September 1, 2025 -- Issue #357
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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Sponsorships:
The Legal Tech StartUp Focus (LTSF) community's platform (this newsletter, the podcast, and the community's website and LinkedIn following) is now accepting sponsors for the fall. If you are interested in reaching LTSF's audience of startup leaders and other legal innovators, send me an email at charlie@legaltechstartupfocus.com.
Conferences and Other Events
◾ Below is a LinkedIn post that announces a workshop for law firms (and other businesses) about automating with intention and empathy. Not saying that law firms ever lack empathy (ahem), but law firm automation folks ought to consider attending. A better approach to implementing AI in law firm workflows (and adding intention and empathy can only improve that implementation) pays recurring dividends. https://www.linkedin.com/events/freeworkshop-startingyourautoma7361894811269836803/
◾ From Legal Operators:
"Join Legal Operators, Elly Meenan, Legal Operations Engineer, and Laura Jeffords Greenberg, Head of Wordsmith Academy, for a hands-on look at how legal teams can design and deploy AI agents that actually work.
"We’ll share examples - automating contract reviews, handling intake, generating reports - and the best practices we’ve learned for building, testing, and rolling agents out across a team."
More about the event and a link to register here: https://lu.ma/WordsmithAI?_bhlid=4e3f0ecbea0c92235db4fea800055e32b3aa9697&utm_campaign=legal-operators-newsletter-agent-secrets&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=newsletter.legaloperators.com
◾ Steve Fretzin is a good friend of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus community whose work as a business development coach for lawyers is superb (and is work that I most heartily recommend).
Steve has just launched a new program that's called COACHES CORNER WITH STEVE FRETZIN. Given my high opinion of Steve's work, I strongly recommend that any lawyer who wants to improve their business development skills (that's just about every lawyer I've known) click on the link below and, by going to Steve's LinkedIn announcement of his Coach's Corner launch, learn about that program. Lawyers who work with Steve love doing so and love even more the improvement in their skills that comes from that work.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevefretzin_stevefretzin-attorneysuccess-lawyerlife-activity-7365813285058772992-bZJE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
Fundraising
◾ From the LawSites blog:
“In February 2024, I [Bob Ambrogi] wrote here about the launch of Bench IQ, a company that is using generative AI to provide comprehensive insights into the decision-making patterns of judges — based not just on their written rulings, but also their rulings from the bench and other data.
“At the time, the company had just closed a $2.1 million pre-seed round, and now comes news that it has raised a $5.3 million seed round and landed four of the top five Am Law 100 firms as customers.”
“The seed round announced today was led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC and Haystack VC.”
More here: https://www.lawnext.com/2025/08/bench-iq-ai-startup-led-by-former-ross-cofounder-to-understand-judges-decision-patterns-raises-5-3m-seed.html
◾ From a blog post by Omri Drory, a general partner at VC firm, NfX:
"There is a seasonality to fundraising – with caveats, of course. If you’re a beast, you can raise all year, full stop. And two, deals do get done all year (yes, even in the summer). But there is a rhythm to it, and it’s worth seeing the pattern."
Yes, gentle reader, there are "seasons, turn, turn, turn," to VC funding. This blog post reveals its structure.
https://www.nfx.com/post/fundraising-seasons?utm_campaign=NFX%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_9vGFXrJ0NyHosjUvwVYYs2UBtR55KOVHkuKdN9Sn0ctEiWcCyFGGdF3mMTA9b2tE_xeYjzq6uLxFEGuKg2EOFDhoXA-jFERefzm-jp3HkVc8AqFM&_hsmi=377814119&utm_content=377814119&utm_source=hs_email
JusticeTech/A2J
◾ From Legal Tech News:
"[Legal technology's] . . . impacts have been slower to reach the general public.
"That limited reach in the public sphere was the impetus for David Cohen, former chair of Reed Smith’s records and e-discovery group, to launch a public benefit corporation called AtJustice. Cohen left Reed Smith in June after 14 years as a partner to start the company, which is dedicated to expanding access to consumer legal services for individuals, non-profits and small businesses."
A very wide-ranging article that not only discusses A2J-related subjects but also addresses the billable hour bugaboo and the need for case law regarding the use of e-discovery technology.
