May 18, 2026 -- Issue #394

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

◾ Interesting AI-native law firm news in a post from Artificial Lawyer (AL). In that post, AL reports that Carta has launched a "new model" law firm, called Carta Law, in connection with Carta's acquisition of the UK ALSP Avantia.

From the AL post:

"Carta, a specialist ERP provider for the private capital world, has bought UK-based ALSP Avantia, which handles managed services for asset managers. The result is the launch of Carta Law, an AI-first, NewMod law firm – which builds on the regulated part of Avantia.

"It also marks Carta’s fourth deal since October 2025, after Accelex, Sirvatus and ListAlpha, as the company seeks to roll-up a chunk of the software and services market for the private capital sector."

Get the entire AL post at: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/13/carta-buys-alsp-avantia-launches-ai-first-law-firm/?jetpack_skip_subscription_popup​

LegalEd

◾ Community member, Zoran Gajic posts: "Legal marketplace transformation and globalization impact

"An impact of communication tools, cloud services, and digital transformation is that a law firm no longer needs to be physically located in the city or country of the client. Law firms and consultants can now exist virtually in any global jurisdiction and provide the same advice and services.

"Growing numbers of legal consultancies, law businesses with international presence with multiple jurisdictions across the globe, are no longer local and thus require legal advice and support from wider geographic areas.

"Rapidly increasing numbers of companies, investors, and digital nomads in the era of digitalization conduct business both nationally and globally, which drives demand for fast communication, booking, and consulting across a broad range of jurisdictions rather than within a single market.

"Why you should choose a global legal marketplace?

"When a law business operates exclusively within a specific area, regional law firms can be a good alternative; however, their costs tend to be higher than local firms, and, should a business need it, regional firms offer no coverage outside of their confined areas/jurisdictions. Rising demands for legal services dedicated to global business development and the need for mobility across the globe will require a specialized marketplace platform to connect the clients and consultants in one single platform.

"What a Legal Marketplace Is — and Is Not?

"Not a Lawyer/ Consultant Directory

"A list of lawyers and legal consultants on a website is not a marketplace. Bar member association listings and profile websites only show names, practice area, and credentials within a geographical area. Once a client chooses a lawyer/consultant, the website, usually built as SaaS, plays no further role.

"A marketplace stays involved. It helps match the client to a consultant, manages the service booking, appointments, communications, and often handles payment.

"Not a Lead-Generation Website

"Lead-generation sites sell only introductions. After the introduction, the platform disappears. The lawyer or consultant and client deal with everything on their own.

"A legal marketplace goes further. The client hires the lawyer through the platform based on the offered features and services for both sides.

"Not a Generic Freelance Platform

"A legal marketplace is not a copy of a marketing platform for sole practitioners and legal practice freelancers.

"What is the legal marketplace actually?

It is a Governed Way to Deliver Legal Services

"A legal marketplace sits between clients and consultants/ lawyers. It manages the full service flow. Clients search for a consultant based on available filters, such as practice area, jurisdiction, etc., and submit a booking request.

"The legal marketplace becomes the platform through which legal services are delivered anywhere, not just promoted.

It is a Built-In Trust and Quality System

"A legal marketplace must create trust at scale. This starts with lawyers' /consultants' verification. Licenses, creation of business portfolio, years of experience, publications, and good standing must be checked.

"Quality control continues during delivery. Client feedback, service review ratings, and clear standards, terms of use matter.

"The real decision is not about technology or AI adoption. It is about whether the firm is prepared to change how legal value is produced, provided, and paid for."

◾ Artificial Lawyer (AL) posts about how leaders at the legal tech vendor Jylo are working to offer legal AI users advice on using open-source legal AI tools, such as the recently released "Mike" AI app.

From the AL post:

"While some legal tech companies are politely trying to avoid the subject, Jylo’s founders, Sam Lansley andShawn Curran, are not just embracing the work of vibe-code warriors such as Jamie Tso and Will Chen – they’re going to help you bring their open-source software into your business, including Mike OSS – the now famous and free legal AI platform.

"They stated that they ‘will offer strategic consultancy sessions to organisations exploring or deploying open source AI systems internally, including implementations built around Mike OSS, or other platforms’. They are also not charging for this support."

Read the entire AL post, especially to understand why Jylo's leaders (that is to say, leaders of a company that has built a legal tech app that, like most commercial legal tech apps, is proprietary and, therefore, closed-source) are taking this rather "altruistic" approach when it comes to open-source AI.

