I have spent the best part of thirty years together with my colleagues on a noble crusade: slaying the dragon of legalese. Gone were the "notwithstandings," the "hereinbefores," and the sentences so long they needed their own postcode. We fought hard. We won. Plain English reigned supreme.

Then AI arrived.

Don't get me wrong, tools like Legora are genuinely brilliant. The Word and Outlook add-ins have shaved hours off my week. Document review, clause analysis, due diligence summaries; it's like having a tireless trainee who never asks to leave early on a Friday. My efficiency has never been better.

But here's the twist nobody warned me about.

My clients now have AI too. And they are using it with reckless abandon.

What used to be a two-line email "Daniel, are we completing Friday? Also, what's happening with the warranty cap?" has become a 1,200-word opus. Complete with sub-headings, bullet points, cross-references, and a tone so polished you'd think McKinsey had drafted it. Which, in a sense, they have. Just the robot version.

So now I sit here, reading AI-generated client emails the length of a short novel, only to draft an equally thorough AI-assisted response, which the client will then feed back into their AI to generate further queries. It's an arms race, except instead of missiles, it's paragraphs.

We have, in the space of about six months, completely undone three decades of "keep it brief." The irony is spectacular.

I love what AI does for my practice. I just wish it hadn't taught my clients to write like Victorian solicitors, only with better formatting.

If anyone needs me, I'll be reading a four-page email about a minor schedule amendment.

The author is a corporate partner who once believed brevity was the soul of wit. He still does. His inbox disagrees.