To Be More Human
Fractionally Legal v59 Looks at Some of Today's Legal and Tech Topics Through a Human Frame
I’ve been playing around with Claude Code, building cool things to help me serve my clients faster and cheaper. For example, vibe coding the long delayed Lawyer Loop AI to solve my own pain point of finding inexpensive lawyers in jurisdictions I don’t practice to help my fractional general counsel clients with jurisdiction-specific legal needs. Traditional search, especially the specialized pay-to-play legal vertical search, always sucked at that. Excuse LawyerLoop.ai, it’s a work in progress but we will get there.
Claude Code is an amazing unlock. The bottleneck is no longer technical — even I can build a rudimentary app that actually does something. You need to have a little technical knowledge, but Claude makes the decisions about tooling for you and then writes the code that ties those tools together to make the app actually useful. These are tasks that we used to hire developers to do. I feel for those developers because the same AI that is “disrupting” (in tech speak) the market for coders and developers is also working hard to give people quality legal work without the need for lawyers (to mixed results https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/openai-hit-with-lawsuit-claiming-chatgpt-acted-an-unlicensed-lawyer-2026-03-05/). As we say in the law: the jury is still out on whether AI can eliminate most human lawyers. But it’s certainly done it for the type of developers — mainly non-U.S. based — that used to do this type of work.
But let’s not over-hype the tech: Claude Code is really empowering, technically. But all this tech is pointless if you don’t actually know what you want to build and why it should exist. What problem are you trying to solve, and why? And how does it do something real human beings actually need to make their lives better? And while the tech is undoubtedly powerful, there are limitations to the techno-determinist viewpoint of how AI is going to change everything. The recent news from the tech world and beyond illustrates how important it is to stay human in the AI era.
It’s not a problem central to tech. It’s the same issue we see in something as seemingly different as the war in Iran. Yes, the U.S. has the technology to dominate the battlefield and destroy all of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, causing a huge amount of pain for our enemies as our toddler-in-chief is always threatening. And that could be a goal in and of itself. But it’s pretty vapid and it’s certainly not the stated goal of this war. We have the how (the tech) but no clear way forward, and we never braced for the non-technical impacts, or “user experience” as my friends in tech might say. Like high gas prices. That’s a huge, non-technical problem.
Apply the same framework to the recent jury verdicts against social media companies in the addiction cases. Google and Meta got the almost laughable damage award of $3,000,000 for ruining the life of a teen by poisoning her on social media. It’s not a $3,000,000 award but, rather, a $3,000,000,000 award because it means that the 1,000 other cases against these companies also have merit. These are not class actions, so each needs to be tried separately — a huge cost to the plaintiffs and the companies. But even if this ordeal costs $3 billion over the next 10 years, it’s still a pittance for these companies. However, if you’re thinking about starting a new social media company — as some of my clients are (and one of these breaks through every 10 years, the last one being TikTok) — you need to think about what it means to addict someone, and how to design around that, because you won’t be able to deal with the attorney fees for even one of these addiction cases, let alone the cost to settle a case that has actual value now. Yes, you can build an addictive social media app using AI faster and cheaper than you could a year ago. But you need to remember the humans involved, because human juries will hold you responsible for harming actual humans.
As I’ve written about in the past, AI companies are helping themselves to content created by actual humans to train their models to produce content that actually seems like it’s created by humans. It’s a pretty funny, and legally fraught, way to build your product, but presumably no one figured out a better way to do it. And the result is that basically every human (or company) who owns the means to produce actual, human-generated content is suing. Or reaching settlements. And I don’t doubt that we will see billions of dollars flow from the big AI companies to the content owners over the next 10 years. But the problem is actually more profound than that: as I’ve written about in the past, the AI companies are not merely the publishers of the content, they are the creators — albeit by pilfering human content. https://fractionallyyours.substack.com/i/142547938/how-not-to-train-your-ai-on-other-peoples-copyrighted-content So even if they have the use of the content, they need to make sure that what they create is not harming anyone. Again, anyone can create anything, but AI companies need to be aware that when their creations hurt actual humans, they are responsible. And I predict that, unlike with social media, it won’t take 20 years to reach that inevitable conclusion. There are already multiple cases of actual humans who have been harmed by AI. The way things are going, these are eventually going to lead to jury verdicts against the AI companies. But for my aversion to personal injury matters, I’d certainly take those cases.
As I experience almost every day with my AI-centric clients and my own work with lawyerloop.ai, in the AI era, building tech, writing code, making movies, and so much more is getting commodified — anyone can do it. In that environment, creativity, human empathy, and managing risk are now the coin of the realm. I feel strongly that the winners in the next decade are going to be companies who think creatively about what humans actually need and design products that enhance human lives and their industries, rather than denigrate humans and try to impose new, somewhat pointless tech solutions on people who don’t actually need them — unfortunately, the latter seems to be the direction of so many AI products today. Stated another way, the more powerful the technology, the more creativity, empathy, and smart risk management take center stage.
Next week I’m headed to Human[X] h in San Francisco to help think through some of these ideas. I’m not there to figure out how to build cool AI tools that can “practice law” and put lawyers out of business. I’m there to think about creative ways to use AI to serve my clients faster and cheaper, because that is what the world needs.
Keep thinking, keep building, Jesse
Hi, and welcome to my newsletter! I’m Jesse Strauss, Your Fractional General Counsel. I’m a lawyer with a private practice based in New York City, helping clients in the United States and globally with their U.S. legal needs. My expertise spans various areas, including raising funding rounds, employment issues, negotiating master service agreements, intellectual property, compliance, legal process management, and dispute resolution. My focus is on founding and nurturing great companies from seed to exit. Discover more at Your Fractional GC and book a complimentary 30-minute consultation. You can also follow me on Threads @lawyerjesse1977, on BlueSky @lawyerjesse.bsky.social, subscribe to my Substack here (follow me on notes), and follow me on LinkedIn here.