Legaltech startup Darrow lays off one-third of workforce despite profitability

Well, here's a career-development masterclass from the legaltech world: Darrow has laid off 60 employees — a full third of its workforce — because AI made their jobs obsolete. The delicious irony? Many of those fired were legal analysts whose expertise was used to train the very AI platform that now replaces them. It's the corporate equivalent of teaching a hungry bear to open your fridge and then being surprised when it eats your lunch.

The company, naturally, frames this as progress. Darrow is profitable, apparently, but that didn't stop them from 'streamlining operations' — a phrase that in boardrooms translates to 'we built a machine that does your job for free.' The analysts, who presumably spent years mastering the nuances of legal discovery, are now out on their ears, having essentially automated themselves into redundancy. One can only hope their severance package includes a free subscription to the platform they unwittingly created.

This is the future of work, apparently: train your replacement, then get replaced. Darrow's decision is a neat microcosm of the wider tech industry's approach — efficiency at the expense of the very people who made that efficiency possible. But hey, at least the shareholders are thrilled. Nothing says 'sustainable business' like a workforce that's been given the same treatment as a buggy software patch.