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LTSF Newsletter -- October 13, 2025 -- Issue #363
Published about 1 month ago • 14 min read
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.
If you enjoy reading this digest, please forward it to others with an interest in legal tech startups. Readers who aren't already members of the LTSF community and who wish to join can do so here. Please do send me feedback here with any questions, comments or other ideas for this digest. If you're not already a subscriber to this newsletter and would like to subscribe, please email me here to join the subscriber list.
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Conferences and Other Events
◾ From Zak Biggs, community member and Director of Marketing at Goodlawyer:
Excited to share the Future of Law Summit, hosted by Goodlawyer — where legal leaders challenge norms and rethink what’s possible in our profession!
Join us November 20 for a free, CPD-accredited event reimagining the future of law. Co-hosted by Chad Aboud and Pauline Chan, and featuring legal thought leaders Brittany Leonard, Rob Hanna, and Jessica Nguyen, this will be the biggest virtual legal event of the year! Secure your spot at summit.goodlawyer.ca
Exit/M&A
◾ From Richard Troman at Artificial Lawyer:
"A&O Shearman’s former legal tech business, aosphere, which was sold to private equity investors in late 2023, has bought Investment Navigator. (Updated…whoops, Monday mornings, lack of sleep and coffee and all that…they only bought one company this September…the other one was last September….doh….)
◾ Law.com reports: “Legal technology and services company Epiq announced Monday that it acquired First Watch Data Breach Solutions, the breach response service from IT and cybersecurity company First Watch Technologies. “According to a press release, the acquisition expands the capabilities of Epiq’s cyber incident response team, with First Watch Data Breach Solutions specifically adding credit monitoring, call center and Social Security number look-up services, among others, to Epiq’s offerings.” https://www.law.com/2025/10/06/epiq-acquires-first-watch-data-breach-solutions-expanding-its-cyber-incident-offerings-/
"Law Business Research Ltd (LBR), which merged with ALM in March, announced today (9 October) that it has acquired Legal Geek, a market leading provider of legal-tech focused events and conferences."
"Legal Geek’s management team, Jimmy Vestbirk and Beth Fellner, will remain with the business and continue to lead the Legal Geek portfolio, which they have successfully grown and expanded in recent years."
◾ From Law.com: “E-discovery company Relativity announced Monday the launch of Rel Labs, an investment and innovation arm that will fund and support legal tech startups, both directly and through a partnership with The LegalTech Fund. The company will prioritize startups that help extend the capabilities and workflows of its cloud-based RelativityOne platform. “According to a press release, Relativity plans to ‘invest more than $170 million in research and development in 2025,’ including through what it called ‘significant investments’ via Rel Labs.” https://www.law.com/2025/10/06/relativity-launches-investment-arm-rel-labs-partners-with-the-legaltech-fund/
◾ From Law.com: “On Monday, legal tech startup Harvey announced that it received a €50 million ($58.6 million) investment from venture group EQT Growth as part of an extended Series E funding round. “The strategic investment aims to accelerate the startup’s global expansion. Harvey is currently accessible across 58 countries in Europe, Asia and North America.” https://www.law.com/2025/10/06/harvey-announces-50m-investment-to-boost-international-growth/
◾ From Law.com:
"Saga, a Dutch and Norwegian practice of law-focused legal artificial intelligence startup, announced a €1.5 million seed funding round Monday. The funds were provided by a number of undisclosed angel investors from the Dutch and Norwegian legal industries.
"Saga was formed out of a combination of a Norwegian team that had been building a legal AI platform with a Dutch group that had been working on CMS software."
◾ Legal tech startup, EvenUp, that builds in the personal injury law space, achieves double unicorn status with a $150 million raise.
From the EvenUp press release today, October 7, 2025:
"SAN FRANCISCO, October 7, 2025 — EvenUp, the category leader in AI for personal injury law, today announced it has raised a $150 million Series E round led by Bessemer Venture Partners; with participation from REV, the venture capital arm of RELX, which owns LexisNexis Legal & Professional; B Capital; SignalFire; Adams Street; Bain Capital; HarbourVest; Lightspeed; and Broadlight Capital. The funding brings EvenUp’s total capital raised to $385 million and its valuation to over $2 billion — more than doubling in less than a year. It also marks EvenUp’s fourth financing round in just 24 months, each of them preempted by investors, underscoring both the company’s momentum and the market’s conviction in its mission."
◾ From Artificial Lawyer: “Hybrid AI Law Firm, Crosby, has raised $20m in a Series A funding round. Investors include California-based Cooley – which is interesting given effectively this is an investment in another ‘law firm’, as well as funds such as Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Elad Gil, along with participation from Sequoia Capital.” “Crosby is a hybrid AI law firm on a mission to fully automate human-to-human negotiations. This funding helps us get there sooner,’ explained co-founder Ryan Daniels.” https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/10/08/hybrid-ai-law-firm-crosby-raises-20m-cooley-invests/
◾ Law.com reporting on yet more fundraising today:
"Sydney, Australia-based customer relationship management (CRM) provider Nexl announced Wednesday that it raised $23 million in a Series B funding round led by growth equity firm Tidemark Capital.
