One stretch of eastern Montana spans 75,000 square miles and has just 123 lawyers to cover it, and John Mudd, Executive Director and General Counsel of the State Bar of Montana, sees AI as one of the only realistic ways to close that kind of gap. A fifth-generation Montanan and national speaker on legal ethics and attorney wellness, Mudd lays out what he calls a "soup" of forces converging at once: rising distrust of institutions, a widening access to justice problem, and AI arriving into both at the same time. He points to recent structural shifts in the profession - Montana's newly adopted community justice worker program, modeled after a system Alaska pioneered, and to the broader wave of non-lawyer ownership entering law firms in addition to more immediate risks like attorneys filing briefs built on hallucinated case law. Mudd closes on the message he's carrying into the next year: when everything speeds up at once, the answer isn't panic, it's returning to the bedrock obligations, honesty with the court and loyalty to clients, that don't change no matter what tool is doing the work.
Proving once again that ALPS Insurance puts the "treat" in retreat, they gathered leaders in law from across the country this summer. These sit-down conversations reveal flavors of leadership and legal trends from a variety of perspectives. Cool takes, one scoop at a time, recorded live at the 2026 ALPS Bar Leaders Retreat in Missoula, MT.
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