October 20, 2025 — Issue #364

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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Legal Tech StartUp Focus is so very pleased, and proud, to announce that it’s a media partner with Cosmonauts for the Future Lawyer USA summit that’s taking place October 29 - 30, 2025 in Boston, USA. Stay tuned for more announcements about this must-attend event.

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Fundraising

• From Law.com:​“On Tuesday, pre-litigation technology and services startup Finch announced the completion of a $20 million funding round. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, and featured participation from returning investors Roar Ventures and Liquid 2 Ventures, as well as a number of individual backers. The new investment comes six months after the company announced a $3.75 million round led by Sequoia Capital.”​Congratulations to co-founders Viraj Bindra and Ben Weems, as well as the rest of the Finch team, on this impressive raise from impressive investors. ​https://www.law.com/2025/10/15/pre-litigation-personal-injury-startup-finch-announces-20m-funding-round/

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Hiring/New Hires​
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• Law.com reports:​“E-discovery services provider Reveal announced Tuesday that founder Wendell Jisa will be stepping down as CEO to become chairman of the company’s board of directors. In his place, Reveal also announced the appointment of Eric Harmon as CEO.”​https://www.law.com/2025/10/14/reveal-appoints-eric-harmon-as-new-ceo-founder-wendell-jisa-takes-chairman-seat/

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• From Law.com:​“One firm that has recently added to its roster of legal tech talent is Addleshaw Goddard, which last month hired Chris Tart-Roberts as a partner tasked with establishing and leading a financial services tech solutions team. Tart-Roberts began his career representing financial institutions and spent the last dozen years as head of lawtech and chief knowledge and innovation officer at Macfarlanes.​“Legaltech News sat down with Tart-Roberts to discuss his introduction to legal technology, legal tech’s fit with financial services and demonstrating value to clients.”​https://www.law.com/2025/10/14/why-addleshaw-goddard-is-combining-legal-technology-and-financial-services/​

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• It’s Friday, so it’s also legal tech rundown day from Law.com’s Legaltech News:​“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 mergers and acquisitions 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/2025/10/17/legaltech-rundown-thomson-reuters-adds-cocounsel-capabilities-to-highq-contractpodai-releases-agentic-platform-and-more/​

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Partnerships/Business Development​
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• From the Entegrata October 16, 2025 press release that announces Entegrata’s new partnership with NetDocuments: “Entegrata, the leading provider of SaaS legal data platforms, today announced a strategic partnership with NetDocuments, the #1 trusted cloud-based content management and productivity platform that helps legal professionals do their best work. This collaboration enables law firms to enrich their data by bringing NetDocuments content into Entegrata’s Azure-native lakehouse. From there, Entegrata contextualizes that data alongside time, billing, experience, governance, security, HR, and financial systems to deliver insight-ready outputs. These enriched insights, tied to people, clients, and matters, are then pushed back into NetDocuments to support advanced AI workflows and document intelligence use cases.” The entire press release can be accessed at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/92322031

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Product Development

• From Scott Leigh, LTSF’er and CEO of AltFee: “We’re excited to share that we’ve just launched Matter Analytics, built to give law firms using Clio + AltFee clearer insight into how their flat fee work performs - helping them price with confidence and track profitability in real time!As firms continue shifting away from the billable hour, we’ve heard a consistent need for visibility into what’s actually driving value and margin under alternative fee models. Matter Analytics is our answer to that.With this release, firms connected to Clio can:✅ See profitability in real time – compare flat fees against recorded time to track margins and realization.✅ Measure value vs. effort – understand how much of a flat fee has been consumed and team contribution by dollar and percentage.✅ Get a clear rate picture – view effective hourly rates by individual or blended across the team.Our goal is to help firms price based on value, not only effort, and to make data a central part of that process.Would love to hear how others in this community are tackling pricing visibility or using data to support value-based models.”

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• Below is a link to a LinkedIn post from Giles Thompson of Avvoka that heralds Avvoka’s release of its Word plugin. As Giles puts it in his post: “We’re bringing the power of no-code document automation directly into the tool lawyers already know and trust as part of our mission to make legal work simpler, faster, and smarter.”https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gilesathompson_legalgeek-activity-7383840078818885632-pjea?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0

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• The LawSites blog reports:​“The legal CRM and marketing automation platform Lawmatics today announced the beta launch of Qualify AI, which it is calling “the most powerful and useful lead score and qualification platform in legal tech.​“The new AI-powered product represents Lawmatics’ first major entry into the application of generative artificial intelligence. It is designed to address one of the most time-consuming challenges law firms face: determining which leads to pursue.”​https://www.lawnext.com/2025/10/exclusive-lawmatics-announces-qualify-ai-a-sophisticated-lead-scoring-platform-for-law-firms.html

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• Reporting from ClioCon 2025 by Law.com:​“On Thursday, practice management provider Clio announced the launch of a product suite offering a range of new enterprise solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments.”​“With the launch of the Clio for Enterprise, the company is moving to serve large law firms and corporate legal departments in addition to solo practitioners and small and midsize law firms. The acquisition of vLex, which served enterprise customers, underscores this decision.”​https://www.law.com/2025/10/16/clio-announces-enterprise-product-suite-introduces-clio-work-to-centralize-ai-offerings/