"Founded in 2018 by [Philipp] Thurner who was previously a legal solutions tech analyst at Australian law firm Gilbert and Tobin, Nexl supports law firm business development across various teams, providing firms with a unified platform for relationship intelligence as well as market and revenue data to inform business decisions.
"Nexl plans to use the funding to further develop its AI-powered CRM to provide agentic AI capabilities for organizations, including around scheduling."
◾ From the Upstarts newsletter yesterday, October 8, 2025: A good piece on AI-first law firm, Crosby, including not only the story behind Crosby's founding, but also news of its latest funding round.
"And months after announcing $5.8 million in seed funding from Sequoia and Bain Capital Ventures, Crosby has now raised $20 million in fresh capital, Upstarts can exclusively report. Index Ventures and BCV co-led the round with Elad Gil, with Sequoia, global law firm Cooley and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison participating.
"The funding will help Crosby to do more to speed up its processes, allowing its lawyers to move contracts to completion faster, while the startup tries to work its way into even bigger customers.
◾ From the Axios “Pro Rata” newsletter today, October 9, 2025: “Spellbook, a Toronto-based AI contract reviewer, raised $50m in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois, with participation from Threshold Ventures, Inovia Capital, Bling Capital, Moxxie Ventures, Path Ventures and Jean-Michel Lemieux. It values the company at $350m.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-09/keith-rabois-bets-on-legal-ai-tech-with-startup-spellbook
◾ From Citybiz today, October 10, 2025:
"Vulcan Technologies, the first reg-tech company offering advanced AI to help government agencies and legal professionals with regulatory drafting and compliance, today announced it has raised a $10.9 million seed round. The round was co-led by General Catalyst and Cubit Capital, with participation from Chief Oil & Gas founder Trevor Rees-Jones, SV Angel, A*, Liquid 2 Ventures, Transpose, 468 Capital, Y Combinator, the founders of Dropbox, and other strategic investors."
◾ From Legal tech Hub (LTH): A legal tech fundraising recap for the one-month period ended mid-October this year. “Since mid-September, LTH has tracked at least 14 new fundraising announcements from legal tech companies, adding up to more than $1 billion in total funding coming into the legal tech sector in just a few weeks.” https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/contents/over-dollar1b-in-one-month-inside-legal-techs-latest-funding-spree/
Partnerships/Business Development
◾ A Friday wouldn't be complete without Law.com's legal tech rundown of some of the legal tech highlights during the work week ending today.
◾ From the LawSites blog: “Earlier this year, Eve, an AI platform for plaintiffs’ law firms, launched the beta version of an AI-powered intake feature that the company said would transform how plaintiffs’ law firms capture and qualify potential clients. After a beta program with over 40 firms, Eve has now announced the general availability of its comprehensive AI Intake platform, which includes “Jenny,” an AI voice agent that can field incoming calls on behalf of law firms.” https://www.lawnext.com/2025/10/eve-launches-ai-intake-platform-with-voice-agent-for-plaintiffs-firms.html
◾ Product release news from Law.com:
"E-discovery company Relativity announced Wednesday the upcoming launch of aiR Assist, the latest offering in its generative artificial intelligence-powered aiR Suite. The new feature will function as a natural language search application to more quickly surface critical discovery information and is set to be available in RelativityOne in early 2026.
"The company also announced that it is now including its gen AI document and privilege review solutions aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege in its standard RelativityOne offering."
◾ The LawSites blog reports: “Passle, a technology company that develops thought leadership and cross-selling tools for law firms, has unveiled a new visualization tool for its CrossPitch AI platform that promises to make cross-selling activity in law firms visible, actionable and measurable for the first time. “The Cross-Selling Intelligence Map, released today, creates a network diagram showing how thought leadership content flows among a firm’s attorneys across different offices and practice areas.” https://www.lawnext.com/2025/10/exclusive-passle-launches-intelligence-map-to-visualize-cross-selling-activity-within-a-law-firm.html
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
◾ Reporting from Law.com:
The headline from the post that's linked below reads: "Law Firms Cagey About Their AI Use and How They Bill It, Rankling Legal Departments"
"Rankling?" If I were a client's GC, I'd be more than just rankled, I'd be pounding-the-table angry!!
"According to Axiom’s global survey of over 600 senior legal leaders, nearly 80% of law firms are actively using AI tools. Yet instead of passing efficiency gains on to clients, most are “pocketing the savings—and in many cases, charging even more for AI-enhanced work,” the report says."
◾ An interview by The Legal Wire of Darryl Chiang, Legal Director at Google in New York, where Darryl leads the commercial legal team for Search, News, and Maps.
