If Your Firm Builds an AI Version of You, Who Owns Your Judgment?

On October 4, 2026, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to Kim Herlihy, a trial lawyer who has spent her career learning how to persuade a jury. There is now a version of her that lives inside her law firm's software.

Her firm, Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Columbus, Ohio, worked with Stanford to build AI personas of its senior lawyers, modeled on how they think and the advice they give. Herlihy showed the program her persona at work. She drafted an opening statement, asked her digital double for notes, and it told her the language was too stiff for a jury.

It is a clever tool, and for now a helpful one. Herlihy is clear that clients still call her because they want to look her in the eye. But the segment raised a question every professional with valuable expertise will face soon, whether they work at a law firm, a hospital or a bank: when your organization captures how you think, what still belongs to you?

Your Judgment Has Two Owners Now

For most of working history, expertise traveled with the person. When a great lawyer, nurse or engineer left, the firm kept the files and the client list, but the judgment walked out the door.

AI personas change that arrangement. A firm can now keep a working model of how its best people reason, long after those people move on. That can be generous to everyone. Junior lawyers get to learn from a senior partner at midnight. Clients may get more consistent service. The firm protects knowledge it spent years helping to build.

It also creates a new kind of dependency. If the model of you keeps improving while you sit in meetings, the value of you can start to look like the value of your copy. And most employment agreements were written long before anyone imagined a digital double.

I am not arguing against these tools. I am arguing that professionals should stop treating them as someone else's project.

What a Persona Can Capture, and What It Can't

A persona learns from what you have already done: the memos you wrote, the comments you made, the patterns in your past advice. It captures the repeatable side of your expertise, the part that has become reliable enough to describe.

That is worth having. Every profession depends on patterns that can be taught and passed on.

What it cannot capture is the judgment you have not exercised yet. The new client whose situation looks like no other. The moment in a courtroom when the jury's faces tell you to drop the script. The decision to take a case because something in you believes in the person across the table. Those calls come from who you are, not just from what you have done, and they are still being written.

This is why I encourage leaders to measure their value by what they solve for, the distinct problem they are built to take on whatever the tools, rather than by their past work. As I wrote in AI Can Learn Your Expertise. It Can't Learn Who You Are., a model can learn how a person reasons. It has no access to what they have lived or what they are willing to stand behind.

Five Questions to Ask Before Your Digital Double Goes to Work

If your organization is building or planning a persona of you, have this conversation now, while it is still a tool and not yet a policy.

• Who owns the persona if I leave? Ask whether it is retired, kept or used to train others.
• Who can use it, and for what? Coaching junior colleagues is very different from advising clients in your name.
• How will my credit be protected? If your thinking shapes the firm's work, make sure your name stays attached to it.
• Can I see and correct what it says? A copy that drifts from your judgment can quietly damage your reputation.
• How does this change how I am valued? Ask what the firm expects from you once your patterns are captured, and make sure the answer includes growth, not just output.

None of these questions is adversarial. They create the kind of clarity that builds trust on both sides.

Keep Writing the Part That Isn't in the Data

The best protection is a habit rather than a contract clause. Keep doing the work no model has seen yet. Take on problems outside your usual pattern, build relationships that rest on trust rather than information, and stay close to the people your expertise serves.

Herlihy put it plainly in the segment: people call their lawyer because they want to look them in the eye and ask what to do. That describes exactly where human value lives, in the relationship, the judgment of the moment and the willingness to be accountable for the advice.

Organizations that build digital doubles should honor that too. The wisest will treat a persona as a way to extend their people, never as a quiet replacement plan, and they will be open about how it is used. The professionals who thrive will be the ones who keep growing past their own copy.

Your patterns can be modeled. Your next decision is still yours.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.