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Purchasing/Using Legal Tech

• From the going’s-on at Relativity Fest 2025: ​“ . . . with Relativity moving to include its gen AI document and privilege review solutions aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege in its standard RelativityOne offering—and with the technology becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous overall—is the end of TAR in sight?”​https://www.law.com/2025/10/09/relativityfest-2025-will-gen-ai-pricing-moves-spell-the-end-for-tar/

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• Tom Rice and Alex Herrity of the Law://WhtasNext podcast interview Nicole Braddick, Global Head of Innovation at Factor. Among other topics, Nicole, Tom and Alex talk about:​(1) how the availability of Gen AI foundation models like OpenAI and Anthropic affects legal tech users' "build-versus-buy" decision-making, ​(2) the problems that legal tech users can confront when agentic AI interfaces become too frictionless - thereby discouraging human-in-the-loop intervention that lawyer ethical rules may require, and​(3) how legal tech vendors too often over index on chatbot-based interfaces and Gen AI feature use when instead more conventional user interfaces and more rule-based machine intelligence use may be better suited to the tasks at hand. ​Here’s a link Tom’s and Alex’s Substack post where you can find the podcast episode’s show notes and access the episode itself: https://open.substack.com/pub/lawwhatsnext/p/the-ux-of-ai-with-nicole-braddick?

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• Law.com’s LegalTech News:​“Every year, Legaltech News surveys leaders at top law firms to take the pulse on the legal industry's most pressing technology issues and top priorities in the coming year. The annual survey is now open, and we want to hear from you!”​“The survey is open until Nov. 14. We're looking forward to reading your responses!”​You can access the survey here: https://alm.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5gQ1sfijkxJ3XLw​

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• Law.com reports:​“Generative artificial intelligence tools appear to be besting lawyers in certain aspects of legal research, according to a report released Thursday by LLM evaluation startup Vals AI. The latest edition of the Vals Legal AI Report showed that tools from Alexi, Counsel Stack, Midpage and Open AI responded to legal research questions with better accuracy and authoritativeness than human lawyers.”​Do read the entire piece at the link below for some important rather nuanced commentary: https://www.law.com/2025/10/16/-vals-ai-report-shows-gen-ai-tools-outperforming-lawyers-on-legal-research-tasks/

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Regulatory Reform​
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• From a Bloomberg Law post:​“Big capital providers are flocking to Arizona to pour money into “alternative” law firms as investors become comfortable with risk in the fledgling space.”​“A Bloomberg Law review of approved ABS applications shows details of the business models of new entrants gaining a foothold in Arizona. This article is based on documents received via a public records request to the Arizona Supreme Court.”​As Wall Street looks for returns that aren’t correlated to more traditional equity and fixes-income investments, it capitalizes (pun intended) on law firm regulatory reform. ​https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/heavyweight-investors-line-up-for-law-firm-ownership-ventures

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Startup Management

• From Law.com:“Last month, artificial intelligence-powered legal risk management company SCOREalytics announced a seed funding round of over $3 million, aimed at accelerating the development of data-driven risk analysis tools. The company was co-founded by Moiz Shirazi and Nicolas Jeangeorges, who worked as economists in Baker McKenzie’s consulting unit prior to spinning SCOREalytics off as an independent business. The company has now added Jennie Morawetz as chief strategy officer and general counsel. Morawetz left a partnership with Kirkland & Ellis to take on the new role, following five years building the firm’s sustainability practice group. “Legaltech News sat down with Morawetz and Shirazi to discuss leaving big law and the future of legal services.The interview here: https://www.law.com/2025/10/13/why-a-baker-mckenzie-economist-and-a-kirkland-partner-left-big-law-to-build-a-startup/

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• Reporting from Legal IT Insider:​“Definely has launched a high level advisor network to build on its growth and expansion in North America.​“Legal tech and SaaS executives from BigHand, Clio, Ontra, Relativity, and Verizon will help Definely with its go-to-market strategy selling into large law, mid-market law, and corporate legal buyers.”​Interesting idea for increasing GTM effectiveness. ​https://legaltechnology.com/2025/10/14/definely-launches-high-level-us-legal-advisor-network-made-up-of-execs-from-bighand-clio-ontra-relativity-and-verizon/

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Teaching/Learning Legal Tech

• LegalTech News from Law.com:​“Law schools are building out their curricula to include courses on legal technology, covering topics like e-discovery and generative artificial intelligence. At the same time, the market for legal tech companies is also expanding.​“Yet, despite the growth of the legal technology industry, law schools do not seem to be steering students to pursue careers in the space. According to experts in the industry, that’s not likely to change any time soon.”​https://www.law.com/2025/10/13/-law-schools-may-teach-tech-but-are-unlikely-to-push-students-toward-legal-tech-careers-/

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