Commentary: Sarah Connor had the Right Idea.

My birthday started poorly. I was on the tenth floor of a grand courthouse when the fire alarm went off. Old courthouse floors are actually two stories tall, which meant we had to jog down twenty flights of stairs. Fortunately, going down meant gravity helped a man of my size.

On the way, I bet my stair companion that a lawyer was running late and pulled the alarm. He wouldn’t take the bet. It was a false alarm, and we went back up to finish our hearings.

After court, I walked past a freshly painted sign. “Beep, Bop, and Boop. AI turneys at LARP.” Proofreading errors irritate me and I make plenty of them. After the fire alarm fiasco, I figured my karma must be lacking and needed a good deed, so I went to tell the occupants of the sign maker’s crime.

The front door was locked. I buzzed the intercom beside it and a mechanical voice greeted me.

“How may I assist? “

“I am here to see Mr. or Ms. Beep. Or Bop. Or even Boop.”

The voice came back, “There are no Mr.’s or Ms.’s here by those names.”

Thinking I had muffed a non-binary pronoun, I Karened, “Could I speak to the manager?”

“One moment.” After a moment, a nerd came to the door. As a fellow tech geek, I recognize my own kind and this person had all the hallmarks— taped eyeglasses, rumpled shirt, white socks, smart phone in a holster at his belt.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I am a fellow lawyer and wanted to tell you that your sign maker made a mistake.”

He peered out the door and said, “No, it is right.” Seeing my surprise, he huffed, “Do come in.”

The door opened to one large room, no cubicles or offices, with bare walls and humming fluorescent lights. But the hum was louder than mere lights. It came from banks of computers which I now saw on racks lined floor to ceiling. I noticed that there was not another person in the room.

“Do your lawyers and staff all work remotely?” I asked.

My guide looked puzzled, then understood my question. “This isn’t a law office.”

It was my turn to look puzzled. My guide continued, “AI turneys. Artificial intelligence turns out answers to legal questions for our customers. We don’t practice law.”

He continued, “People trust the internet more than they trust lawyers. We utilize AI to answer their questions for a much more modest fee, 24/7.”

I grimaced. Many of my clients think they know the law or what their case is worth thanks to the WWW. I’m left to argue with an omniscient internet search or a hive mind of Redditors.

“I get the AI in the name,” I said. “But LARP?”

My guide could not contain his glee. He replied, “Live Action Role Play. Our computers present as legal counselors. They create responsive video chats with our customers and dispense information that is readily available on the internet. We never say there is a lawyer giving the advice, but people probably assume the speaker on the screen in a suit is one.  Faking a video is easier than faking through a court hearing. If the user’s question goes beyond information the computer can find, which is becoming less common, the video feed will freeze or drop. Customers try back a time or two at most before giving up and going to another internet site.”

“I need to get back to maintaining the servers. Thank you for stopping by.”

“One more question,” I said to him. “Who are Beep, Bop, and Boop?”

“Do you remember 9600 baud modems for dial up internet?” he asked, still smirking. “Those are the sounds they made when they connected.”.

He vanished, leaving me to find my own way out. Back on the sidewalk, I thought that this is how the last T-rex must have felt. I put my hat on and walked to my truck. If there was a fire alarm for my profession, I would have pulled it.

©2026 With All Due Respect. Spencer Farris is the founding partner of The S.E. Farris Law Firm in St Louis, Missouri. No AI was utilized in writing this column, though maybe it should have been. Comments or criticisms about this column may be sent c/o this publication or directly to him via email at [email protected].