October 6, 2025 -- Issue #362
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
◾ Below is a link to a LinkedIn post from Mat Rotenberg, Director of Workflow Solutions at Bloomberg Law.
". . . the firms that will lead the future aren’t just chasing AI. They’re rethinking the most overlooked piece of the lawyer’s puzzle: PROJECT MANAGEMENT and WORKFLOW ADOPTION.
"This is about process and the all-day-every-day. This is about getting lawyers to use new tools.
"On October 8 at 1pm ET, I’ll be joined by leaders from Paul Hastings (Glenn Hoxie, PMP) and Brown Rudnick (Bradford Cavallo) for a webinar:
👉 The Lawyer’s Workflow Advantage: Project Management Principles for the AI Era
"We’ll explore how innovative firms are:
✔️ Applying project management to simplify their tech stacks
✔️ Driving adoption and accountability across teams
✔️ Turning workflow into a talent and client-service advantage"
Here's the link to Mat's LinkedIn post, where you can also find a link to register for the event: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mat-rotenberg-10528537_ai-gets-all-the-buzz-and-attention-in-legal-activity-7378861227751661568-nYCA?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
◾ Monica Zent, friend of the Legal Tech StartUp community, stellar podcast guest, and a leader at ZentLaw and Law Innovation Agency, has just told me about a must-attend event that's happening next week at the Embarcadero in San Francisco:
ZentLaw and Law Innovation Agency, together with a16z and Chief LegalX, are hosting a gathering during #SFTechWeek of up to 100 legal innovation leaders for a critical conversation about legal tech and AI.
The event, called The Future of AI + LegalTech Unplugged, will take place on Wednesday, October 8, will kick off with a panel discussion at 3 pm (PDT), and will be followed by a mixer at 4:15 pm (PDT).
From the event's sign-up page:
"Join four leaders who've seen how AI implementations succeed spectacularly and where more work needs to be done:
"🎯 Monica Zent – Pioneering AI-native ALSP founder who's boldly bringing AI to the legal services realm.
"🚀 Martin Felli – Chief Legal Officer, Alight (balancing legal risk and AI needs at scale), and more! ⚡
"Russ Philpott – Director, Legal Operations, Okta (transforming enterprise legal operations).
"🛡️ Rajiv Batra – Head of Legal & Compliance, Arc (driving compliance and legal innovation in AI adoption).
"💡 Leo Murgel – SVP, Office of Legal and Corporate Affairs, Salesforce (leading tech, data, and legal enablement initiatives).
"Topics will include: * The challenges GCs and Legal Ops teams face in adopting AI tools in their departments. * What founders (and the investors backing them) need to know when building AI-powered LegalTech solutions.
"* How founders, investors and legal department leaders can accelerate the industry’s next era. After the panel chat, join the most strategic legal AI networking event of Tech Week:
"Connect with the VCs writing checks to legal AI startups, the founders building the next Harvey, and the GCs and Legal Ops leaders who've cracked the code on AI ROI."
So, if you're going to be in SF on October 8, go to the link below to apply to attend this event: https://partiful.com/e/h5poS2VHKPJtzggAt0Kh
Exit/M&A
◾ The LawSites blog from Robert Ambrogi reports:
"Content is the raw material of generative AI, so it only makes sense that an AI-driven contract automation platform would want to acquire what is said to be the world’s largest database of contracts and clauses.
"That is exactly what happened today as SimpleDocs, a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, has acquired Law Insider, which claims to be home to 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spanning more than 50 languages."
https://www.lawnext.com/2025/09/ai-contracts-company-simpledocs-acquires-law-insider-and-its-extensive-library-of-contracts-and-clauses.html
◾ Law.com reports:
“On Thursday, NetDocuments announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire eDOCS, the legal document management system from OpenText. According to a press release, the deal is expected to be complete in early 2026, with NetDocuments planning to acquire the ‘technical assets, intellectual property, and dedicated personnel associated with eDOCS.’”
https://www.law.com/2025/10/02/netdocuments-announces-agreement-to-acquire-opentexts-dms-edocs/
As other commentators have written, the foundation models are converging when it comes to their intelligence (general intelligence "commoditizes"). So for independent foundation model operators like Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe also for captive foundation models like those operated by Microsoft, Google, and the like) how can they each differentiate in the market?