Darryl spends much of the interview discussing how contracting is often unnecessarily bespoke - even when comparing purportedly similar contracts found within the same organization, let alone when comparing contracts that originate from different contracting counterparties. Too many clauses are each directed at the same point substantively, but do so with different language. Let's use AI to reach a consensus on standardizing clauses and leave all the needless negotiating (and "gotcha" gamesmanship) behind. (Warning: I can ride this standardization hobbyhorse of mine for a long time.)
$$Quote from the interview:
"Currently, AI offers a powerful, yet false sense of efficiency by helping us churn through needlessly bespoke, complex contracts. While it’s tempting to use AI to simply do more of what we’ve always done, the real game changer is to use AI to standardize and harmonize 80% of our contract clauses. If we use AI’s unprecedented analytics capabilities to confirm that 80% of contract clauses are actually saying the same thing (using an infinite number of needlessly different formulations), and if we ask AI to help draft standardized, open-source template clauses instead–the way oneNDA and BonTerms have already started to do–we can move away from having AI bots engage in a wasteful “battle of the forms” to harnessing AI to build a shared foundation of standard terms so that humans can focus on negotiating the 20% of contract clauses that are truly novel or material."
◾ From Legal IT Insider: A customer win for Legora.
"UK and Ireland law firm Browne Jacobson today (7 October) announced the purchase of an enterprise-wide licence for Legora, following a pilot that chief operating officer Abby Ewen tells us encompassed over 400 people and has created a “wellbeing lift” at the firm.
DocSolid has developed another class-leading breakthrough by applying Microsoft Azure AI Language to Airmail2® Cloud’s on-demand image processing. Daily mail is now more productive because the existing digital delivery can be supplemented with abstractive summaries. The result provides mail recipients with a concise, private, and secure summarization of a newly delivered mail item. This gives attorneys and staff immediate context to prioritize and speed up their work. Subscribe to DocSolid Dispatch on LinkedIn
◾ A lovely post in the Law://WhatsNext Substack by Alex Herrity entitled, "Legal AI’s Future Is Railroads, But Speeding Up Canals Still Makes Sense For Now" (with the post's subtitle being, "Exploring the difference between creating faster LLM-driven workflows and designing coordinated systems for agentic AI").
Alex begins his posts by explaining that his "canal vs railroad"-building metaphor comes from a recent article by Sangeet Paul Choudar. As Alex explains:
"Earlier this week, I read Sangeet Paul Choudary’s thought-provoking essay The Problem with Agentic AI in 2025 and it reshaped some of my thinking on agentic AI in legal.
"In a twist for a piece about AI, he opened by talking about canals. In the early nineteenth century, canals were the infrastructure marvel of their time. They connected towns, cut costs, and expanded trade opportunities. When railroads were created, many people saw them as just faster canals; a more efficient way to move the same goods along similar routes.
"But railroads didn’t just move things faster; they changed how everything connected. Trains running hundreds of miles forced towns to standardise time zones, to coordinate schedules, to build new systems of governance. Railroads created national markets because they required, and enabled, coordination on a scale that canals never did.
"Choudary argues that the current thinking around the application of “agentic AI” risks repeating the same mistake. He worries that many experts still think like canal engineers. They see agents as a more powerful way to automate tasks instead of recognising that the real opportunity lies in re-architecting how work is coordinated across systems."
After writing the above, Alex brings it all back to AI's use in legal:
"[Choudary's] idea struck a nerve because I’ve been wrestling with understanding the material difference between super-charging existing workflows by adding LLM-powered features vs implementing true agentic AI.
"His article has helped me think more deeply about what AI could really mean for Legal workflows, and made me consider if my recent mindset has been more canal builder than railroad revolutionary."
Here's a link to the entire post, one that is so very much worth a complete read:
"Lucy Nixon and Richard Tapp, both well-known legal sector experts with a track record in managed services, have launched a new ALSP, NuCas, which will leverage AI – see AL In-depth Interview below. The business is backed by Crasner Ventures.
"They both played key roles in developing and leading what at the time was the ground-breaking Carillion Advice Services, which Clifford Chance bought in 2018. Nixon will serve as Chief Executive and Tapp will be Chair."
"While generative and agentic artificial intelligence can now streamline a larger slice of legal services, it can be daunting for law firms to know where and how to start. Some, however, are finding roadmaps by looking internally.
"A growing number of firms have realized they can spur AI innovation—and ensure their current and prospective attorneys are trained to meet the moment— by launching internal innovation competitions.
"These novel contests, called hackathons, see law firm staff team up with developers to design legal technology solutions for client, legal or business challenges."
Charlie Uniman - Former lawyer now legal tech startup evangelist
A weekly newsletter with links to articles from around the world that help legal tech startup leaders (and their customers and their investors) succeed in business
Read more from Legal Tech StartUp Focus Newsletter
November 10, 2025 -- Issue #367 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. If you enjoy reading this digest, please forward it to others with an interest in legal tech startups. Readers who aren't already members of the LTSF community and who wish to join can do so here....
November 3, 2025 -- Issue #366 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. If you enjoy reading this digest, please forward it to others with an interest in legal tech startups. Readers who aren't already members of the LTSF community and who wish to join can do so here....
October 27, 2025 -- Issue #365 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. If you enjoy reading this digest, please forward it to others with an interest in legal tech startups. Readers who aren't already members of the LTSF community and who wish to join can do so here....