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/08/26/former-reed-smith-partner-david-cohen-talks-leaving-big-law-serving-unmet-needs-and-the-impact-of-gen-ai/?kw=Former+Reed+Smith+Partner+David+Cohen+Talks+Leaving+Big+Law,+Serving+Unmet+Needs+and+the+Impact+of+Gen+AI&utm_position=2&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20250827&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&slreturn=20250827082834
LegalEd
◾ Legal Tech News reports on the use of “shadow AI” in the workplace:
“Much like the early days of shadow IT when unsanctioned messaging apps and cloud platforms spread through enterprises, this current shadow AI introduces a new layer of exposure reaching into litigation, privacy, cybersecurity, contracts, intellectual property, and regulatory compliance.”
The trade-off: “For general counsel and compliance officers, the task is daunting: enabling businesses to capture the benefits of AI while ensuring risk management and compliance structures keep pace.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/08/28/taming-shadow-ai-what-legal-leaders-must-do-now/
Member Introductions/Questions
◾ New community member, Gary Doernhoefer, puts up a post with this information about himself: "Gary Doernhoefer graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law and has 40 years of experience in private practice, as an in-house attorney, general counsel and entrepreneur in two successful technology startup companies. His legal experience convinced him of the benefits of ADR and inspired him to apply his skills to the development of technology for dispute resolution practitioners. He is the founder of ADR Notable – the leading case and practice management software designed specifically for ADR practitioners. He also serves as Co-Chair of the ADR Practice Skills and Technology Inno."
Readers who wish to do so, can comments on Gary's post here: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/89712531?utm_source=manual
◾ Another new LTSF'er, Ayam Pandey, introduces himself to the community: "
Hi, great to be part of this community!
My name is Ayam Pandey, and I'm a final-year student in a unique 5-year integrated B.Sc. (Data Science) & LL.B. (Hons.) program. My entire focus is on building practical AI solutions for the legal industry.
I recently finished an internship with Khaitan & Co.'s Digital & Innovation team, where I built internal tools for legal automation, worked on prompt engineering and developed AI-powered clause extraction pipelines using Python and LLMs.
To put theory into practice, I've also been building my own tools. One of my main projects is LegalInsight, an AI application that automatically analyzes and summarizes court judgments to help lawyers find critical information faster.
I'm passionate about generative AI's potential to reshape legal services and am actively looking for full-time remote opportunities as a Legal Engineer, AI Engineer, or in a similar legal tech role.
I'd love to connect with anyone working on similar challenges!
Portfolio: https://ayampandey.github.io
You can respnd to Ayam at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/90023707?utm_source=manual
Partnerships/Business Development
◾ "August 27, 2025 - Raleigh, North Carolina - Querious, the first Legal Conversational Intelligence™ platform purpose-built for the demands of modern legal practice, today announced an integration with Clio, the industry’s leading cloud-based legal technology platform. With this launch, Querious is now officially listed as a Certified App in Clio’s App Directory.
"By integrating with Clio, Querious closes a critical technology gap in capturing billable time from client conversations,” said Hilary Bowman, CEO and Founder of Querious. “With a single click, attorneys can review and finalize auto-drafted billing entries from every virtual meeting and push them seamlessly into Clio. This integration captures lost time, reduces write-offs, and frees lawyers to focus on their clients.”
H/T to Lydia Flocchini for bringing this integration with Clio to my attention.
More here: https://querious-new.webflow.io/post/aug-2025-querious-joins-clio
◾ From Legal Tech News:
"On Wednesday, regulatory artificial intelligence agent developer Norm Ai announced its partnership with CodeX, a center at Stanford run by the university’s law school and computer science department.
"Via this partnership, Norm Ai plans to conduct research alongside lawyers, entrepreneurs and technologists at CodeX to explore the governance of agentic AI and how current legal frameworks can be applied to AI agents."
https://www.law.com/2025/08/27/regulatory-ai-company-norm-ai-announces-partnership-with-stanford-codex-to-research-agentic-ai/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_content=20250828&utm_campaign=morningminute&utm_term=law&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&slreturn=20250828085657
◾ And let's not forget Legal Tech News' own weekly legal tech rundown:
"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/2025/08/29/legaltech-rundown-harvey-launches-team-in-mexico-supio-launches-demand-letter-tool-and-more/?kw=Legaltech+Rundown:+Harvey+Launches+Team+in+Mexico,+Supio+Launches+Demand+Letter+Tool+and+More&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=afternoonupdate&utm_content=20250829&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A
◾ From a LinkedIn post by Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer:
“Things are really moving now....In what may be the first deal of its kind in the legal tech world, Juro and Wordsmith – both inhouse-focused – have formed a partnership using a Model Context Protocol (MCP) approach to provide an integrated AI offering to their clients, (see AL in-depth interview + video in article).”
