Every few years a technology arrives that is described as changing everything. Sometimes the claim is nearly true. But in my work I have noticed that even the genuine breaks with the past tend to raise the same legal questions the past was already asking — about ownership, responsibility, money, and trust — in new clothing.
I spend a good deal of my time with people building at the edge of what is settled: companies deploying artificial intelligence, founders working with digital assets and blockchains, artists and businesses trying to understand what they own when a machine helped make it. The energy in that work is real, and so is the uncertainty. The law is often a step or two behind the technology, and the temptation is to treat that gap either as a license to ignore the law or as a reason to be paralyzed by it. Neither is right.
My posture, and the firm's, is a third one. New technology does not repeal old questions; it relocates them. Who owns this? Who is responsible when it goes wrong? Is this money, a security, or something else? Who owes a duty to whom? These are not new questions. They are the questions the law has always asked, and they apply to a model or a token as surely as they applied to a printing press or a share certificate. The work is to answer them carefully in an unfamiliar setting — not to assume the setting has made them disappear.
The questions are older than the tools
Consider artificial intelligence. The hard legal issues around it are, underneath, familiar. When a model is trained on others' work, the question is about copyright and permission — an ownership question. When a system makes a decision that harms someone, the question is about who is accountable for it — a liability question. When a company tells the public what its system does, the question is whether that is accurate — a question of representation and consumer protection. The technology is new. The legal categories are not, and they do not switch off because the subject is a neural network.
The same is true of digital assets. Whether a particular token is a security, how property passes at death when it exists only as a key, what happens when an intermediary fails — these map onto securities law, property law, and the law of fiduciaries and custody that long predate the blockchain. The instinct that this is new, so the rules do not apply yet is an expensive idea, and a common one. The rules usually do apply. What is genuinely new is the difficulty of applying them well.
This is, I think, good news for anyone trying to build responsibly. It means there is a body of accumulated wisdom to draw on, not a void. The task is translation — taking principles that are well understood and working out, with care, how they govern something the drafters never saw coming.
New technology does not repeal old questions; it relocates them.
Between hype and fear
Two failure modes dominate this space, and they mirror each other. The first is hype: the belief that the technology is so transformative that ordinary obligations — disclosure, consent, accounting, fiduciary duty — are quaint and can be skipped in the rush to build. The second is fear: the belief that because the law is unsettled, nothing can be done safely, and so either the project stalls or it moves offshore and out of sight. Both treat uncertainty as a reason to stop thinking. Good counsel does the opposite.
The useful path runs between them. It means being honest about what is settled and what is not, building in the parts that are clear, and managing the parts that are not with structure, disclosure, and documentation rather than wishful thinking. It means writing down assumptions, so that when the law clarifies — and it does, steadily — you can see what you relied on and adjust. Uncertainty is not the same as lawlessness, and it is not the same as paralysis. It is a condition to be managed, like any other risk in a serious enterprise.
I am not neutral about which failure mode is worse, but I try to guard against both. The client who wants to skip the hard questions and the client who is too frightened to act both need the same thing: a clear account of where the ground is firm, where it is soft, and how to build accordingly.
Counsel as a steadying function
What a lawyer offers in a field that changes quickly is not a prediction of where it will end up. No one has that. What we offer is steadiness — a way of making decisions now that will look defensible later, whichever way the law turns. That comes from grounding new questions in old principles, documenting choices, and preferring structures that hold up under scrutiny to ones that merely move quickly.
It also comes from a certain humility about technology itself. The tools will keep changing. The model you build on today will be dated in a few years; the protocol will fork; the platform will revise its terms. Building something meant to last means not tying your legal position too tightly to the particular tool, and instead grounding it in arrangements — ownership, contracts, governance — that survive the next release.
So I am optimistic and cautious in equal measure, which is, I have come to believe, the right way to be about anything genuinely new. The technology deserves the enthusiasm it gets. It also deserves to be built on a foundation that will still be standing when the excitement has moved on to the next thing. That foundation is mostly made of old questions, answered well.
What we offer in a field that changes quickly is not prediction. It is steadiness — decisions made now that look defensible later.