Now more than ever, everybody needs an editor.

What once was a cliché we told reporters and junior lawyers should now be a mantra for anyone who is touching AI these days.

AI can summarize information at extraordinary speed, but it cannot determine why a district court ruling matters, what happens next, or if you need to pick up the phone and get to work. In a world where you can get 2,000 summaries of opinions, press releases, and SEC documents in minutes, the information at your fingertips is limitless. 

The new premium is knowing what deserves your attention.

The competitive advantage in legal information may not be access to data but access to editorial judgment and context. 

We’re drowning in AI summaries of court documents. It’s still tough to identify which ones matter to your clients, your practice, your business.

The job of editors is to separate out the noise, especially in a world where everything is instantly available. There are essential skills a journalist builds over years of accumulated expertise, talking to sources, and connecting the dots.

Editors know the lede. They know the context. They know the audience.

There is a big difference between being interesting and being significant. A lot of things happen every day; a lot of things are new. Few are meaningful. Editors have an innate sense of what’s actually important.

It’s crucial to be able to determine the credibility of information; it’s crucial to understand the motives or biases of the people behind the news. Editors always evaluate the source. AI is not well-equipped to treat statements, data, and sources with the skepticism required for the world we’re living in today.

An editor’s superpower is telling you what is being left unsaid. It’s giving you missing context that changes meaning and perception. 

A US House bill makes it out of committee, and the journalist is the one who knows it has no path to becoming law. A company wins a lawsuit, and the editor is the one who catches that dozens of nearly identical cases are still pending elsewhere.

Editors spend their lives forecasting what’s next. The job is to know if something is a one-day story or a one-month story. They dispatch reporters to ferret out whether regulators are going to act on something. They have radar for whether something will become an industry standard that competitors will follow. The “what” is easy. The “what’s next” is still the province of smart humans.

Significance is not universal. Editors are masterful at understanding their audiences. A court decision that’s crucial to one practice area is irrelevant to another and would just prompt some readers to wonder, “Who cares?”

AI should increase demand for human curation instead of diminishing it. You need an editor to help know what’s worth your limited time and what to ignore.

We have to maintain the ability to flag the cases no one is talking about yet but should be, the rule changes where experts think folks are overreacting, the things that will actually change how you advise a client or structure a deal.

A list of summaries isn’t the goal. Knowing more facts isn’t enough. The defining value is the action you take next. That’s where editorial judgment comes in. We’re making facts actionable.

Information is now infinite. News judgment is more scarce.