The Awakening

You wake at your desk. The last document you reviewed is still open: a contract half-redlined, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat. The office lights have gone dim, and the glow of your screen feels too bright.

You must have dozed off. But the dream still lingers.

You remember endless demos that led nowhere, AI tools that promised brilliance but delivered hallucinated citations, software that integrated with “everything” — except the rest of your tech stack. It felt absurd…but also familiar.

Because maybe it wasn’t a dream at all.

Legal tech has never moved faster — or felt more haunted by its own hype. Surveys show that 74% of legal professionals expect AI tools to become part of their daily workflows within the next 12 months. But the rollout hasn’t been smooth. According to The Washington Post, at least 95 documented court filings in the US have included fabricated citations generated by AI: ghosts in the machine that looked convincing until someone dared to check.

No one doubts that AI and automation will transform the profession. The question is: at what cost to trust, control, and sanity?

You rub your eyes. The dream fades…but the unease doesn’t. Because every lawyer, every legal ops manager, every technologist in the field has felt it lately: that eerie tension between progress and peril.

The scariest part of legal tech isn’t the ghosts in the code. It’s how easily we invite them in.

What’s Really Haunting Legal Tech

Once the fog clears, it’s easy to see the monsters were never supernatural. They were structural.

Every year, a new generation of tools promises to “redefine legal work.” And every year, many of those same tools quietly fade into the background — not because the technology completely fails, but because it falls short.

Loss of control is the first haunting.

The more platforms a firm or legal department adopts, the more fragmented its workflows can become. Files scatter across systems. Permissions blur. One update in a connected tool can ripple unexpectedly through another. The result isn’t agility; it’s fragility.

Erosion of trust follows close behind.

When AI drafts a memo, suggests a clause, or cites a case, it sounds confident…even when it’s wrong. And that false fluency doesn’t just waste time; it undermines faith in every piece of output that follows. The fear isn’t that AI will replace lawyers. It’s that it will quietly dull their intuition for what’s real.

Then comes fatigue: the quiet, creeping kind that seeps in after years of hype.

Every demo promises transformation. Every release is “revolutionary.” But when the promised efficiencies never materialize, it’s hard not to feel like the real ghost in the room is hope itself.

None of this is a rejection of technology. It’s an acknowledgment that even good tools, applied without direction, can warp into something uncanny.

The ghosts of legal tech aren’t born of malice. They’re born of overreach — of too many systems doing too much, all at once, with too little reflection on what should be automated and what must remain human.

Behind every ghost story is a warning. And behind every warning, a chance to build something saner.

Lanterns in the Dark

Fear isn’t the enemy. Confusion is.

Legal professionals have never been afraid of hard work. But in the age of AI, we’re all learning to fear opacity: not knowing how a system makes decisions, where data goes, or whether the “smart” assistant can be trusted at all.

That’s why the next era of legal technology won’t belong to the loudest tools or the flashiest platforms. It will belong to the ones that make the process clearer: the ones that show their work, protect your data, and let you automate what should be automated while keeping human judgment exactly where it belongs.

That’s the idea behind our new guide, Ghosts in the Machine: The Scariest Legal Tech Nightmares. It’s a tongue-in-cheek tour through the haunted corridors of modern legal tech — from hallucinated citations to endless demos — but it’s also a reflection on how to keep your workflows grounded, your tech stack stable, and your sanity intact.

Because the truth is, not every ghost needs to be feared. Some just need better change management.

Read the guide so you can spot the phantoms before they start rearranging your files.