June 2, 2025 -- Issue #343

Hi, Charlie Uniman here, host of Legal Tech StartUp Focus ("LTSF"), the online community for everyone involved with legal tech startups. You're reading the latest digest of articles, opinion pieces, and other thoughts posted during the past week at the community.
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Exit/M&A

◾ Seemingly, a good exit for Brightflag, as reported by Legaltech News:
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“On Thursday, information services company Wolters Kluwer announced the acquisition of Dublin-based legal spend management platform provider Brightflag. The transaction was completed in cash, at a value of roughly €425 million (approximately $483 million).
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“Brightflag, founded in 2014, provides matter management and billing software for corporate enterprise customers, primarily mid-sized companies.”
​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/29/wolters-kluwer-acquires-legal-spend-company-brightflag-in-425-million-deal/​

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Hiring/New Hires​
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◾ Legaltech News reporting:
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“On Wednesday, professional and legal services company Harbor announced the appointment of Allan Lamkin as chief technology officer.
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“Lamkin previously served as Paul Hastings’ chief information officer and was also chief technology officer at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group.”
​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/28/harbor-appoints-former-paul-hastings-cio-as-its-chief-technology-officer/​

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Incubators/Accelerators

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◾ Artificial Lawyer reports:
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“A&O Shearman has announced the companies joining Fuse’s ninth cohort, the largest and ‘most ambitious’ group in the program’s history.”
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For the names of the companies joining this cohort follow this link: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/05/29/ao-shearman-announces-largest-ever-cohort-to-join-fuse/​

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JusticeTech/A2J

◾ “On Wednesday, legal services provider Rocket Lawyer announced the launch of Rocket Copilot Q&A, an expansion of Rocket Copilot for small businesses.
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“Rocket Lawyer’s Rocket Copilot is a gen AI-powered chatbot initially built to generate names for businesses, customize business documents and register trademarks.”
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Read the rest of this Legaltech News article here: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/28/rocket-lawyer-debuts-gen-ai-legal-qa-tool-for-small-businesses/​

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LegalEd

◾ From Legaltech News, an article by Darren Cunningham, vice president at Komprise (a data management company):

"Global and national law firms face a growing dilemma: how to efficiently manage the vast volumes of unstructured data they accumulate over time — much of which cannot be deleted for legal or compliance reasons. From litigation documents to case files, contracts, and discovery materials, legal institutions are witnessing explosive data growth, often exceeding 20% annually. This data sprawl presents some thorny challenges, particularly around storage costs, accessibility, and cybersecurity."

$$Quote: "Ultimately, intelligent unstructured data management is not merely an IT function—it is a strategic initiative that influences how a law firm operates, serves its clients, and prepares for the future. The ability to analyze and mobilize unstructured data to address storage growth, lower security risks, and support AI initiatives is fast becoming a competitive advantage." https://bit.ly/43P42T0​

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Partnerships/Business Development​
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◾ This week end's legal tech rundown from Legaltech News:
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"The fast-paced legal tech world is constantly evolving. At Legaltech News, we always try to bring you the latest news on hirings, product and feature releases, new integrations, legal tech M&A deals, and more. The Legaltech Rundown is a weekly update of legal tech happenings that might have gone under the radar."
​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/30/legaltech-rundown-lighthouse-launches-ai-search-sedona-conference-publishes-principles-for-international-arbitration-and-more-/​

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Product Development

◾ From the Lighthouse press release, today May 27. 2025:

SEATTLE, May 27, 2025–Lighthouse, a leader in technology-enabled eDiscovery, compliance, and information governance services, today announced the availability of Lighthouse AI Search, an AI-first search tool that allows litigation teams to better identify evidence, understand narratives, and build case strategy.

The entire press release can be found at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/85156577?utm_source=manual​

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◾ The LawSites blog reports:
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“LexCheck has launched version 3.0 of its AI-powered contract review software, introducing capabilities that automatically generate custom playbooks from clients’ historical redlines and provide precedent checking against past agreements.”
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“The new version builds upon LexCheck’s existing contract review foundation, which identifies deviations between client template language and counterparty documents. Version 3.0 adds automated playbook generation, precedent analysis, and enhanced redlining capabilities designed to handle complex commercial agreements including MSAs, SaaS agreements, and professional service agreements.”
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Entire blog post here: https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/exclusive-lexcheck-unveils-version-3-0-of-its-ai-powered-tool-for-reviewing-complex-agreements-and-auto-generating-custom-playbooks.html​

