Writing archive
Writing archive on legal AI, litigation finance, and legal execution.
This archive brings together Craig Cornick's essays on litigation finance, motor finance redress, legal AI, legal asset management, regulation, and collective redress.
Featured essay
24 April 2026 · 10 min read
The Operator View of Legal AI
Why legal AI becomes commercially meaningful when it is wired into workflow, case movement, and accountable operating design rather than left as isolated assistance.
Pillar: Legal AI and technology built from operating reality
Category: Legal AI and technology
Archive
Recent essays
Each essay sits within a wider thematic route, so readers can move from a single argument into the surrounding body of work without losing context.
What Legal AI Actually Changes in Case Progression
Why legal AI only becomes strategically important when it improves the movement of matters through intake, evidence, review, and next-action decisions.
The Billing Paradox: Why Hourly Rates and AI Do Not Mix
How useful legal AI exposes the tension between time-based pricing and a service model that increasingly depends on visible process leverage rather than hidden effort.
Build Versus Buy for Law Firm AI: A Decision Framework
A practical operating framework for deciding which parts of a legal AI stack should be bought, which should be built, and which workflow layers must stay under direct control.
Document automation: what ten years of overpromising taught us
A decade of document automation investment has produced genuine capability gains, but the firms that extracted real value were those that treated it as an operating problem rather than a technology purchase.
Legal AI agents: what is real and what is not
The legal market is saturated with claims about AI agents automating everything from intake to settlement, but separating genuine operational capability from vendor theatre requires a more disciplined framework than most buyers currently apply.
The legal asset management thesis
Legal asset management reframes litigation and legal rights not as costs to be minimised but as financial assets to be actively managed, and that reframing has profound consequences for how capital, law firms, and regulated businesses operate.
Law firms as acquisition targets: who is actually buying
The wave of capital entering law firm ownership is reshaping how legal services are structured, priced, and delivered, and understanding who is buying matters as much as understanding why.
What is an alternative business structure, properly explained
Alternative business structures are widely misunderstood as a regulatory footnote, yet they represent one of the most consequential shifts in how legal services are owned, capitalised, and delivered in England and Wales.
The ABS law firm model in practice
Alternative Business Structures have been legally permissible in England and Wales for over a decade, yet the operational and commercial logic that makes the ABS law firm model genuinely powerful remains widely misunderstood.
The PACCAR problem
The Supreme Court's PACCAR ruling redefined what a litigation funding agreement must look like, forcing funders, law firms, and claimants to renegotiate the commercial architecture of funded cases from the ground up.
What commercial litigation funding actually does
Commercial litigation funding is widely misread as a simple loan product, but understanding what it actually does to the operating layer of a dispute changes how firms, businesses, and funders should approach it.
How to evaluate a litigation funder
Choosing a litigation funder is one of the most consequential decisions a law firm or claimant can make, yet the evaluation frameworks most practitioners rely on remain surprisingly shallow.
Consumer Duty, properly explained
Consumer Duty is not a compliance checklist to be filed and forgotten; it is a structural shift in how the FCA expects regulated firms to design, price, and govern every product and service they offer to retail customers.
The four Consumer Duty outcomes, in practice
The FCA's four Consumer Duty outcomes are not a compliance checklist but a structural reorientation of how regulated firms must design, price, and govern every product and service they offer.
Principle 12: what it actually means
Consumer Duty Principle 12 is widely treated as a restatement of existing conduct obligations, but its operating logic is fundamentally different and the gap between those two readings is where regulatory risk accumulates.
Discretionary commission arrangements: how we got here and what comes next
Discretionary commission arrangements in motor finance created a structural conflict of interest that regulators, courts, and consumers are now unwinding, with consequences that will reshape the industry for years to come.
The motor finance Supreme Court ruling, decoded
The Supreme Court's intervention in the motor finance commission dispute is not simply a consumer win; it is a structural recalibration of how hidden remuneration arrangements are treated across the entire credit industry.
The FCA redress scheme is the floor, not the ceiling
The FCA's motor finance redress scheme sets a regulatory baseline for compensation, but operators and law firms that treat it as the upper limit of consumer entitlement are likely to find themselves materially exposed.
The Consumer Duty cross-cutting rules: the practical guide
The FCA's Consumer Duty cross-cutting rules are not a checklist exercise; they impose a continuous standard of conduct that reshapes how regulated firms must design, deliver, and evidence every customer interaction.
SRA Accounts Rules: what every firm still gets wrong
Most law firms treat SRA Accounts Rules compliance as a bookkeeping exercise, but the rules impose a structural discipline on client money that bookkeeping alone cannot satisfy.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2026
The Solicitors Regulation Authority is reshaping how law firms operate in 2026, and firms that treat regulatory compliance as a back-office function rather than a strategic discipline are already falling behind.