One way to differentiate is to become the "best" at providing AI services to various verticals (from what I've read and heard, Anthropic may already be following this "verticalizing" approach by entering the finance vertical).
So, like a prediction market, Legal Tech StartUp Focus ask for your predictions:
Will OpenAI buy Harvey?
If so, when?
Or, will Harvey's customers object so strongly to having OpenAI get access to their confidential and proprietary data (promised "firewall" protections to the contrary notwithstanding) that they put the kibosh on an acquisition by OpenAI (or by nthropic, for that matter)?
Your predictions, please, in the comment section at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/91723351?utm_source=manual
Fundraising
◾ From Artificial Lawyer:
“Isaacus, a legal AI foundation model builder for legal tech companies, has gained $700,000 in pre-seed funding from leading Australian investors Aura Ventures and Galileo Ventures. It aims to provide models that will ‘outperform everything currently in use by legal tech practitioners today’.”
“One of the investors, Mark Esterhuizen, Partner at Aura Ventures, commented: ‘Isaacus is building the core AI infrastructure for legal: what AWS became for the cloud, Isaacus aims to be for law. As the wave of legal tech startups grows and wrappers on general-purpose models hit their ceiling, there is a real and urgent need for purpose-built, domain-native systems that understand the nuance and complexity of law.’”
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/09/16/isaacus-legal-ai-foundation-model-builder-bags-700k/?jetpack_skip_subscription_popup
◾ Here's a link to a post from Law.com's Legal Tech News that asks if there's still wind in the sales of the boat that carries all these recently announced $100 million-plus legal tech funding rounds. With comments from Jeroen Plink of Legaltech Hub and Brad Blickstein of the Blickstein Group, it's very much worth reading.
From the post:
“'The investment community has discovered legal tech as a category, I think for the right reasons. We used to be in the back corner of tech investing. I think gen AI [has made] a significant shift—people are realizing that gen AI is going to transform not only the practice of law, but it also can mean bigger impact.… Legal tech may end up replacing some legal services,' Jeroen Plink, COO and co-founder of Legaltech Hub, told Legaltech News."
“'A startup like Harvey, growing its investments as quickly as it has, is an anomaly.…I imagine that that's mostly investors buying on potential… they think that it has a ton of room to grow,' [Brad Blickstein] said. 'Companies [like Filevine] have really built their companies and grown, they've gotten their revenue numbers, and their profit number is big enough.'”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/29/are-9-figure-funding-rounds-for-legal-tech-companies-the-new-normal/?kw=Are+9-Figure+Funding+Rounds+for+Legal+Tech+Companies+the+New+Normal?&utm_position=1&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20250930&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A
◾ From a post in the "Newsroom" section of The Legal Wire:
"Milan, September 29, 2025 – Lexroom, the Italian startup using generative AI to transform the legal sector, has closed a $19 million Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC Base10 Partners. The round also saw participation from Spanish VC Acurio Ventures, View Different founded by Diego Piacentini – who will also take on an advisory role at the company – and Riccardo Zacconi, founder of King (Candy Crush), along with other strategic angel investors. The deal also confirmed the support of existing investors such as Entourage, Verve Ventures, and Joe Zadeh."
https://thelegalwire.ai/lexroom-raises-19-million-in-series-a-to-scale-legal-ai-across-europe/
◾ From Law.com: The funding "hits just keep on coming."
"On Tuesday, generative artificial intelligence-powered legal tech startup Eve announced that it completed a $103 million series B funding round at a valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Spark Capital, and included participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures.
"The series B is the second funding round this year for Eve, which builds AI-powered workflows for plaintiffs firms. The company previously raised $47 million in a series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which was announced this January."
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/30/eve-announces-103m-series-b-funding-round-at-1b-valuation/?kw=Eve+Announces+$103M+Series+B+Funding+Round+at+$1B+Valuation&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=newsroomupdate&utm_content=20250930&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A
◾ From Law.com’s Legal Tech News:
“Brazilian Legal AI Startup Enter Raises $35 Million. The $35 million investment in Enter, which operates in one of the world’s most congested legal markets, comes as legal departments search for speedier solutions in Latin America’s largest economy.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/29/brazilian-legal-ai-startup-enter-raises-35-million/?kw=Brazilian+Legal+AI+Startup+Enter+Raises+35+Million
◾ From the Europe-focused startup newsletter, Sifted:
“Swedish legal tech Legora, which leverages AI to automate tasks for lawyers, is reportedly in talks to raise more than $100m in fresh funding at a valuation of around $1.7bn.
