Fifty First Dates with AI
By James Chan, Innovation Team Leader at Verlata Consulting.
There's a scene in Fifty First Dates where Drew Barrymore wakes up every morning with no memory of the day before. Her family has built a whole system around it: same newspaper, same breakfast, same routines. Every single morning, Adam Sandler has to win her over from scratch.
That's AI right now. Except nobody's trying to protect you from it.
What a month looks like
I've stopped describing AI developments in weeks. A week is meaningless.
A month, though, is like dog years. In the last thirty days: new model releases from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. A new reasoning paradigm. Three "the old way is dead" blog posts from people who were doing the old way six weeks ago. Agentic workflows that didn't exist as a concept when I started writing this.
Every morning you open your laptop and the ground has moved.
So how do you build anything on top of something that keeps changing?
The one thing that doesn't move
The DMS.
While the models churn, while the interfaces change, while vendors get acquired and APIs get deprecated, the document management system just sits there holding everything. Every matter. Every precedent. Every negotiated position. Every version of every agreement.
It's the video diary in Fifty First Dates. The one thing that stays constant when everything else resets.
AI tools, whatever they are this month, are only as useful as the information they can access. That information lives in the DMS. The DMS is the foundation in a way the AI layer on top of it isn't.
Which is why MCPs matter. Model Context Protocols are pipes that let AI tools talk to your systems: your DMS, your matter management, your email. Nobody writes breathless blog posts about MCPs. But they're what turns a general-purpose AI into something that knows your matters, your clients, your positions.
Without them, you've got Drew Barrymore. Charming and capable, but starting from zero every morning.
Making it your own
The firms that get the most out of this moment won't be the ones chasing the latest release. They'll be the ones doing the quieter work: getting their DMS in order, building the right connectors, finding a consistent way to capture institutional knowledge so it doesn't disappear when someone leaves or a model updates.
Adam Sandler's character doesn't win by being the most interesting person Drew Barrymore has ever met. He wins by showing up every day with the right context.
That's the play.
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Written by James Chan, Innovation Team Leader.