Here's the link to all of AL's post: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/11/jylo-founders-will-help-you-onboard-mike-oss/?jetpack_skip_subscription_popup​

◾ In this post from Legaltech News (LTN), take a look at how one BigLaw firm, NYC-based Debevoise & Plimpton, has created organizational structures to encourage and channel the use of AI at the firm.

From LTN's post:

"Like other law firms, Debevoise formed a committee to centralize how it manages AI adoption and risk. Launched in 2023, the Debevoise’s AI policy committee establishes firm-wide AI policies and approves AI use cases and tools for internal use."

"The committee provides guidance to the firm’s applied AI team, which works closely with practice groups and supporting operations groups—nonlegal teams such as finance, marketing and professional development, among others—to develop AI use cases.

"A partner and a group of lawyers from each practice group, as well as one representative from each operational team, are appointed 'AI liaisons' to the applied AI team and meet on a regular basis to share AI best practices and use case ideas."

You can access the entire LTN post at this link: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2026/05/12/-debevoise-harnesses-client-practice-internal-experimentation-to-navigate-ai-era-/?kw=Debevoise+Harnesses+Client+Practice,+Internal+Experimentation+to+Navigate+AI+Era&utm_position=1&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20260513&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&user_id=5a62392218ff43ec508b502b&slreturn=20260513102859​

◾ One of the most comprehensive and thoughtful legal tech newsletters out there is Peter Duffy's "Legal Tech Trends Newsletter." Do give it a read!

Available on the web here: https://legaltechtrends.substack.com/p/legal-tech-trends-newsletter-52?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1378009&post_id=191230219&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=dm1ui&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email​

Member Introductions/Questions

◾ New community member, Prathik Karthikeyan, posts: "Hi All!
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"My name is Prathik Karthikeyan, I currently work as the Head of Legal Engineering & Growth at LITT a legal ai startup based in India.
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"Always open to new things, opportunities, collaborations and academic research in Legaltech.
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"I also write about legal tech and startups on my personal substack here:https://open.substack.com/pub/prathikk?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5qq6eq "

Partnerships/Business Development

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◾ As an old transaction management hand myselt, it's gratifying to see a transaction management legal tech company such as DealCloser do what sounds like a solid business partnership integration with TR's CoCounsel, as reported in a post from Artificial Lawyer (AL).

From the AL post:

"Transaction Management company DealCloser has struck a deal with Thomson Reuters that brings CoCounsel Legal’s AI document review capability into its deal platform.

"DealCloser, which started back in 2017, but has moved with the LLM wave, said that ‘the integration signals a move away from fragmented workflows toward a connected, intelligent transaction environment’.

"By embedding CoCounsel Legal directly into the platform they are ‘eliminating the need to move between systems at the most critical stages of a deal’, they added."

Read the AL post here: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/12/dealcloser-integrates-cocounsel-for-ai-doc-review/?jetpack_skip_subscription_popup​

◾ Busy week in legal tech for the business week ending today, May 15, 2026. So, catch up by reading the Legaltech News legal tech rundown, which covers product releases, business partnerships, and more (link below, natch).

​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2026/05/15/legaltech-rundown-lexisnexis-announces-protg-updates-deloitte-expands-legora-partnership-and-more-/?kw=Legaltech+Rundown:+LexisNexis+Announces+Prot%26eacute;g%26eacute;+Updates,+Deloitte+Expands+Legora+Partnership,+and+More&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=afternoonupdate&utm_content=20260515&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&user_id=5a62392218ff43ec508b502b&slreturn=20260515160722​

Product Development

◾ More law firm “AI build rather than buy” activity according to a Legaltech News (LTN) post, as Linklaters announces the launch of its “Applied Intelligence” offering.
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From the LTN post:
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“On May 5, Linklaters announced the launch of Applied Intelligence, a new practice designed to build bespoke artificial intelligence workflows and tools for individual clients and matters. The practice unites attorneys and data scientists in a front office team to work together directly on live matters.
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“Applied Intelligence was co-founded by Tom Quoroll, a structured finance partner and chair of the Linklaters’ AI program, and Sarah Barnard, the firm’s director of AI delivery. The team has three attorneys and three data scientists to start, with hopes to expand further.”
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Here’s a link to the entire LTN post: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2026/05/08/linklaters-launches-new-practice-to-build-matter-specific-ai-solutions-/​