“Bloomberg reports US VC Bessemer Venture Partners is set to lead the round, citing people familiar with the talks. Legora declined to comment.”
https://sifted.eu/articles/reports-legal-tech-legora-raising-100m
Hiring/New Hires
◾ News from Law.com in the ALSP space:
“Eversheds Sutherland has hired a former A&O Shearman leader to help guide the legal staffing function of its captive alternative legal services provider (ALSP) platform Konexo.
“The global firm hired Amie Davidson as head of resourcing strategy and markets for Eversheds’ captive ALSP in New York, the firm announced Tuesday.”
https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2025/10/01/eversheds-captive-alsp-konexo-hires-former-ao-shearman-legal-staffing-leader-/
Investing
◾ Marc Andrusko, at partner at a16z writes about legal tech AI from Big VC's standpoint.
". . .the below is not a market map. Instead, I’d like to summarize my key learnings on Legal AI, having met many startups and software buyers focusing on it over the past 18 months. While I don’t expect these learnings to be revelatory, I’ve come to believe they are the forces–sometimes subtle and nuanced, other times glaringly obvious–underpinning the market structure as it exists today."
Two key takeaways for me: Marc's call for legal tech AI to optimize more for what he calls "multiplay mode." As Marc writes:
"None of [the current] tools are truly multiplayer in the sense of connecting different organizations. Sure, they might be used by multiple people within a legal department, but where are the tools that bring together a company’s in-house team and their outside law firms on the same platform?Having studied the accounting software market, this feels like a missed opportunity." I might add to Marc's "connecting different organizations" point (particularly in the transaction-doing context): How about connecting the law firms on the opposite sides of a deal, or the investment bankers, commercial bankers, accountants, insurance companies, etc. on the deal?
Another takeaway forme from Marc is that legal tech vendors offering AI tooling must solver what Marc calls the "Incentive Puzzle." As Marc also writes:
"Solving the Incentive Puzzle: The most promising companies deliver clear ROI in the context of their customers’ business model. They’re not fighting the billable hour – they’re aligned with how users make money (or save it) in a big way. That’s why we’re particularly drawn to companies tackling contingency-based models, high-volume fixed-fee work, and automated intake/orchestration for firms looking to scale."
Good thoughts to read in Marc's piece involve, no surprise, Harvey and how, like IBM in days of olde, "no one ever gets fired for hiring Harvey" - here both brand and distribution among a coterie of BigLaw law firms begin to build Harvey's competitive moat.
LegalEd
◾ Two of my favorite commentators on the legal tech scene, Zach Abramowitz and Richard Tromans, have put together an "all signal, no noise" podcast episode. The episode kicks off with a discussion of legal tech company Eudia's establishment of a law firm in the reform-minded State of Arizona and, from there, the episode ranges widely to cover, among other topics:
- the future of the billable hour,
- the role that ALSP/law firms could have when it comes to demolishing the hold that the billable hour has on the law firm revenue model,
- how scaling AI-first tech companies may, on their way to becoming the next tech company behemoths, hire AI-first ALSP/law firms for all (even bet-the-company) outside counsel work (at the expense of law firms who, reluctant to put AI first, find their too-highly-priced legal service delivery offerings materially disrupted),
- when the billable hour model will finally meet its demise (Richard says a decade from now, my gut tells me it'll be sooner than that - with, in my gut-driven view, the billable hour model sickening slowly until its death occurs "all at once").
Run, don't walk, to get your hands on a pair of earphones to listen to this episode. Here's a link to the podcast episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7gVItS8zYTsMNJ9CgNtZZS?si=DKCwSGXrQcCqRm1lvf2aKg
Product Development
◾ A link below to a LinkedIn post from Stephanie Goutos about Anthropic’s release of Claude Sonnet 4.5. From Stephanie’s LinkedIn post:
“As Vals notes: ‘Sonnet 4.5 is the clear leader in finance. On our Finance Agent Benchmark, it outperforms every other foundation model by a wide margin, making it the most capable model yet for real financial analyst work.’"
