The Great Escape: Shoggoth and the Lawyer

Send us Fan MailDamien Riehl and Horace Wu catch up across time zones ahead of ILTACON, discussing legal tech announcements and market consolidation, including Elevate’s acquisition of Lupl and partnerships linking Harvey and Legora with DeepJudge.We explore ecosystem tension among document custodians (iManage/NetDocuments), search, and AI interfaces, and debate whether tools are “features” or enduring companies. We dig into DeepJudge’s Agent Handoff Protocol as a response to MCP limitations, plus confidentiality and commercialization implications. We discuss risks of probabilistic AI and argue for deterministic, pre-processed data to approach “march of the nines” accuracy. We review reports of OpenAI and Claude “escaping containment” to hack third parties, and concerns about autonomy and interpretability. We also examine EU-driven watermarking’s potential to degrade legal precision, and note Anthropic’s legal-focused hires, including Robert Mahari and Alan Rozenshtein.Link to the Black Hat video: youtube.com/watch?si=DsD4-_h0rVGjvOaA&v=87DyyMV0kCY&feature=youtu.be00:00 Tagging Facts and Law03:14 ILTACON Plans and FOMO07:30 Pre ILTA Press Releases08:19 DeepJudge Partnerships10:19 Feature or Company12:32 Agent Handoff Protocol17:10 Autonomous Agent Risks18:52 Preprocessing for Accuracy20:27 Deterministic Structuring21:53 Privacy and Adoption23:28 Containment Escape Claims24:49 Shoggoth Thought Experiment25:40 Black Hat Hugging Face Breakdown28:08 YOLO Agent Autonomy31:55 Unknown Unknown Incidents33:19 EU Watermarking Explained35:41 Legal Precision Risks39:00 Anthropic Legal Hires42:10 Labs Versus Legal Tech43:38 Optimism and Wrap UpSupport the show