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John Nay

John Nay

Founder & CEO of Norm AI (an AI-native legal/regulatory technology firm), also affiliated with Norm Law and a Stanford CodeX researcher working on AI and law.

Oct 29, 2026

11:32
I mean,
11:33
it's perplexing to me.
11:36
Well, I agree.
11:37
And I think another interesting stat, I don't know if I get the numbers exact, but from the S1 was around the number of enterprises paying more than $10 million a year to Anthropic.
11:48
And I think that was pretty small, like it was like 200, 250 or something like that.
11:53
So if you think about how many big companies there are in the world, and if only 200 are paying more than 10 million a year to Anthropic, I mean, there's a lot of room to run there of way more than 10 per top companies and then getting way more than 250 companies pay more than 10 million a year.
12:11
And so I think that really shows you that we've barely scratched the surface.

41 MINS LATER

53:43
So I guess, John, your immediate reaction there and like why do you think this is happening? There's this schism among the open source community on Reddit.
11:05
And then eventually evolved into a law firm and kind of curious what that thesis was and, you know, why not stay a tech company and why evolve into a law firm?
11:15
Yeah.
11:16
Yeah.
11:16
No, I mean, I think what's super unique is that, I mean, we really have a new model.
11:21
So with a traditional tech company selling technology as a tool and that's still useful, that's still a big thing in the world and we'll continue to do that as well.
11:33
But I mean, what we see is the new model and something that's increasingly important for us in particular, and then for others too, is this integration of tech and services.
11:44
So how do you co-evolve the two, especially focused on the AI agent part of this, where You can have AI agents do a lot of some of the services work, but then still have a lot of very talented humans very involved in supervising that work and working with the clients.

35 MINS LATER

46:42
And so we are in the process of building out a regulatory practice but it is going to be fully expert in not only those traditional domains,
12:04
Mm-hmm.
12:04
Like every, I would say every couple quarters job descriptions change because of how quickly the technology's moving- How quickly we are reinventing what these disciplines are, and we're doing this interdisciplinary work.
12:17
So that's the first comment I'll make, is that if you asked me that a couple quarters ago, I would tell you something different than what I tell you today.
12:23
And so where it is today, we have different flavors of legal engineers that do different things.
12:29
So legal engineers, they're f- formerly attorneys.
12:33
They join and then they focus more of their time on the build-out and the testing and validation of AI agents.
12:39
But even within that scope, that also has some, some diversity of what they do.

5 MINS LATER

17:45
Yeah.
NeilHOST
11:47
So how do these disciplines work together and complement each other, and what new skills will maybe lawyers need as legal knowledge increasingly becomes embedded in software or AI and other technologies?
12:00
Yeah.
12:01
So it's, it's evolving.
12:02
Like every...
12:03
I'd say every couple quarters, job descriptions change because of how quickly the technology's moving- How quickly we are reinventing what these disciplines are, and we're doing this interdisciplinary work.
12:16
So that's the first comment I'll make, is that if you asked me that a couple quarters ago, I would tell you something different than what I tell you today.
12:21
And so where it is today, we have different flavors of legal engineers that do different things.

5 MINS LATER

NeilHOST
17:44
Yeah.
7:52
But give a concrete example of what a lawyer using a co-pilot is doing and for what, and then what an agent that your team has built would do and how that differs.
8:01
So let's take the example of doing a deal for a client.
8:04
So if you're doing a deal and you're using a co-pilot, the docs come in and you're going to check the docs against, maybe there's a form for that type of deal that you already have.
8:13
Maybe you have playbooks for that client.
8:15
You have a term sheet associated with the deal, et cetera.
8:17
So you're checking the docs with respect to those things and looking for issues that you'd want to flag to the client.
8:23
If you're doing that in a co-pilot basis, then you're able to put that in and prompt it and see what happens.

15 MINS LATER

23:12
What problem is it solving? Why is it important to Norm AI and Norm Law? And where do you think it's going? What are your goals for the Legal AGI Lab?

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