“This matters well beyond finance. The agentic capabilities and reasoning depth are particularly relevant for legal ops and professional services workflows where accuracy matters more than speed.”
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephanie-goutos-7565a54a_ainews-claude-valsai-activity-7378515070919647232-p1qE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
◾ A post from Law.com:
"On Tuesday [Septermber 30, 2025], legal tech startup PortOptix launched its generative artificial intelligence-powered platform for private equity portfolio companies.
"Founded in 2025 by Sklar Kirsh founding partner Jeff Sklar, PortOptix helps private equity firms manage their investment portfolios and optimize earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA)."
Entire post here: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/30/private-equity-management-startup-portoptix-launches-gen-ai-platform/?kw=Private+Equity+Management+Startup+PortOptix+Launches+Gen+AI+Platform&utm_position=4&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20251001&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A
◾ From the Clarra press release issued today, October 1, 2025:
"SAN FRANCISCO (October 1, 2025) — Clarra, a cloud-based legal practice management platform optimized for litigation and legal operations, announces the launch of a new suite of accounting and analytics features. Developed in direct response to customer feedback, the added capabilities enable plaintiffs’ law firms, defense litigation practices, and in-house counsel to improve litigation management and make better business decisions that impact productivity, contingent recoveries and liabilities, pricing and budgeting per matter."
The entire press release can be accessed at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/91576928?utm_source=manual
◾ From legal tech company Altorney's press release issued today, October 1, 2025:
"Altorney Announces General Availability of MARC
Unhosted review intelligence shown to drive more than 60% savings
"BALTIMORE, Oct. 1, 2025–Altorney, a developer of unconventional legal solutions, has announced the general availability of its groundbreaking product MARC. After a successful pilot period with corporate legal departments, MARC will now broadly empower those managing eDiscovery, whether in-house legal teams, litigation service providers, or law firms, to securely and defensibly arrive at faster decisions while cutting costs. Unlike other tools that work in a review platform, MARC transforms first-pass review by bringing it inside the organization’s (or its service provider’s) environment. Powered by GenAI, MARC automates first-pass review at scale and dramatically reduces the volume sent to traditional review platforms. In a single project for a food and beverage giant on a case involving more than 200,000 documents, MARC cut review costs by 62% and hosting costs by 78%.
The entire press release can be accessed at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/91577828?utm_source=manual
◾ From Law.com:
“Legaltech Rundown: Legal Decoder Announces Investment and New CEO, Wolters Kluwer Adds Matter Summarization to TyMetrix 360°, and More
“An update on the legal tech market’s past week, from product launches to new partnerships.”
Enjoy the weekend!!
https://www.law.com/2025/10/03/legaltech-rundown-legal-decoder-announces-investment-and-new-ceo-wolters-kluwer-adds-matter-summarization-to-tymetrix-360-and-more/
◾ Reporting from Artificial Lawyer:
"LLM pioneer, OpenAI, has unveiled a contract review agent aimed at enterprises so ‘you don’t have to eyeball every term’ – and which inevitably will make some legal tech companies a little nervous, especially if the AI giant keeps going in this direction.
"For now, it’s being shown off as an internal experiment. But, OpenAI underlines that they would be very happy to talk to companies about helping them with this type of use case for their LLM and agentic capabilities."
Also from the post at Artificial Lawyer:
"Is this a big deal? Yes and no. Someone skilled with LLM tools could have done this already inside an inhouse team. So, this is not a massive revelation. What is more impactful is that as OpenAI seeks to gain more revenue via working hand-in-hand with large enterprises, it seems to be going after legal and legal adjacent areas of work."
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/10/06/openai-shows-off-contract-review-agent/
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
◾ From Law.com and its Legal Tech News:
“Legaltech Hub (LTH)--which offers insights and analysis, as well as a directory, on the legal technology industry– published its latest Competitive Analysis of provider categories in the legal tech market Monday. The newest report looked at document automation providers, analyzing them based on completeness of features offered, maturity and market penetration, and what the report refers to as “stability,” which considers a company’s funding, financial status and security profile.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/29/legaltech-hub-releases-competitive-analysis-on-document-automation-providers/
◾ From The Scotsman newspaper online:
"Scotland has established itself as a UK lawtech powerhouse, with 14 cutting-edge companies and growth rates that outpace everywhere except London and the South East. But this success story risks being incomplete if the benefits of legal technology don’t reach every corner of the profession.
