Confidence Is Getting Cheaper
The overconfidence risks created by AI
đ I am a tech lawyer that breaks down fun and complex legal topics that companies should know. Subscribe below!
There was a Forbes piece recently that landed a little too close to home.
Not because it said anything radical, but because it described something a lot of people already know and donât want to talk about: companies are making important decisions based on work that no one actually checked.
Not âreviewed carefully.â Not âpressure-tested.â Checked.
And the problem isnât the tools. Itâs the confidence.
Itâs Sloppiness Wearing a Suit.
If youâve sat through enough board meetings, diligence calls, or strategy reviews, youâve likely seen this before:
A slide looks clean.
The analysis sounds reasonable.
Thereâs a citation at the bottom.
Everyone assumes someone else verified it.
Nobody wants to be the person who slows things down by asking, âDid we actually read the source?â So the assumption slides through.
Thatâs how bad ideas become âagreed-upon facts.â
The Legal Examples Are Just the Most Embarrassing Ones
The reason lawyers keep ending up in the news is simple: courts write things down. When a filing includes cases that donât exist, or quotes that were never said, itâs visible. Public. Awkward.
But that same behavior happens every day outside the courtroom.
In internal memos. In market analysis. In technical reviews. In investment theses.
The difference is that nobody publishes those mistakesâŠuntil something breaks.
The Code Problem Is a Perfect Example
One of the more unsettling data points in the Forbes article came from academic research on software development.
A meaningful amount of automatically generated code references libraries that donât exist.
Not obscure ones. Not outdated ones. Made-up ones.
Which means someone eventually:
patches it by hand
works around it
ships anyway
updates the documentation later (maybe)
From the outside, everything looks fine. From the inside, nobody is quite sure how things actually work anymore.
This Is How Messes Form Quietly
This kind of problem doesnât announce itself. It shows up as:
rework no one can explain
âtemporaryâ fixes that never go away
systems no one wants to touch
reports that donât quite line up
diligence questions that suddenly get very specific
By the time leadership notices, the original mistake is buried under layers of confident follow-ups.
Everyone thought someone else had checked.
Why Investors Should Be Nervous (Even If Nothing Looks Broken)
Markets are great at pricing visible risk. Theyâre terrible at pricing quiet operational messes.
You donât see this on earnings calls. You hear it later as:
âunexpected complexityâ
âexecution challengesâ
âintegration issuesâ
âlonger-than-anticipated remediationâ
Translation: we trusted something we shouldnât have.
Consultants Donât Automatically Save You
One uncomfortable point the Forbes piece hints at: outsourcing doesnât magically fix this.
A polished deck with footnotes is still risky if nobody checked the footnotes. Iâve seen external reports that looked airtight and collapsed the moment someone asked where the numbers actually came from.
The issue isnât who produced the work. Itâs whether accuracy is someoneâs job or just assumed.
Habits That Matter
The companies that avoid this donât have better tools. They have better habits:
Someone is responsible for checking.
That person has time to do it.
Speed isnât the only thing rewarded.
Saying âthis isnât readyâ isnât career-limiting.
Those sound basic, but theyâre increasingly rare.
The Real Risk Isnât Error
Mistakes happen. Always have.
The real risk is when mistakes look good enough to pass. When confidence replaces verification. When polish replaces proof. When nobody wants to be the person who slows things down.
Thatâs what the Forbes article is really pointing at, even if it doesnât say it bluntly.
And thatâs the part lawyers, investors, executives, and boards should be paying attention to now.
Not because something exploded.
But because nothing hasâŠyet.