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Welcome to this week's edition of The Legal Wire!

Adobe’s AI Foundry bets big on “commercially safe” models, custom-trained only on a company’s licensed IP, to deliver brand-consistent images, text, audio, and video without scraping drama.

Meanwhile, law schools are lagging: Bloomberg Law finds most grads aren’t getting hands-on AI training even as courts sanction hallucinated citations. No literacy, higher risk.

On tools, benchmarks vs. bundlers: Vals AI’s research test (major vendors opted out) shows upstarts leading and ChatGPT close behind legal-specific tools; Thomson Reuters counters with Deep Research in Practical Law, deeper CoCounsel–HighQ ties, and new languages, AI inside the workflows lawyers actually use.

If strategy beats slogans, here’s a pragmatic one for in-house: PERSUIT. With Apperio now inside, it turns scoping, pricing, and real-time spend into one pane of glass. The pitch isn’t “do more with AI,” it’s “buy better with data”, value-based fees, early WIP alerts, and performance feedback that actually shifts panel decisions. We spoke with VP Product David Falstein about moving outside counsel from gut feel to measurable outcomes. Read the full interview below!

This week’s Highlights:

• Industry News and Updates

• Rethinking Legal Spend: Can PERSUIT Turn Outside Counsel Management Into a Strategic Advantage?

• AI Regulation Updates

• AI Tools to Supercharge your productivity

• Legal prompt of the week

• Latest AI Incidents & Legal Tech Map

➡️ Adobe Might’ve Just Solved One of AI’s Biggest Legal Problems | Adobe has launched AI Foundry, a new service that helps companies build custom AI models using their own intellectual property, eliminating copyright concerns that plague most generative AI tools. Built on Adobe’s Firefly models, Foundry lets brands train AI systems on their proprietary data to safely generate images, text, audio, and video. Adobe says its models are commercially safe, meaning all training data is properly licensed, unlike many competitors that scrape content from the internet. The company is betting that businesses will pay for responsible, brand-consistent AI as content demand surges. Pricing will vary by customer, and the launch follows Adobe’s new LLM Optimizer tool, which tracks brand visibility across major AI chatbots.
^{Oct 20, 2025, Source: ZDNET}

➡️ Law Schools Lag Behind on AI Training | An article on Bloomberg law reports that AI is transforming law, yet most law schools still don’t teach it, leaving graduates unprepared for real-world practice. Courts have logged hundreds of “AI hallucination” citation cases since 2023, with some lawyers facing sanctions for misuse. Without AI literacy, students risk ethical breaches and malpractice. The solution: integrate hands-on AI education covering how tools like ChatGPT and Lexis+AI work, why they err, and how to verify outputs. Future legal competence depends on it.
^{Oct 17, 2025, Source: Bloomberg Law}

➡️ Vals AI Releases Legal Research Benchmark, But Major Players Opt Out | Benchmarking firm Vals AI has published its long-awaited legal research report, evaluating how AI tools perform against human lawyers, but leading platforms like Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel, Lexis+AI, and Harvey are notably absent. The study tested Alexi, Counsel Stack, Midpage, and ChatGPT on 200 U.S. legal research questions, scoring accuracy, citation authority, and clarity. Counsel Stack achieved the top score, with all tools outperforming the human baseline. ChatGPT performed nearly as well as the legal-specific AIs. Vals said the major vendors declined to participate after research was separated from its earlier February report. Despite rapid AI progress since July’s testing period, the report concludes that both general and legal AI tools can now rival human performance in legal research.
^{Oct 16, 2025, Source: Legal IT Insider}

➡️ Thomson Reuters Expands Legal AI with CoCounsel and Practical Law Integration | Thomson Reuters unveiled new AI upgrades, including Deep Research on Practical Law and deeper integration between CoCounsel and HighQ. The tools streamline research and drafting while embedding generative AI directly into collaborative workflows. CoCounsel is also expanding globally with new language support in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. The company, investing over $200 million annually in AI, will showcase these innovations at upcoming industry events in London and Florida.
^{Oct 14, 2025, Source: Thomson Reuters}

Legal Technology

Rethinking Legal Spend: Can PERSUIT Turn Outside Counsel Management Into a Strategic Advantage?

