{"articles":[{"slug":"artificial-general-intelligence-for-law","title":"Artificial General Intelligence for Law","subtitle":null,"authors":[{"name":"Angus McLeod","affiliation":"Lawnomic Ltd","url":"https://lawnomic.com/team#angus-mcleod","links":[{"kind":"orcid","href":"https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6420-5566"}]}],"publishedAt":"2026-09-24","updatedAt":null,"abstract":"An Artificial General Intelligence for Law (AGIL) is a jurisprudentially-grounded neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) system that produces auditable and accurate legal reasoning. An AGIL has a core of symbolic logic which reasons over formal representations of norms and facts. Neural networks, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), add scale and flexibility and in return the symbolic core scopes and verifies their inputs and outputs. This symbiotic balance of symbolic accuracy and neural breadth allows for auditable non-monotonic legal reasoning at scale. An AGIL is positivist insofar as what counts as law depends on social facts as normalised across jurisdictions by a weakly universal system design. It is argued that an AGIL of this nature will help to address the long-standing problems created by the complexity and volume of laws in modern legal systems. It is further argued that the project of legal alignment of AI (‘legal alignment’) needs both a jurisprudentially grounded concept of law and an empirically grounded technical project if it is to work. It is argued that legal alignment should be understood, like the safety of autonomous driving systems, as an emergent property of an evolving sociotechnical system.","url":"https://lawnomic.com/research/artificial-general-intelligence-for-law"},{"slug":"metamorphoses-of-the-lawyer","title":"Metamorphoses of the Lawyer","subtitle":null,"authors":[{"name":"Angus McLeod","affiliation":"Lawnomic Ltd","url":"https://lawnomic.com/team#angus-mcleod","links":[{"kind":"orcid","href":"https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6420-5566"}]}],"publishedAt":"2026-06-06","updatedAt":null,"abstract":"Few would describe the experience of being a lawyer in the modern economy as a virtuous pursuit. Since at least the 1970s, the legal profession in liberal societies has been dominated by professional structures, rules, business models and institutions designed to deal with modernity. Those structures, rules, models and institutions have allowed legal professional ethics to extend beyond individual practitioners to firms, outsourced work and now even artificial intelligence (AI) systems. They have also preserved the language of duty and virtue while simultaneously weakening the practices and institutions that cultivate substantive virtue. At one end, modern legal ethics increases moral hazard by primarily relying on appropriate restrictions and punishments to prevent undesirable behaviour, and at the other end, it drains the sense of purpose and meaning from law as a personal and civic pursuit. AI seemingly exacerbates this problem while simultaneously undermining the modern lawyer’s economic foundations. Against that somewhat bleak backdrop, this essay argues that, perhaps counterintuitively, AI provides an opportunity for the legal profession to reshape itself, as it has done a number of times in its two thousand years of history. It provides an opportunity to refocus law’s professional ethics on meaningful personal and civic ends, and to build more stable and defensible economic value for a future in which AI becomes increasingly more competent. It is argued that AI only threatens one form of the lawyer rather than lawyers per se, since machines that make technical legal work abundant and cheap also make cultivated and accountable human judgment more valuable. It is argued that the profession should aim to reshape legal education, professional institutions and business models around cooperation between artificial capability and cultivated legal judgment, drawing on a history that offers no specific form to restore but provides the substance from which a new form can be moulded.","url":"https://lawnomic.com/research/metamorphoses-of-the-lawyer"}]}