◾ It seems that every day there are announcements from legal-related apps that their AI agent capabilities have undergone some kind of enhancement. And today it’s Docusign’s turn, with a post from Legaltech News (LTN) describing new AI-agentic features that Docusign has added to its IAM platform.
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From the LTN post:
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“On Monday, Docusign announced the addition of new agentic artificial intelligence-powered features to its Intelligent Agreement Management platform, the company’s contract review, analysis and management offering for legal teams.
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“What It Is: Docusign is upgrading the IAM platform with an AI assistant and AI agents powered by Iris, its underlying generative AI system, as well as new integrations with other platforms.
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“The assistant and agents are designed to triage and review incoming agreements, analyze an organization’s existing contracts, and forward agreements to other employees.”
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There’s much more information about this Docusign product upgrade in the LTN post, the entirety of which can be found here: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2026/05/11/docusign-enhances-iam-contract-platform-with-agentic-features/​

◾ From the press release today (May 12, 2026) from Aderant, one of the global leaders in providing business management and practice-of-law solutions to law firms:

"ATLANTA – May 12, 2026 – Aderant, a leading global provider of legal business management software, todayannounced the Aderant Agent Center, alongside a broad set of AI-driven innovations and platform advancements, at Momentum Global 2026—signaling a major step forward in the evolution of law firm operations.

"Built on the Stridyn platform and powered by MADDI, the Agent Center introduces a new model for managing firm operations, bringing together intelligent automation, real-time insights, and AI-driven workflows into a unified experience."

Catch all of Aderant's press release at this link: https://www.aderant.com/news-pr/aderant-introduces-agentic-law-firm-operations-ai-agent-center/​

◾ When I practiced law (I retired about 12 years ago), my firm's document management system was, well, just there. Sure, you could search it, but otherwise it was pretty "inert" (i.e., about as interactive as the sole of a shoe). Things are much different nowadays, particularly in light of a post today (May 14, 2026) from Legal IT Insider that discusses NetDocuments' unveiling of a major feature-add.

From the Legal IT Insider post:

"NetDocuments today (14 May) will announce what CEO Josh Baxter and chief product officer Dan Hauck described as a reimagined platform built around a new substrate they are calling the Legal Context Graph. Private preview opens today for customers on the Enterprise AI tier, with public preview to follow. It is a substantial announcement, and one that deserves to be taken seriously – both for the ambition behind it and for what it signals about where the legal AI conversation is heading.

"The argument, stripped of slideware, is that AI in legal work is only as useful as the context it can reach, and that context in a law firm is scattered across matters, documents, communications, timelines, and institutional knowledge held in people’s heads, all bound by permissions and ethical walls that cannot slip. NetDocuments’ response is to construct a typed, traversable graph spanning three tiers – global (industry and expertise), matter (case-specific), and document – and to feed it into an AI context engine that any model, first-party or third-party, can draw on. The live demo, walked through by director of product Nate Ruiz, showed the graph manifesting as cross-matter natural-language search, an automatically assembled matter overview with extracted parties and dates, version-difference summaries, and an in-Word drafting panel. The latter pulled a freshly filed expert report into a Markman reply brief without anyone having to tell it where to look. It was a polished and well-staged demonstration."

There is much more to read in the entire Legal IT Insider post here: https://legaltechnology.com/2026/05/14/netdocuments-reimagines-the-dms-around-context-2/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8t1HChYJev_Sm3ywJYaMZ7miGj18pQir6B7WMZ3XiBHaVlsJ5pilqziPyhzfx8szUdLrlBB_ca-9xSYpYV6sNfcqc3V-4Gr0PsxYhFpF6Rnu8htvI&_hsmi=135839674&utm_content=135839674&utm_source=hs_emai​

◾ Dig into Artificial Lawyer's (AL) weekly "Wrap" for a rundown on legal tech news for the business week now ending today (kicking off with a recap of Anthropic's Claude-for-legal announcement):

From the AL post:

" . . . Clearly, Claude for Legal is the dominant news this week and AL did an in-depth interview with Anthropic’s Mark Pike, an inhouse lawyer there who is also leading the legal AI project, who explains why they are doing this and what they want to achieve. It’s a must-read!"https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/15/claude-for-legal-clio-500m-legal-innovators-california/​