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/artificiallawyer_legaltech-mcp-mcpalliance-activity-7366728585891520512-cKZf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
Product Development
◾ From Legal Tech News:
“A new legal tech startup is trying to make the vital but often-neglected process of business development a little less painful for attorneys.
“MagNet Agents, a startup that builds agentic artificial intelligence workflows to help attorneys acquire customers, publicly launched in July.”
“Unlike most legal tech vendors, MagNet looks to individual attorneys as customers, instead of selling access to its platform to law firms. While the company’s offering is size and practice area agnostic, Bingenheimer said attorneys from large firms doing corporate work are the primary target.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/08/25/why-2-cornell-tech-grads-built-a-business-development-tool-for-individual-firm-lawyers/
◾ From the LawSites blog:
As only Bob Ambrogi can muster, here’s a comprehensive description of LexisNexis’ Protégé AI platform - its current offerings, its plans for a personalized agentic capability (personalized to each individual user), the grounding of its output in up-to-date “authoritative legal content” (“courtroom-grade AI”), its co-building with Harvey, and more. https://www.lawnext.com/2025/08/lexisnexis-every-lawyer-will-have-a-personalized-ai-assistant.html
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
◾ "Danger, Will Robinson (see linked article below from Legal Tech News!"):
"Many legal professionals who use unapproved artificial intelligence tools at their organizations are driven to do so by pressure to deliver work faster, a desire to access unique functionalities, and recommendations from senior colleagues, according to research from AI-powered translation platform DeepL released Friday.
"In a DeepL survey that received 1,000 responses from from law firm, in-house, public sector or independent legal professionals in the U.S. who are impacted by or directly involved in the use of AI tools in legal work, more than half of the respondents noted that they either frequently (35.3%) or have occasionally (35.6%) used AI tools without formal approval from their organizations."
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2025/08/22/going-rogue-efficiency-pressures-drive-legal-professionals-to-use-unauthorized-ai-tools-/?kw=Going+Rogue:+Efficiency+Pressures+Drive+Legal+Professionals+to+Use+Unauthorized+AI+Tools&utm_position=1&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=morningupdate&utm_content=20250825&utm_term=ltn&oly_enc_id=6788E2252056B4A&slreturn=20250825085923
◾ Joel Bijlmer from The Legal Wire posts: Every GC has the same headache: legal spend.
In our exclusive interview with co-founder Jesse Soslow, we explore how Poppy Legal uses AI to flag billing issues, track trends & give in-house teams real control over outside counsel costs.https://thelegalwire.ai/poppy-legal-smarter-legal-spend-made-simple/
◾ From Legal IT Insider:
"Leading South African law firm and Linklaters alliance partner Webber Wentzel has today (26 August) announced a multi-faceted partnership with legal AI platform Legora. The Legora platform has been rolled out across the firm, which Webber Wentzel says marks just the start of a deeper, long-term collaboration."
More here (including how Legora is anchoring what Webber Wentzel calls its "Innovation Lab"):
https://legaltechnology.com/2025/08/26/leading-sa-firm-webber-wentzel-rolls-out-legora-as-part-of-multi-faceted-partnership/
◾ Here's a link to a LinkedIn post from Kerry C., which discusses the several ways that AI-driven agents can fail - failure modes, if you will. And those failure modes go well beyond "hallucinating" and "bullshitting." Very good and essential read.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7366141145539575808-QlDu?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
◾ Another LinkedIn post from Kerry C, this one dealing with also dealing with LLM hallucination risk and the steps that can be taken to mitigate that risk.
