About
What This Is
Legal AI Governance is a compliance reference for small and mid-size US law firms. We track state bar AI guidance, court orders on AI use, and AI-hallucination sanctions cases, and produce the documentation malpractice carriers are beginning to require at renewal.
This is not legal advice. It is a compliance tool sold to licensed attorneys. Strategic and rule-application calls belong to your firm's attorneys.
Who Runs It
Built and edited by Brian Alenduff, founder of Desired Path Consulting. BS in pre-law, Appalachian State University. Not a licensed attorney, by design.
The gap this tool fills isn't legal analysis. That belongs to your firm's lawyers. The gap is operational: maintaining a 51-state opinion tracker, a court-order tracker, and a 320-case sanctions database against primary sources, with verification dates on every entry and a build-time check that fails when a citation goes missing. That's compliance operations, and that's what Desired Path Consulting does.
The technical discipline behind those checks comes from twelve years in senior product roles at consumer software companies. Founding product team at Everlane, scaling e-commerce from two to over 150 countries with the international tax, payments, and localization infrastructure that comes with that. Senior PM for web platform and internal tools at VSCO, a consumer subscription product at tens of millions of monthly users. Director of product at Backbone, the seed-stage gaming startup. At VSCO and Backbone in particular, that work meant close partnership with general counsel on cookie and tracking policies, subscription auto-renewal compliance, and the consent UX and documentation those regimes required. Citation verification for a 51-state tracker is a smaller engineering problem, but the operational discipline is the same: read the rule, ship the artifact, maintain the evidence.
Outside the product career, Brian has served as a court-appointed Guardian ad Litem in North Carolina and trained as a Legal Observer with the National Lawyers Guild. Earlier work focused on constitutional law and the federal Article V amendment process.
See methodology for how every entry is verified, where leads come from, and how the build catches errors before they ship.
Why We Built This
79% of US legal professionals report incorporating AI into their daily work (Clio 2024 Legal Trends Report). 43% of legal professionals say their firm has no formal AI policy and no plans to create one; only 9% report a written, actively enforced policy (8am 2026 Legal Industry Report). Specialty broker Jencap reports underwriters now ask "How are you utilizing AI?" on renewal applications and forecasts firms without documented protocols will fall out of preferred-risk tiers within 12 to 18 months (IA Magazine, March 2026).
The tools that exist are either built for BigLaw (enterprise pricing, CISO-driven procurement, horizontal compliance frameworks that don't speak bar-rule language) or generic bar-association Word templates that go stale. Small firms need something in between.
Editorial Standards
Every citation links to its primary source. The build fails on broken citation URLs (see the
verify-sources script) and flags case files missing a primary court source.
Each entry carries a last-verified date. The full process is at
methodology.
The Duke Law RAILS tracker stopped updating in May 2025. This tracker is continuously maintained and overlaps minimally with RAILS in scope: state-bar AI ethics opinions and federal/state court orders, plus carrier-renewal mapping RAILS did not provide.
If you find an error, a missing court order, or a stale citation, contact us. Credibility is the product.
Contact
Direct contact: brian@desired-path.com. For citation corrections, broker and carrier inquiries, consulting, or anything else. Subscribe to the newsletter for ongoing updates; replies to any issue reach the same inbox.
Consulting engagements are capped at two per month and are productized: fixed scope, fixed price, fixed deliverable.
Last reviewed: 2026-04-30.