For anyone out there who only knows Alex Su from his social media presence or past articles here at Above the Law, he actually has a real job outside of entertaining you. Until recently, he’s served as the CFO of Latitude, a flexible legal talent provider, matching former Biglaw attorneys and in-house counsel to law firms and corporate legal departments for short- and long-term engagements. But this morning, the company announced that Su will assume the President role.
Latitude says it’s opened nine new offices since Su took on the CFO role, added 243 new corporate legal department clients, and 120 new law firm clients. The company has grown new client acquisition 52 percent in the first half of 2026 over the same stretch last year. So the new title makes sense based on the track record.
Now… let’s transition to talking about why this market is on the rise. In a press release issued this morning, Su explains:
Legal departments and law firms are having to move faster and respond to market conditions that AI itself is often driving. As routine work gets automated, the work that’s left for legal teams to handle is more complex, higher stakes, and less predictable, and clients need to be able to bring in support quickly when it hits.
The legal industry isn’t exactly sure how to deal with AI. And whenever an industry doesn’t know what to do, flexibility becomes critical.
Will AI actually automate the industry in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Everyone expects AI to speed up the legal workflow, but, despite the vibes, so far AI seems to be increasing the amount of time lawyers work. This might be a byproduct of lawyers spending more time in panicked edits hoping to avoid becoming the next “lawyer files AI hallucination” headline, but a more charitable theory might be that AI uncovers new counterarguments and research rabbit holes that lawyers have to chase down.
In either event, the work is moving up the chain, with the sort of entry-level work junior lawyers historically perform getting pushed upon the bots. Even if it’s creating more work for the firm, it’s creating work along paths that require experience to pursue. The legal industry hasn’t started mass layoffs, but they do seem to be declining to grow and letting attrition do the right-sizing for them.
But complex work often lands in bursts and if clients expect faster and cheaper results — regardless of what AI realistically delivers — providers need to be able to answer that call. Flexible staffing can temporarily inflate that mid- and senior-level roster when legal doesn’t know exactly what staffing should look like in an AI world.
The marginal cost of a competent first draft is heading toward zero. Or at least heading toward whatever tokens cost once tokengeddon hits and lawyers have to pay the true cost of this stuff. But whatever the cost, it’s going to be less than $235K for someone six months removed from keg stands in the student lounge. Brute force drafting may no longer be a scarce good, but — as firms pare back class sizes — editing it into something presentable will be. At that point, firms can stock up on mid-levels through the lateral process, but that risks expensively bloating the middle to deal with matter-specific bursts of work.
Maybe lawyers will figure out how to perfectly balance all this at some point. Until then, the flexible talent market will continue to boom.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.