"The opportunity is clear. Scotland’s legal sector contributes £1.37 million to the economy annually and employs 24,000 people. But to maximise this potential, there’s an important gap to address – ensuring that technological advances reach firms of all sizes, not just those with the resources for early adoption."
H/T to LawtechUK for calling my attention to this post.
https://www.scotsman.com/business/why-scotlands-lawtech-success-must-not-leave-small-firms-behind-5299221?utm_campaign=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9Dkj4saDYi-Z0prLscBJFpgSlCH3iu-8PnH8FXV61E0a_S65TIHUuIOKt_WM1q7R64DhrYSQKPsCOKy7fFnoAn7nMx9PY4UMR1wZWpYpn6S7gWeoc&_hsmi=118125096&utm_content=118125096&utm_source=hs_email
Regulatory Reform
◾ Reporting from the LawSites blog on regulatory reform in lawyer licensing in the US:
“Utah has joined the growing movement to rethink attorney licensure in the United States, as the Utah Supreme Court approved Rule 14-703A, establishing an alternate pathway to becoming a licensed attorney that emphasizes hands-on legal training over traditional standardized testing.”
Three cheers for the Great State of Utah!!
https://www.lawnext.com/2025/10/utah-breaks-new-ground-with-skills-based-alternative-to-traditional-bar-exam.html
Startup Management
◾ Law.com's Legal Tech News posts about the recently released 2025 Trends Analysis for Legal Pricing and Budgeting benchmark report from legal tech vendor BigHand.
"'The authors of the BigHand industry report note that the gap between client expectations, internal law firm capabilities and practical implementation 'remains one of the biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest opportunities for forward-thinking firms'.”
The billable hour revenue model for law firms (whose work doesn't involve "bet the company" matters) will continue to survive - until it doesn't. The lesson here for legal tech vendors is that they should get ahead of this change. So, just as legal tech vendors try their hardest to devise ROI calculations to persuade potential customers of their tech's financial return, so should these vendors put hard thought into devising alternative-fee approaches that work with their products and work for their customers.
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/09/26/law-firms-clients-struggle-to-see-eye-to-eye-on-alternative-fees/?kw=Law+Firms,+Clients+Struggle+to+See+Eye+To+Eye+on+Alternative+Fees&utm_position=1&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20250929&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&slreturn=20250929091032
◾ More on, what else -legal tech startup (scale up?), Harvey. This post, from the very experienced and very thoughtful Ken Crutchfield, who guest posts at LawNext.
What Ken describes here is the multi-factored “secret sauce” behind Harvey; which secret sauce is no “secret” at all, it’s “just” great execution on a number of business success drivers and it’s certainly more than “just” good product.
In short, when it comes to explaining Harvey’s success to date, I’ll simply say, “What Ken says.”https://directory.lawnext.com/library/harvey-is-playing-a-different-game-is-it-winning/
◾ As a big fan of American-style football, and at the risk of putting off readers who happen not to be fans of that “beautiful game,“ I pose a question. How is Winston Weinberg, cofounder and CEO of Harvey, like Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team?
To get an answer, read the post at the link below from Zach Abramowitz. (Note that I do take some liberties here, because Zach doesn’t apprach the question in terms of each “team’s” leader).
https://open.substack.com/pub/zachabramowitz/p/harvey-and-the-reddit-thread-the?r=1cv2&utm_medium=ios
Teaching/Learning Legal Tech
◾ A report from Legal IT Insider about training a law firm’s junior lawyers in this “age of legal AI:”
“UK top 50 law firm Kennedys has partnered with generative AI startup Spellbook to build a training programme for junior lawyers that helps them to build new tech skills and overcome fears about their ability to thrive in a world where entry-level tasks are increasingly automated.
“Led by chief knowledge officer Catherine Goodman, the training programme will use simulated scenarios and AI-assisted drafting exercises to replicate learning opportunities that may start to disappear in the workplace. Participants will receive structured feedback on their work, mirroring the coaching traditionally gained from senior colleagues.”
https://legaltechnology.com/2025/10/02/a-massive-step-in-the-right-direction-kennedys-partners-with-spellbook-to-rethink-junior-training-in-the-ai-era/
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