We often make predictions at this time of year, forecasting what the legal industry might see in 2024. While this can be a useful exercise, it is the events we cannot foresee—unanticipated developments, unexpected outcomes—that have the greatest impact on the legal profession.

Who, for example, would have foreseen at this time last year that Hamas terrorists would attack, brutally murder and take Israelis hostage, setting off a devastating war in Gaza—a fight that has had far-reaching ramifications and created divisions that even the legal community has been unable to avoid? Who would have predicted at the start of 2023 that Russia would invade Ukraine and that the resulting war would still be raging, continuing to impact the legal industry in myriad ways? And who, other than the most sophisticated and prescient techies, envisaged the incredibly rapid development of generative AI, with all its accompanying promise and perturbation?