Originally shared on Facebook · January 2026 · 68 reactions — my highest-engagement post ever
Every year I do a version of this exercise — looking back at what actually happened versus what I planned, and trying to be honest about both. This year, 2025, the exercise is more interesting than usual. More happened. More changed. And some of what changed, I did not see coming.
ThaiLawOnline: The Business Side
The headline numbers: ThaiLawOnline doubled in size in 2025. Four times more organic traffic than the year before. More lawyers on the team. More cases handled, more countries represented in the client base, more revenue. For a law firm that was running quietly for years without much investment in visibility, the growth was significant.
The reason for the growth is not complicated: I built an AI-powered infrastructure around the business. Not in the way that tech companies talk about AI — not as a slogan or a positioning statement — but practically, at the level of daily operations. Email handling, client intake screening, newsletter production, social media scheduling, legal research across 131,000 Thai Supreme Court decisions via a custom vector database. The AI does not replace the human lawyers. It eliminates everything that was consuming the human lawyers’ time that was not actual legal work.
The result is a firm that can handle more volume with the same team, respond faster, research more thoroughly, and do it at a price point that undercuts the competition. I pay roughly $600 USD per month on AI subscriptions. The return on that investment, measured in billable time recovered, is not close.
The Earthquake
In March 2025, I was living above the 40th floor of a tower in Bangkok when the earthquake hit. I felt the building move in a way that buildings should not move. I could hear walls cracking. Some residents could not open their doors. A TikTok video of my building swaying circulated widely — I recognised it because I live in the middle one, the slightly yellowish tower.
The pool, the onsen, the sauna, and the gym were all closed for inspection. Half the elevators were out. It took time to assess the structural integrity of everything.
I left Bangkok shortly after. Not because I was afraid, but because after the earthquake, my concentration dropped and I needed a new environment to reset. I moved to the coast. Cha-Am became my base. The sea is slower than Bangkok, and slower was what I needed.
The Personal Scorecard: Honest Version
Health: I lost 3 to 4 kilos during 2025. I added 3,000 extra steps per day to my baseline. I implemented an 8-hour eating window. None of this was dramatic. None of it was a programme or a transformation story. It was small adjustments made consistently, which is the only thing that actually works.
Dating: I had about 10 dates if you want to know, and very few second dates. I have not found the right person yet. I say this without drama — it is simply the honest state of things. Dating in Thailand as a 56-year-old with specific interests and high standards for conversation is not simple. I am not complaining. I am being accurate.
Travel: Da Nang, Songkhla, Surabaya. Three cities that none of my friends were particularly interested in when I mentioned them. Three cities that gave me some of my best experiences of the year.
The AI Year: What I Actually Use
By the end of 2025, my standard AI toolkit includes Claude (Anthropic), Gemini, Grok, Deep Seek, and Kimi. I dropped my ChatGPT subscription for the first time in three years — for the first time, ChatGPT felt behind the alternatives rather than ahead of them. This is a significant shift. OpenAI built the market. The market has caught up and, in several specific areas, passed them.
My AI system for ThaiLawOnline has 60 sub-agents. They write emails, send newsletters, post on social media, screen incoming inquiries, and maintain the legal database. I watch Netflix while three different systems work in parallel. I wrote about this publicly because I think the honest version of what AI can actually do — not the hype, not the fear, but the practical reality — is more interesting than either the utopian or the dystopian narrative.
One post on this subject got 19 sad reactions. Someone was worried. I understand that. The honest answer is that I am also slightly worried — not about my own situation, but about what happens when this technology reaches the parts of the economy where there is no equivalent of a law firm to restructure around it.
Hypnotherapy: The Surprise of the Year
I started hypnotherapy sessions in early 2026 but the groundwork was laid in late 2025. I had been sceptical about it my entire adult life. Then I tried it. The result surprised me. It works, at least for specific applications — breaking automatic thought patterns, accessing things that talk therapy surfaces slowly if at all.
I include this not because I am selling hypnotherapy, but because I think the pattern — I was sceptical, I tried it anyway, I updated my position based on evidence — is worth naming explicitly. It is a useful habit of mind.
What 2026 Looks Like
More travel. More writing. Continued investment in the AI infrastructure. A possible extended stay somewhere that is not Thailand, for a change of context.
More of what works, less of what does not. That is really the whole plan, and it turns out to be enough of a plan.
The year that changed everything did not feel like it was changing everything while it was happening. That is how it usually works. You look back and see the shape of it. You look forward and the shape disappears again into uncertainty.
That is fine. I have been navigating uncertainty for a long time. I am reasonably good at it.
Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer and the founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has been based in Thailand since 2006 and writes about law, technology, travel, and life in Southeast Asia.
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