Legal departments have long grappled with a paradox: while expected to be strategic business partners, they’re often stuck in the weeds of budgeting, billing, and outside counsel management. Well, until they found PERSUIT: a platform built not just to digitize these tasks, but to rethink them from the ground up.

While legal tech is abundant, PERSUIT caught our attention for its clear focus on enabling smarter, outcome-oriented decisions across the lifecycle of outside counsel engagement. As a private practice lawyer, I’m always intrigued to know how to provide the most value to in-house counsel, and this tool provides great perspective.

Founded with the belief that legal dollars should reflect business value and not only hours logged, PERSUIT is designed to help legal teams engage firms more strategically, implement value-based pricing models, and monitor performance throughout the matter lifecycle. The recent acquisition of Apperio, a spend management platform known for its real-time analytics, strengthens that mission with enhanced visibility into spend and billing data.

We recently had the opportunity to touch base with David Falstein, VP of Product at PERSUIT to understand more about the product, its evolution, and what lies ahead.

Click here to continue reading the full interview

The AI Regulation Tracker offers a clickable global map that gives you instant snapshots of how each country is handling AI laws, along with the most recent policy developments.

The most recent developments from the past week:

📋 19 October 2025 | Dubai Crown Prince approves new AI initiatives to fast-track Dubai’s digital transformation: His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence of the UAE, has approved a series of AI initiatives aimed at accelerating Dubai's digital transformation. These initiatives include the launch of the 'AI Infrastructure Empowerment Platform', the establishment of the 'Dubai AI Acceleration Taskforce', and the introduction of the 'Unicorn 30 Programme'. These projects are designed to enhance the adoption of future technologies across key sectors, in line with Dubai's vision to become the world's fastest and smartest city in embracing AI. Sheikh Hamdan emphasized the importance of integrating technology, knowledge, and innovation to solidify Dubai's position as a global hub for advanced technologies.

📋 16 October 2025 | Turkey’s privacy watchdog to publish guidelines on generative AI: It is reported that Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Authority will soon publish guidelines on generative AI to help companies and citizens harness the benefits of AI and uphold human values, according to the authority’s president Faruk Bilir.

📋 15 October 2025 | US federal AI regulation is on the way, says US senator: It is reported that at a CNBC AI Summit, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has announced that federal regulation of AI is forthcoming in the US amid growing consensus among lawmakers on the need to establish guidelines to govern AI technologies, ensuring they are developed and deployed responsibly. Senator Blackburn has been pushing multiple legislative fronts beyond the Kids Online Safety Act, working on an online consumer privacy protection bill that would let users "set those firewalls and protect the virtual you," plus legislation targeting how AI systems use someone's name, image, or likeness without consent. “The reason the states have stepped in, whether it’s to protect consumers or protect children, is because the federal government has, to date, not been able to pass any federal preemptive legislation,” Senator Blackburn said. “We have to have the states standing in the gap until such time that Congress will say no to the big tech platforms."

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The Responsible AI Collaborative is a not‑for‑profit organization working to present real‑world AI harms through its Artificial Intelligence Incident Database.

View the latest reported incidents below:

⚠️ 2025-03-12 | Alleged ChatGPT Misuse by Contractor Leads to Reported Data Exposure in New South Wales Resilient Homes Program | View Incident

⚠️ 2025-08-19 | New Zealand Financial Markets Authority (FMA), Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko, Reportedly Flags Purported Deepfake Pump-and-Dump Network Using Social Media Ads | View Incident

⚠️ 2025-10-03 | Old Mutual Reportedly Warns of Purported Deepfake Videos Impersonating Chairman Trevor Manuel in Investment Scams | View Incident

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