- Essays··8 min read
Hangzhou Priced the Legal-AI Discount
DeepSeek's inference rate of $0.28 per million input tokens sits roughly twelve times below GPT-4o equivalents, making contract review economically tractable for mid-tier law firms. A Hangzhou court ruling of 30 April 2026 established that those margin gains do not constitute 'objective circumstances' under China's Labour Contract Law — firms cannot push the cost of AI transition onto workers. The ruling fixes precisely where the legal-AI discount lands.
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Harvey Signs at Raffles Place. The Bill Starts Now.
When WongPartnership signed with Harvey, it acquired a seat licence and a compounding stack with it: wrapper-maintenance costs running 30–60% above the sticker, prompt libraries with no clear owner, and a hallucination-liability perimeter across three jurisdictions that Vietnam's new AI statute just made more expensive. The Forrester 400% ROI ceiling belongs to firms with clean, documented processes. Most Southeast Asian mid-market partnerships are not those firms.
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A Cabinet, a Court, a Copyright Clause: The Gulf's Quiet Legal-AI Build
While the June headlines fixed on Gulf gigawatts and GB300 licences, three quieter moves redrew the region's AI map one layer above the chip, in the statute book. A new UAE federal AI-and-data authority, a Saudi copyright exception that opens a training-data corridor the EU is busy closing, and the DIFC's autonomous-systems rules together sketch what a sovereign legal-AI stack will look like.
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