The Defensibility Question

A quick reminder: Law://WhatsNext is our vehicle to explore through dialogue (or occasional reflection) how leading lawyers, educators and technologists are using emerging tech to evolve how we practice and administer legal services. No hype — just practical conversations. Hi Friends 👋 🎙️ This week we sit down with Helen Fan — California lawyer, Chief AI Officer at a Silicon Valley boutique firm, and one of the most original voices currently writing and building in legal AI. What makes Helen unusual is the combination. She is a practising cross-border lawyer who is also genuinely technically literate — building, testing and writing about agentic systems at a level most lawyers (and a fair few engineers) do not reach. And she sits squarely on the bridge between the US and China technology frontiers (building legal tech communities in each). “My role is really about being a bridge — between tech people and legal professionals, and between the US and Asia.” It is a rare vantage point — and one that has produced one of the more original frameworks we have come across in the legal AI conversation this year. Listen Now Available here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Our conversation is in two halves. First, we ground the conversation in the Legal AI Value Stack — Helen’s five-level framework for thinking about defensibility in a world where frontier models keep climbing the stack (you might have noticed Anthropic’s Claude for Legal announcement last week? 😂). Helen's Legal AI Lab The Legal AI Value Stack: Five Levels of Defensibility After Anthropic’s legal plugin triggered a $285B selloff, everyone’s asking which legal AI companies will survive. I think that’s the wrong question… Read more 3 months ago · 39 likes · 1 comment · Helen's Legal AI Lab Then we get into the fun part: OpenClaw LLP, her public experiment to actually walk the roadmap herself. We get into the design choices behind her two AI associates, the four-layer security framework she has built, the Argument Report skill, her custom debrief skill which has her agents look back over recent work and recommend tweaks, why she ended up on Discord, and her honest reflections after the first 60 days. Key References Connect with Helen Fan — California lawyer & Chief AI Officer | LinkedIn | Substack | Personal site The Legal AI Value Stack — Five Levels of Defensibility — Helen’s now widely-shared framework. Start here if you have not read it yet. The OpenClaw LLP AI-Native Law Firm Experiment — Helen’s public 100-day project, documented on LinkedIn and her site. Helen’s Stanford Presentation — A quick video run-through of the talk Helen gave at Stanford about OpenClaw LLP a few weeks before this recording. If you enjoyed this conversation please do share it with someone — or a community — who you feel would benefit from listening. And if you have any more time, tell us what resonated, what didn’t, and rate the show — it really does help us grow the audience and get great guests on. We hope you have a great week! Tom & Alex Thanks for reading Law://WhatsNext! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share