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◾ From VC firm First Round’s online “Review” publication:
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“In this interview [with David Kossnick, Figma’s Head of Product, AI], we explore the evaluation process Kossnick and team used to launch Figma Make [Figma’s new AI prompt-driven prototype-building tool], one that kept humans at the center of every step — from defining success metrics, to the process for gathering qualitative feedback and then exploring how you can assess this data. If you’re interested in building, testing and validating AI products, this one is for you.”
​https://review.firstround.com/figma-ai-eval-process/​

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◾ “On Thursday, information services company Wolters Kluwer announced that it will hold an international arbitration-focused hackathon in collaboration with the American Arbitration Association-International Center for Dispute Resolution (AAA-ICDR). The hackathon will take place on June 11, 2025, in The Hague in the Netherlands, and will follow one day after the AAA-ICDR’s Future Dispute Resolution Conference in the same city.”
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As Legaltech News learned from David Bartolone, vice president and general manager for Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.’s international group:
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“ . . . this year’s hackathon was designed as an open innovation event to prioritize interaction between practitioners and technologists and minimize coding. Attendees will be provided with access to Wolters Kluwer’s AI tools and allowed to work on developing use cases of their own design in collaboration with DXG employees.”
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There’s also an access-to-justice aspect to this hackathon:
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“Attendees at the June 11 hackathon will also be asked to focus on building workflows for AI-enabled access to justice initiatives related to arbitration in collaboration with The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law.”
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Read much more here: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/29/wolters-kluwer-american-arbitration-association-team-up-to-host-international-hackathon/​

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◾ From VentureBeat:
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“Alibaba Group has introduced QwenLong-L1, a new framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to reason over extremely long inputs. This development could unlock a new wave of enterprise applications that require models to understand and draw insights from extensive documents such as detailed corporate filings, lengthy financial statements, or complex legal contracts.”
​https://venturebeat.com/ai/qwenlong-l1-solves-long-context-reasoning-challenge-that-stumps-current-llms/​
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Purchasing/Using Legal Tech

◾ Below is a link to a LinkedIn post from board advisor Ross Dawson that describes Johnson & Johnson's "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach to finding GenAI use cases that serve important business goals. Needless to say, the approach that J&J is following can be used by other business organizations, including, of course, law firms and in-house legal departments.

H/T to Dennis Kennedy for making me aware of this LinkedIn post.

"In their 'thousand flowers' strategy, J&J seeded 900+ GenAI use cases. Using clear metrics they found that 10–15% of these drove 80% of the value, and pivoted to focusing on fewer scalable, high-impact use cases.
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"Some commentators have suggested that this means the use case proliferation was a mistake. J&J's CIO doesn't see it like that.
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" 'You had to take an iterative approach to say, ‘Where are these technologies useful and where are they not?’... We had the right plan three years ago, but we matured our plan based on three years of understanding,'
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"Leaders cannot know in advance where the value will emerge. The challenge is to select the right scope of experimenation before selecting focus use cases."

​https://www.linkedin.com/posts/futuristkeynotespeaker_in-my-work-with-boards-and-exec-teams-one-activity-7327838056361656323-r21H?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0​

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◾ “[UK law firm] Garrigues is diving headfirst into the digital future—launching its own generative AI platform, Garrigues GAIA, acquiring a majority stake in digital trust provider EADTrust, and teaming up with tech giant Microsoft to reshape the legal tech landscape.”
​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/05/29/inside-garrigues-plans-to-diversify-its-income-through-its-digital-business-g-digital/​

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◾ A Q&A from Legal IT Insider about legal tech startup Crimson:
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“Crimson is an AI platform built to help litigation teams manage complex disputes. Founded by a machine learning specialist, an AI engineer, and a litigation lawyer, here is everything you need to know about the cloud-based vertical LLM application and the people behind it. Crimson was just yesterday (30 May) revealed to have been selected to A&O Shearman’s innovation incubator Fuse.”
​https://legaltechnology.com/2025/05/30/start-up-corner-crimson-the-ai-platform-built-to-manage-complex-disputes/​

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◾ Legaltech News asks in this article how the use of AI (particularly in transaction-driven law firm work) will affect the shift from billable hour pricing approaches to alternative approaches. The article reaches no definitive conclusions, of course (it’s still to early to measure the impact of AI on law firm business models), but it does provides a good general discussion.
​https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2025/05/30/can-ai-make-fixed-fees-more-profitable-deal-work-is-offering-clues/​

