What do the firms getting AI right do differently? In TechTarget’s feature on AI in law offices, Esther Shein interviews Michael Drapkin, and features Landfall IP as one of the firms setting the pace.
July 30, 2026
Christine LaBerge, Head of Innovation and Engineering at Landfall IP, sat down with Jason Weaver to discuss the worries facing founders. LaBerge, an engineer by background, drew a clean line between the panic and the real exposure. The noise, she explained, is the assumption that vibe cloning makes everything worthless. Because a competitor can copy your interface over a weekend, your innovation no longer matters. What AI actually made cheap is copying the visible layer: the interface and the obvious features. The sharper question is are you protecting the part that was genuinely hard to build?
The idea of a competitive moat has changed. Her bottom line: don’t lose sleep over the clone that merely looks like you; focus on where your durable advantage actually lives.
The moat used to be that you shipped first; in a world where everything can be copied quickly, the durable moat is that you own the protectable technical advantage, and a patent is one of the few real ways to hold onto it.
LaBerge described traditional patent work as slow, expensive, and, in economists’ terms, a “credence good”: even after you receive a patent, it’s hard to judge whether it’s any good. Rather than bolt AI onto that broken model, Landfall rebuilt it from the ground up as an AI-native firm, keeping senior legal judgment while letting AI absorb the mechanical work. She reached for an analogy from film to explain the difference.
When computers came into animation, the established studios handed their animators digital pencils: the same hand-drawn workflow, just on a screen. Pixar asked a completely different question: what does filmmaking look like if you design the entire production system around the technology? Most patent firms right now are still in the digital-pencil phase.
That architecture shows up most visibly in Landfall’s Discovery Agent, a confidential voice-interview tool that lets inventors talk through an idea in plain language while the system runs a prior-art search in the background and produces a structured report for the firm’s attorneys. The result is speed and predictability: LaBerge said Landfall can file a non-provisional application with the USPTO in a week or two, where traditional firms take months, and at a flat fee rather than open-ended hourly billing.
Watch the full conversation: Christine LaBerge with Jason Weaver on Protecting Your IP From Vibe Cloning.
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