Class actions in the UK: what you actually need to know
The UK does not have a single unified class action regime, and that structural reality shapes every decision a law firm, funder, or affected business must make before a collective claim gets off the ground.
The Group Litigation Order, explained
The Group Litigation Order is one of the most powerful procedural tools available to English courts, yet it is routinely misunderstood by the businesses and practitioners who encounter it most.
Opt-out versus opt-in: the class action structural choice
The structural choice between opt-out and opt-in class actions is not merely procedural; it determines who recovers, how much capital is required, and whether collective redress is commercially viable at all.
How motor finance redress is actually calculated
The debate around motor finance redress has focused heavily on liability, but the more consequential and less understood question is precisely how compensation figures are assembled once liability is established.
The next wave of UK financial services redress
The FCA Consumer Duty has fundamentally altered the architecture of UK financial services redress, and the motor finance mis-selling episode is only the opening act of a much larger reckoning.
Omnibus litigation versus the scheme: the economics
The choice between omnibus litigation and a regulatory redress scheme in motor finance is not merely procedural; it is a structural economic decision that will shape how value flows to consumers, law firms, and funders for years to come.
Competition claims and the CAT regime
The Competition Appeal Tribunal's collective proceedings regime has reshaped how competition law damages reach consumers and businesses, and the Mastercard class action illustrates both its promise and its structural tensions.
Funders and class actions: the economics
Litigation funding companies occupy a structural position in class actions that is widely misunderstood, and getting the economics wrong at the outset produces consequences that neither lawyers nor claimants can easily reverse.
The next decade of UK mass claims
The UK's collective redress landscape is undergoing a structural shift that will reshape how law firms, funders, and regulated businesses approach mass litigation over the next decade.
Litigation funding agreements: what to actually negotiate
Most parties entering a litigation funding agreement focus on the headline return multiple, but the terms that will actually determine commercial outcomes sit several clauses deeper and are rarely scrutinised with equivalent rigour.
CFAs, DBAs, and third-party funding: the UK options explained
Understanding what litigation funding actually means in the UK requires separating three distinct financing structures that are routinely conflated, each carrying different risk profiles, regulatory obligations, and commercial consequences for the parties involved.
Post-PACCAR funding structures that actually work
The PACCAR judgment forced the litigation funding market to rebuild its contractual foundations, and the structures that have emerged from that process are more sophisticated and more durable than what came before.
Arizona and the UK: the next ABS jurisdictions
Arizona's legal reforms have turned the state into a live laboratory for alternative business structure experimentation, and the comparison with the UK's more mature ABS regime reveals where the next wave of legal market liberalisation may emerge.
The data moat in professional services
The most defensible strategic advantage in professional services is increasingly not brand or geography but the proprietary data asset that sits beneath workflow, pricing, and client retention.
The generational cliff in the UK legal profession
The UK legal profession is approaching a generational inflection point in succession, ownership, and talent economics, and firms that treat it as a staffing issue rather than an asset-management problem are likely to misjudge the scale of the transition.
The FCA and SRA perimeter problem
The boundary between FCA-regulated claims activity and SRA-regulated legal practice is becoming more commercially significant and more operationally unstable, especially in redress-driven markets where firms and intermediaries are expanding rapidly.
Harvey, Legora, and Thomson Reuters: where the legal AI market is actually going
The legal AI market is no longer defined by demos or generic model access; it is being shaped by distribution, workflow depth, and the strategic positioning of platforms such as Harvey, Legora, and Thomson Reuters.
The funder return puzzle
The economics of litigation funding companies look deceptively simple from the outside, but funder returns are driven by portfolio construction, duration, enforcement risk, and capital discipline in ways that are often misunderstood even by sophisticated observers.
Pillars
Six themes shaping the archive
These themes organise the essays into clear routes through litigation finance, motor finance redress, legal AI, legal asset management, regulation, and collective redress.
Litigation Finance
Litigation finance as legal infrastructure
Writing on litigation finance, funding structures, underwriting logic, and the operating realities that shape whether claims can move.
Motor Finance Redress
Motor finance redress and the next UK compensation wave
Analysis of discretionary commission arrangements, redress economics, Supreme Court outcomes, and the operating questions surrounding motor-finance compensation.
Legal AI and Technology
Legal AI and technology built from operating reality
Essays on legal AI, workflow design, document systems, and the practical difference between useful legal technology and software theatre.
Legal Asset Management
The legal asset management thesis
Writing on legal asset management, ABS structures, legal-sector consolidation, data advantage, and the ownership logic behind modern legal businesses.
Consumer Duty and Regulation
Consumer Duty, regulation, and legal-market boundaries
Writing on Consumer Duty, SRA and FCA perimeter questions, regulatory interpretation, and the compliance realities shaping legal and financial-services businesses.
Class Actions and Collective Redress
Class actions and collective redress at UK scale
Essays on UK class actions, collective redress, CAT and GLO structures, and the funding and operating logic behind large-scale mass claims.