profession is quietly removing the scarcest one from the production process.

Read essay10 min
06The pyramid transformation — firm shapes
Profession

From up or out to up and out

If AI automates the base, where does the top go? Firms moving upmarket aren't heading for unoccupied territory — and the ladder is collapsing behind them.

Read essay11 min
Interactive · D3

The topic network

A living map of the corpus underpinning this series. Each source is coded across dimensions, surfacing which issues are most discussed, where structural tensions live, and which sources bridge multiple domains.

170
Sources
39
Topics
11
Dimensions
Open the visualisation