◾ A post from Bob Ambrogi at his LawSites blog discusses EvenUp’s release of its “Pre-Litigation as a Service, or PLAAS” product offering.
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From the Law Sites post:
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“EvenUp, the personal injury AI company that reached a $2 billion valuation last fall, is making a significant shift in its business model – one that extends it beyond software vendor to something closer to an outsourced operations partner for PI firms.
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“The San Francisco-based company announced yesterday the launch of what it calls Pre-Litigation as a Service, or PLAAS, along with updates to its AI assistant Companion and a new Firmwide Knowledge Base capability for AI-drafted documents.”
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What this all means (also from the LawSites post):
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“[PLAAS] combines purpose-built AI with EvenUp’s own U.S.-based case management staff to handle the full pre-litigation lifecycle. That lifecycle, according to the company, encompasses

“- Claim setup and investigation.
- Care coordination and treatment tracking.
- Records and bills retrieval.
- Demand preparation to firm standards.
- Settlement negotiation with carriers.
- Optional lien resolution.”
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Read all of the post here: https://www.lawnext.com/2026/05/evenup-extends-beyond-software-with-launch-of-pre-litigation-as-a-service-offering-for-pi-law-firms.html​

◾ And the beat goes on!

As reported today, May 18, 2026, in an Artificial Lawyer (AL) post. From the AL post:

"OpenAI is planning to launch a legal AI offering, joining Anthropic and Microsoft in the strategy of providing legal-specific tools for lawyers. Sources told Artificial Lawyer that the plan involves hires from the legal tech world and could be branded as ‘Codex for Legal’.

"In terms of how this will look, it’s understood that the current thinking is to have a range of ‘Codex for…..’ offerings all focused on major business verticals, e.g. sales and finance, of which one will be for legal, hence: Codex for Legal. Anthropic initially made the same type of move earlier this year, with a range of enterprise plugins, of which one was for legal."

Read the complete AL post at this link: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/18/openai-plans-codex-for-legal/​

Purchasing/Using Legal Tech

◾ StrongSuit Shows How Legal AI in Litigation Moves From Chat To Workflow — An interview with Justin McCallon, founder and CEO of StrongSuit — Episode 84 of the LTSF Podcast. From the show notes for the episode:

We sit down in this episode of the LTSF podcast with Justin McCallon, CEO and founder of StrongSuit, to get concrete about what modern litigation AI looks like when it’s built around real attorney workflows. Justin shares how his experience in legal transformation and early gen AI product work shaped StrongSuit’s approach: help litigators from intake through trial with research, drafting, doc review, timelines and statements of facts, deposition prep, and even oral argument practice. From that overview, Justin highlights just one of StrongSuit's standout features: an AI appellate judge that can interrupt, question your positions, and adapt in real time based on the case materials you upload.

Read the entire show notes here: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/101897258?utm_source=manual​

Link to podcast episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2454829/episodes/19165793​

Startup Management

◾ "Battle lines have been drawn!" Did I exaggerate here - probably. But, any exaggeration aside, here's the the big legal tech news of the day (May 12, 2026): Anthropic's release of "Claude for Legal!" And one way to begin getting a handle on this development is to read the LinkedIn post by Nikki Shaver of Legaltech Hub.

From Nikki's post:

"BREAKING: Anthropic just officially entered the legal market, launching 𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐝𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐋𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐥"

"So today, Anthropic announces Claude for Legal, part product-entry, part vertical program launch for the legal industry."

"Anthropic says they are not seeking to 'unseat legacy legal tech providers' but instead work with them to improve the industry (per Mark Pike, associate GC at Anthropic).
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"But do they have any idea what this market entry means? We've long had the frontier model versus legal application debate: what happens when they become one and the same? What does this do to the market?

"Time will tell. Stay tuned."

Read all of Nikki's thoughts in her LinkedIn post found here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicola-shaver_ai-law-lawyers-share-7459973939969298433-hkCT?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0​

◾ From a post from George Hannah on his Best Practice website: seriously good ruminations on Anthropic's offerings in the legal tech space.

From George's post, which is captioned: "Anthropic Targets Big Law On The Road To IPO:"

"The consequences of Anthropic’s entry will divide the legal-technology sector into two distinct camps.

"(1) Highly specialized boutique startups - those handling intricate, “last mile” workflows. As Anthropic commoditizes the underlying AI engine, the premium shifts to this custom workflow layer.

"(2) Conversely, generalist tools face an aggressive squeeze. To avoid being underpriced from below by Claude’s enterprise plans or outmatched from above by the boutiques, they need to transition from broad “ChatGPT for law” assistants into indispensable infrastructure."

Much more to read and ponder at: https://bestpracticeai.substack.com/p/anthropic-targets-big-law-on-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4942770&post_id=197985187&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=dm1ui&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email​