June 23, 2025 -- Issue #346
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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Conferences and Other Events
◾ The 2025 TLTF Summit has announced who's judging the Summit's Startup Showcase. The "Judges will review the hundreds of early stage companies that apply for the Startup Showcase to bring the most innovative and interesting emerging tech to the Summit Sessions."
Visit this link to find out who comprises this excellent panel of judges (and to learn more about this year's Showcase): https://mailchi.mp/legaltech/tltf-summit-applications-to-attend-are-open-17441528?e=41156188ed
Exit/M&A
◾ Are private equity roll-ups of legal tech companies in the offing? Are the likes of JPMorganChase, Workday, and Docusign planning legal tech acquisitions? Far-fetched, you say? Well, take a look at this LinkedIn post from The Legal Tech Fund founder and Managing Director, Zach Posner.https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zachposner_the-next-wave-of-legaltech-ma-is-coming-activity-7340347487825588225-ryKS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
◾ An article from Legaltech News
“E-discovery and managed review provider Consilio announced Tuesday that it has acquired AI research lab TrueLaw.
“With the acquisition, Consilio aims to expand its AI capabilities and market reach as an AI legal data technology provider.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/06/17/-consilio-acquires-ai-research-lab-truelaw/
Fundraising
◾ From TechCrunch:
“The tech industry talks a lot about how AI is going to transform work. Legal startup Crosby, which just came out of stealth with a $5.8 million seed round led by Sequoia, is perhaps the most extreme example of what’s coming that we’ve seen to date.
“Crosby isn’t just making AI software for lawyers – although it is doing that. Crosby is an actual law firm using AI to provide legal services at a speed never before possible.”
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/sequoia-backed-crosby-launches-a-new-kind-of-ai-powered-law-firm/
◾ From Artificial Lawyer:
"Harvey CEO, Winston Weinberg, has just confirmed to Artificial Lawyer that the genAI pioneer has raised $300m at a $5 billion valuation – in addition to recently raised funds.
"He told AL: ‘[The investment will be used for] investing more in international expansion and supporting customers around the globe. We are in 53 countries now and want to support that growth." https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/06/23/breaking-harvey-raises-300m-at-5bn-valuation/
Member Introductions/Questions
◾ New community member, Mike Fahner, introduces himself: "Hi, I’m Michael — a corporate lawyer turned legal tech founder. I built Socius to solve a problem I lived every day: too much time spent on routine drafting, document review, and email triage. Our product is an AI-powered assistant that lives in your inbox and helps you draft, summarize, redline, and review contracts — all from a simple email message. Before founding Socius, I practiced at Cravath and Goodwin and now run a solo firm where I still practice corporate law for startups and investors." https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/86251092?utm_source=manual
◾ New LTSF'er, Bibek Dawadi, makes an introduction: "Founder and systems architect focused on AI-native legal tech. I build scalable platforms for eDiscovery and document intelligence using LLMs, agentic workflows, and automation-first design. Background in distributed systems, real-time analytics, and intuitive UX for non-technical users. Passionate about reducing the cost and complexity of legal processes through self-guided, resilient infrastructure." https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/86298767?utm_source=manual
Partnerships/Business Development
◾ From Joel Bijlmer: "DWF AGREES PARTNERSHIP WITH LEGORA TO DELIVER AI-POWERED LEGAL OPERATIONS
https://thelegalwire.ai/dwf-agrees-partnership-with-legora-to-deliver-ai-powered-legal-operations/
◾ From Legal IT Insider:
“Contract lifecycle management vendor Agiloft today (17 June) announced a strategic collaboration with PwC UK.
“Through the collaboration, businesses will gain access to Agiloft’s no-code CLM platform, combined with PwC UK’s expertise in business strategy, digital transformation, and regulatory compliance.”
https://legaltechnology.com/2025/06/17/agiloft-collaborates-with-pwc-uk-in-tech-services-partnership/
◾ From Legal IT Insider:
"In a major turning point that was first signalled earlier this year with Harvey’s $300m raise, LexisNexisLegal & Professional and Harvey today (18 June) announced a strategic alliance to integrate LexisNexis generative AI technology, primary law content, and Shepard’s Citations within the Harvey platform and jointly develop advanced legal workflows."https://legaltechnology.com/2025/06/18/lexisnexis-and-harvey-announce-strategic-alliance-in-major-genai-turning-point/
◾ More on the DWF/Legora partnership:
From LegalTech Talk;
“DWF, the global provider of integrated legal and business services has announced a partnership with Legora, the collaborative legal AI platform. DWF will embed Legora into its legal operations offering, as one of the first Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSP) to take this approach.”
https://www.legaltech-talk.com/dwf-agrees-partnership-with-legora-to-deliver-ai-powered-legal-operations/
Product Development
◾ From the vLex press release:
"Miami, Fla. June 18, 2025—Global legal intelligence company vLex has launched the Spring ‘25 upgrade to Vincent, its industry-leading legal workflow platform. The release continues to build on the strength of vLex’s global legal database, which empowers the company to innovate rapidly at global scale. The new release features agentic AI, user-created workflows, new transactional features, model upgrades, and much more."
