GPT-6 reached general availability in the United Kingdom this week, and within seventy-two hours four of the Magic Circle law firms had convened emergency partnership meetings to discuss what one senior partner described, off the record, as "an existential workflow event."
The model's headline capability is mundane on paper: it ingests up to 2 million tokens of context and returns verifiable, citation-anchored output. In practice, that means a junior associate's seventeen-hour due-diligence task — reviewing a 400-page commercial contract for inconsistencies — completes in 8.7 seconds with a 99.2% accuracy rate on internal benchmarks shared with Britwire.
The pricing problem
Law firms bill by the hour. AI does not bill by the hour. The mathematics of that collision are not subtle.
