New AI Will Replace All Lawyers, Says Founder Who Has No Idea What Lawyers Actually Do

 22 April 2026

SAN FRANCISCO — The founder of Nova.AI, a general purpose artificial intelligence platform, has declared that lawyers will be fully replaced by AI within three years. His only direct experience of legal practice was the incorporation of his company in 2021, during which process he did not read the documents, did not understand them, and took four months to pay the invoice, despite having raised eleven million dollars three weeks earlier.

Tyler Wren, 31, holds a PhD in Sparse Tensor Decomposition for Federated Learning Environments from MIT.

“I looked at what lawyers actually do,” Wren said. “It’s templates. They have a template, they fill in the names, they change a few words. We can do that. We do that in seconds.”

He said the legal industry was ripe for disruption.

“It’s just text,” he said. “Text in, text out. We’re very good at text.”

At Halcourt & Blyth, a commercial litigation firm in Sydney, a senior associate named Kate Mercer was on day three of compiling the court book for a Commercial List matter listed for hearing the following Monday.

The court book was governed by Practice Note SC Eq 3. It contained 1,400 documents. Each required a coversheet bearing a tab number, a document description, a date, and the party who produced it. Affidavits were numbered sequentially. Annexures to each affidavit were lettered — Annexure A, Annexure B — as sub-items of the affidavit to which they related. Documents formally tendered as exhibits were numbered separately in the exhibit index, which was distinct from the court book index, which was distinct from the chronological bundle, which was also required.

The distinction between an annexure and an exhibit had taken thirty-five minutes to explain to the paralegal. A further twenty minutes had been spent explaining why the chronological bundle was not the same as the court book even though it contained the same documents in a different order.

On the morning of day three, it emerged that 200 documents produced by the other side had been scanned sideways. Practice Note SC Eq 3 requires documents to be upright and legible. Rotating them in Word displaced the pagination across four sections of the court book. The court book now exceeded the page limit specified in the usual orders for hearing by 22 pages.

Mercer was asked how it was going.

“Fine,” she said, without looking up.

“They collect documents,” Wren said. “We can collect documents. That’s a retrieval problem. We solved retrieval in 2018.”

Wren’s platform was used, at his insistence, to generate the legal documentation for his company’s most recent funding round. A review of these documents by Halcourt & Blyth — retained after Wren’s previous lawyers declined to continue acting, citing non-payment of invoices exceeding 120 days — reveals the following. The shareholders agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware and also, in a separate clause, the laws of the State of California, with no mechanism for resolving the conflict. The intellectual property assignment deed defines the term “Relevant Materials” in clause 3 and does not use it again. It uses the term “Subject Materials” seventeen times without defining it. The privacy policy contains a clause requiring the company to notify users of data breaches within 72 hours and a separate clause stating that the company assumes no obligation to notify users of data breaches. The terms of service are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Wren’s company is incorporated in Australia.

The matter now before the Commercial List concerns a contested takeover of a related entity. The deficiency in the constituent documents is, sources indicate, a central issue.

Wren said the documents were fine.

“They cover the basics,” he said. “That’s all you need.”

He was asked whether a lawyer had reviewed them at the time.

“That’s exactly the problem with this industry,” he said. “You’ve been conditioned to think you need a lawyer for everything.”

He said his incorporation lawyer had charged him $4,200 to review an earlier set of documents.

“For what?” he said. “Reading? I can read.”

He said the experience had inspired him to build the platform.

Back at Halcourt & Blyth, Mercer had resolved the pagination problem by deleting the coversheet template and rebuilding it in a new document. This had taken three and a half hours. The tab numbering was correct. The page cap was met.

At 4.20pm, the partner reviewed the court book and identified three documents subject to a confidentiality order made in related proceedings. They could not be included. Removing them required the renumbering of every subsequent tab, the correction of all cross-references in the index, and the rebuilding of the chronological bundle from page 94 onwards.

Mercer began renumbering.

“They read the other side’s documents and write a response,” Wren said. “That’s summarisation and generation. We’re extremely good at summarisation and generation.”

He was asked whether the response needed to be correct.

“It’s a first draft,” he said. “Lawyers don’t get it right the first time either.”

He was asked whether a first draft that cited the wrong jurisdiction, used undefined terms, and contained contradictory clauses could cause a client harm.

“That’s what the review process is for,” he said.

He was asked who would conduct the review.

Wren said the platform was working on that.

At 6.40pm the court book was complete. The tab numbering was sequential. The pagination was correct. The confidential documents had been removed. The chronological bundle matched the index. The exhibit index was consistent with the affidavit schedule. The usual orders for hearing had been met. So had a requirement in the judge’s specific directions that Mercer had not previously encountered and did not wish to encounter again.

Halcourt & Blyth’s invoice for the matter to date was outstanding at 87 days.

The court book would be filed in the morning. If it was accepted, no one would mention it. If it was rejected for a deficiency, the partner would be informed and Mercer would fix it before 9am.

She was asked whether she thought her work could be replicated by an AI.

She looked at the screen.

“Ask it to renumber 1,400 tabs after removing documents 47, 203, and 891,” she said. “Without breaking the cross-references. Without touching the exhibit index. In Word.”

She turned back to her screen.

“I’ll wait,” she said.

Tyler Wren posted about the legal profession on LinkedIn at 2pm. The post received 4,200 likes, primarily from people who are not lawyers.

Several lawyers commented. Their comments were long, precise, and cited specific paragraphs of specific practice notes. One explained the distinction between an annexure and an exhibit across seven paragraphs. Another described, with some feeling, the confidentiality order problem. A third asked, without apparent irony, whether Wren’s platform could handle the usual orders for hearing.

Wren replied to none of them.

“I don’t engage with incumbents,” he said. “That’s not where the future is.”

He said the platform’s legal product would be in market within six months.

“It just needs some fine tuning,” he said.

He was asked what kind of fine tuning.

“Formatting stuff,” he said. “Minor things.”

He waved his hand.

“Text editor things,” he said.

This article is a work of satire. It was not drafted by AI. A human checked the cross-references. The usual orders for hearing have been reviewed. We make no representations about the exhibit index.