The entire press release can be accessed at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/86293155?utm_source=manual
◾ Reporting from the LawSites blog:
“Free Law Project’s CourtListener has launched RECAP Search Alerts, a new feature that allows users to monitor federal court filings for specific keywords, people, or topics, and receive alerts when there is a match. The service, which went live this week, represents what the organization calls “Google Alerts for federal courts, but much better.”
Detailed discussion in the full article makes that article a must read: https://www.lawnext.com/2025/06/courtlistener-launches-recap-search-alerts-for-pacer-filings-google-alerts-for-federal-courts.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=LawSitesBlog-2025-06-20-50179
◾ The Legaltech News legal tech rundown arrives:
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/06/20/legaltech-rundown-disco-brings-auto-review-to-the-eu-and-uk-vlex-launches-updated-vincent-platform-and-more/
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
◾ Reporting from Artificial Lawyer
“In a very creative approach to using genAI for contract review, Syntracts – co-founded by Uber and Latham & Watkins alums – doesn’t need prompts, and instead uses orchestrated small language models (SLMs) trained on synthetic data, each focused on different aspects of a contract to provide lawyers with very high accuracy – and without hallucinations.
“Syntracts is also different in another way: it operates on-prem and thus doesn’t need to get into the cloud at all, thus providing law firms and inhouse teams with, in theory, much better security.”https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/06/17/syntracts-reinvents-contract-ai-small-models-on-prem/
◾ From the LawSites blog by Bob Ambrogi, thorough reporting and analysis of a Washington state bar association survey of Ai adoption (as well as other tech issues affecting the practice of law):
“A comprehensive survey of Washington State Bar Association members reveals a cautious approach to artificial intelligence adoption among legal professionals, with significant gaps in technology knowledge and cybersecurity practices creating potential vulnerabilities across the state’s legal landscape.
“The WSBA Technology Survey, conducted from September to October 2024 and published in April 2025, found that only 25% of the state’s lawyers currently use generative AI applications in their practice on a regular basis.”
https://www.lawnext.com/2025/06/washington-state-lawyers-show-limited-ai-adoption-despite-growing-interest-new-survey-reveals.html
◾ Another post from Joel Bijlmer: "Legal teams still sketch complex deals on whiteboards. StructureFlow thinks it’s time for something better.
"The Legal Wire recently attended the Future Lawyer Europe event in Milan, where we had the opportunity to hear directly from the StructureFlow team, and see their product in action. This UK-based platform turns the scribbles and spreadsheets of legal work into clear, editable, client-ready diagrams, timelines, flowcharts, step plans, and more. Whether it's mapping an ownership chain, visualizing a dispute, or updating a funding flow, StructureFlow has a demonstrated ability to help legal professionals show what they know in a faster, cleaner, and clearer way.
"Read the full article: https://thelegalwire.ai/structureflow-turns-diagrams-into-dialogue-for-legal-teams/
Regulation
◾ LTSF community member, Tafadzwa Chikuvanyanga, posts about how US federal legislation could preempt US state law regulation of AI:
https://dailymontanan.com/2025/06/19/state-ai-laws-could-go-away-under-big-beautiful-bill/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Startup Management
◾ Tips from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz on figuring out what your “ideal customer profile” (ICP) is:
https://a16z.com/framework-define-refine-icp/
◾ Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Viraj Bindra and Ben Weems of Finch Legal: What if personal injury attorneys could say "yes" to every promising case that came through their door? That's the problem Finch Legal (https://www.finchlegal.com) is solving with a groundbreaking approach that combines human expertise with AI-powered automation.
Show notes and link to episode here: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/86291765?utm_source=manual
◾ What does it mean for a legal tech vendor to build a competition-beating "moat?" This article from Legal IT Insider attempts to answer that question by analyzing the moat Harvey is trying to build.https://legaltechnology.com/2025/06/19/comment-harveys-defensible-compliance-moat-strategic-advantage-or-market-dependency/
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