From the LinkedIn post:
“Recent paper asserts hallucinations are not just “bugs” but fundamental limitations and the realistic goal is mitigation, detection, and human oversight, not elimination.” A link to the cited recent paper can be found in the post.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7366503517009666048-kxiw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAACjKkUBuYvfoBWwBGd7KKABZw3jrdiBcc0
◾ From LawSites:
". . . the e-discovery company Everlaw made two notable announcements there: The expansion from private to open beta of its AI Deep Dive, a tool that can answer complex questions about large document collections, and its having secured FedRAMP certification for its AI Assistant features."
"Deep Dive, which the company had previously code-named “Project Query,” allows legal teams to query entire document corpuses in seconds using natural language questions. The tool synthesizes answers grounded in facts extracted from specific documents, providing citations and access to underlying source materials for verification."
As noted in the linked article from LawSites, the ". . . forthcoming FedRAMP certification for its EverlawAI Assistant, [Everlaw's] suite of generative AI tools, [enables] federal government agencies to adopt the platform’s generative AI capabilities."
https://www.lawnext.com/2025/08/everlaw-expands-ai-capabilities-with-deep-dive-tool-and-achieves-fedramp-certification-for-its-ai.html
◾ From LawSites:
". . . the e-discovery company Everlaw made two notable announcements there: The expansion from private to open beta of its AI Deep Dive, a tool that can answer complex questions about large document collections, and its having secured FedRAMP certification for its AI Assistant features."
"Deep Dive, which the company had previously code-named “Project Query,” allows legal teams to query entire document corpuses in seconds using natural language questions. The tool synthesizes answers grounded in facts extracted from specific documents, providing citations and access to underlying source materials for verification."
As noted in the linked article from LawSites, the ". . . forthcoming FedRAMP certification for its EverlawAI Assistant, [Everlaw's] suite of generative AI tools, [enables] federal government agencies to adopt the platform’s generative AI capabilities."
https://www.lawnext.com/2025/08/everlaw-expands-ai-capabilities-with-deep-dive-tool-and-achieves-fedramp-certification-for-its-ai.html
◾ Here’s a hard-hitting piece about what should and should not qualify as “agentic Ai.” Note that the piece is written for Artificial Lawyer by Jake Jones, co-founder of Flank that, as stated in the article, is “a legal tech company that develops agents for legal teams that can autonomously handle routine.”
No punches pulled right from the get-go, the piece starts off with:
“Legal tech has a new addiction: slapping ‘agentic’ on anything with an LLM and a few integrations. It’s sloppy, it confuses buyers, and it slows the industry down. If your product can’t run unattended, can’t re-plan when the world pushes back, and requires a bespoke UI to babysit every click, then it’s not an agent. It’s software with delusions of grandeur.”
H/T to Peter Duffy and his Legal Tech Trends newsletter for calling the piece to my attention. https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/08/26/stop-calling-workflows-agents-a-guide-to-real-agentic-ai/
Startup Management
◾ From Alex Su's "Off the Record" post:
In my previous article, I argued that the real bottleneck for legal AI isn’t product quality—it’s distribution. Startups, legacy giants, and even law firms won’t be able to get AI into the hands of lawyers at scale. That raised an obvious next question: if those channels won’t work, what will?
In this article, I’ll make the case that alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) are uniquely positioned to fill that role. ALSPs are embedded in client workflows where AI can make the biggest difference, are funded from budgets clients already understand, and trusted by the decision makers who matter."
If they're not already doing so, many legal tech vendors who consider law firms their target market should also consider marketing/selling to ALSPs as part of the go-to-market approach.
https://www.alexofftherecord.com/p/alsps-legal-ais-secret-weapon?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=575792&post_id=171747887&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=dm1ui&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Teaching/Learning Legal Tech
◾ Legal IT Insider serves up a week’s end legal tech rundown:
“Happy Friday, here’s a round up of some of the bigger legal tech news of the week.”
Of special note in the rundown (at least of “special note for me):
“In the US, Harvey announced the launch of its law school alliance program, embedding its generative AI technology into law school curriculums.
“Launch collaborators include Stanford Law School, NYU School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, UCLA School of Law, The University of Texas School of Law, and Notre Dame Law School, which began a rigorous pilot of Harvey’s platform a year ago.”
https://legaltechnology.com/2025/08/29/legal-tech-latest-news-from-ross-harvey-legora-bench-iq/
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