Fifty years ago, as the United States celebrated its bicentennial, lawyers experienced their own declaration of independence with Jay Foonberg’s landmark book on starting a law firm.
That publication, “How to Start and Build a Law Firm,” became something of a cult text, reportedly setting the record for the most frequently stolen book from law school libraries across the country.
Now, half a century later, Helen Fan has released the first primer on building a two-agent, AI-native law firm, based on her 100-day experiment in reimagining legal practice from the ground up.
Together, Foonberg and Fan represent diametrically opposing ends of the law firm launch continuum, separated not just by decades but by fundamentally different visions of what a law firm actually is.
Born in 1935, Foonberg was 41 and mid-career when his roughly 700-page tome hit the market, offering personal, conversational advice built around the assumption that lawyers would do everything themselves.
His early guidance was blunt and uncompromising, covering everything from renting an office to never letting the sun set on an unreturned phone call, with technology treated as little more than an afterthought.
Fan, by contrast, is a young woman at the very start of her legal career, just two years post-LLM, and her approach places AI at the centre rather than the lawyer.
She used Open Claw to architect a firm around two specialised AI agents, a senior agent called Morgan and a junior called Cleo, designed to accept client-style prompts, break them into subtasks, debate strategy, draft work product, and return recommendations.
Fan built in rules to preserve some human oversight, including a mandatory requirement to escalate disagreements between Morgan and Cleo for live attorney review, ensuring lawyers were never entirely removed from the process.
Despite their differences, both figures share a commitment to lawyers remaining relevant and viable, with Foonberg long insisting that solos run businesses, not charities, and Fan arguing that AI’s highest use in law is freeing human lawyers for trust and accountability that software alone can never provide.
Fan’s concept, which she calls the Legal AI Value Stack, holds that AI-native firms should use artificial intelligence to handle everything that scales while permanently reserving a seat at the table for human legal professionals.
As Fan herself has described it, the model is not about replacing lawyers but about building firms that can compete with pure automation on its own terms, with humans providing what technology structurally cannot.
Both Foonberg and Fan have also built significant followings as first movers in their respective spaces, with Foonberg spending decades as a keynote speaker on the solo and small firm circuit and Fan recently celebrating 10,000 new LinkedIn followers while speaking at law schools and legal tech events.
Throughout history, the legal profession has faced wave after wave of disruption, from economic downturns to DIY legal forms to catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic, and has adapted each time.
Today, the spectre of AI-driven obsolescence looms larger than most previous threats, but as this half-century of independent legal innovation shows, the future of law has always belonged to those willing to build something anyway.