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Startup Management

◾ As this article from Legaltech News points out, only a few legal tech companies are public. So what can we learn from those companies?
"A look inside the quarterly filings of DISCO, Intapp and LegalZoom and what they say about the health, market share and strategy of each company."
​https://bit.ly/4koFki0​

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◾ Excellent advice from Charlie O'Donnell, former VC and now adviser to VC's, about to whom startups ought speak BEFORE speaking to potential investors (especially if a big part of the startup's pitch to investors is "we're the 'this' or 'that,'" e.g., "we're the Uber of [fill in the blank]").
​https://mailchi.mp/next.nyc/032525-10376308?e=f989338576​

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◾ From a LinkedIn post today, May 29, 2025, put up by Daniel Van Binsbergen, CEO of DraftPilot:
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“But here's the truth: 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲-𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴.
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“They come when OpenAI releases a new base model. Everything else is incremental in comparison.
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“I included an example below, same contract, same playbook, just upgrading DraftPilot from GPT4o to GPT4.1.
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“The quality leap was massive. And we shipped it within weeks.
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“⚠️ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗽 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼:
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“Some large Legal AI providers went much deeper: retraining internal weights, ingesting billions of legal tokens, building custom checkpoints.
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“This was 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗼 when models weren't good enough out of the box.
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“But now those vendors are locked into infrastructure they can't easily escape. Moving to GPT4.1 would require rebuilding everything from scratch.
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“🧠 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗔𝗜 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿𝘀:
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“If you're evaluating legal AI tools, ask one question: ‘𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹?’"
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The entire post is a very worthwhile read, as are the spirited comments:
​https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielvanbinsbergen_the-dirty-secret-about-legal-ai-a-lot-of-activity-7333831696464719873-8G2e?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc​

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◾ A great friend of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus community, Russ Koris, a lawyer and legal technologist at the Cohen Tauber Spievack & Wagner law firm in NYC, has told me he has a webinar coming up. This webinar will take up a topic of interest to leaders at legal tech startups (and at other types of startups, of course) that are based outside the US; namely, legal factors to consider when bringing your startup to the States.

As the webinar's announcement puts it: "Expanding Into the U.S.: Key Corporate Legal Issues for Companies Based Abroad
A Webinar with Daniel Arbov and Russ Korins, Cohen Tauber Spievack & Wagner P.C. Tuesday, June 17, 10:00 to 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time
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"Entering the U.S. market can bring opportunities for business growth and investment capital. But while thinking big, it’s important to lay the right foundation. What should business owners and executives based abroad be aware of as they launch their U.S. presence?
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"In this webinar, CTSW corporate attorneys Daniel Arbov and Russ Korins will discuss some of the critical questions of corporate law these owners and executives should address. The discussion will include:

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"Selecting the type of business entity (say, corporation or LLC) and where it should be based, and how your overall business objectives may dictate one type or another

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"The relationship between the U.S. entity and the entity based abroad, and a few business questions that may drive different ownership configurations

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"Basics and potential traps in intellectual property protection when hiring contractors or consultants and employees
Key corporate housekeeping items investors expect to be in place before funding

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"Executives, founders, and founding teams based abroad, their advisors, and anyone else interested in U.S. rollouts are welcome to attend. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_72rV0iLaStCFMwsfL8uVJA "

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Teaching/Learning Legal Tech

◾ From Artificial Lawyer:

"When AmLaw 100 law firm Dorsey & Whitney decided to implement ndMax, an AI assistant integrated with their NetDocuments system, Caroline Sweeney recognized a critical challenge. As the firm’s Chief Knowledge and Innovation Officer, she knew that simply providing access to a powerful tool wouldn’t be enough[, in addition, Sweeney knew that skills development - training - had to come along too]."

"Dorsey’s leadership team, including Sweeney and Carla Tollefsrud, Programs Director at the firm, devised a straightforward but powerful approach: make AI training a prerequisite for tool access.

"After evaluating various training options, they selected Hotshot’s AI offering and selected Hotshot’s Generative AI training, which includes a short prompting course as the required training for the ndMax AI Assistant. This course provides the essentials quickly and easily without overwhelming people’s schedules." https://bit.ly/43q7RxZ​