Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #52

Happy Friday, and welcome to the 52nd edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋 The last few weeks have been a great mix: helping clients embed GenAI platforms into priority legal workflows, running AI workshops with several impressively advanced corporates, and moving fast to build out an exciting new AI initiative. We crossed a nice milestone, jumping past the 5,000 subscriber mark. Glad to have you reading along in what remains a relentless and wildly exciting time for legal tech. The last edition was several weeks ago, so this is an extended roundup. ☕ Subscribe now Big Platforms, Big Tech, and a Few Wildcards Legal AI Platform Wars Continue Harvey & Legora often dominate the headlines, but to be fair, they are extremely active! More funding, acquisitions, global roll-outs, and partnerships. The big two aren't slowing down anytime soon. Harvey Roundup Raised $200M in growth funding, valuing Harvey at $11bn - up from $8bn in December. Total funding now ~$1bn. LINK Slaughter & May: Firmwide rollout. LINK DLA Piper: Expanding rollout to 5,000 licences globally. LINK Axiom: Adds Harvey to its Tech+Talent service, deploying Harvey-trained legal talent directly into client environments. LINK Legora Roundup $50M Series D Extension: Series D extended to $600M total at a $5.6bn valuation, with NVentures (NVIDIA’s fund) and Atlassian joining as strategic investors. LINK Acquired Qura: Stockholm-based legal research startup LINK Acquired Graceview: Regulatory horizon-scanning platform, monitoring 100+ jurisdictions for legal, compliance and risk teams. LINK Baker McKenzie: Global deployment. LINK Everlaw Partnership: Strategic partnership enabling users to access documents stored in Everlaw directly within Legora. LINK Jus Mundi Partnership: Will surface Jus Mundi's arbitration database inside Legora. LINK Big Tech Targets Legal Microsoft & Anthropic lit up LinkedIn feeds recently. 🚀 Claude for Legal Launches: Anthropic launched Claude for Legal with 20+ MCP connectors (including Ironclad, DocuSign, iManage, NetDocuments, LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters) and 12 practice-area plugins. LINK 🤝 Freshfields + Anthropic Partnership: The Magic Circle firm signed a multi-year co-innovation deal with Anthropic. LINK 📝 Microsoft Legal Agent for Word: Microsoft rolled out a Claude-powered Legal Agent inside Word for contract analysis, version comparison and tracked-change redlines. Available to their US Frontier Program. LINK 🔄 Microsoft Copilot Cowork: Microsoft’s answer to Claude Cowork even features Anthropic’s models. I’ve heard good things so far, certainly one to watch! LINK Vibe Coding Virality Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Clarke’s Third Law. 💻 MikeOSS - Open-Source Legal AI The internet got excited by this vibe-coded Harvey and Legora clone, which currently has 3,000 GitHub stars. Vibe-coding is magical, incredibly fun, and addictive! It’s awesome to see what folks are building at such a pace, but anyone who has been through BigLaw infosec processes will know MikeOSS is unlikely to be a viable option for large law firms. LINK I got my first real taste of enterprise infosec 11 years ago, building and trying to launch an internal product at Deloitte. Yes, it is so much easier to build software now, but the lessons are still valid. Even for internal tools, you need solid answers to these questions: Who will onboard and continue to support the users? Who maintains this long-term, including after you’ve moved on? We run an annual security audit across every application. If one fails, the whole firm fails. How confident are you that yours won’t? So whilst I’m loving using Claude Code to prototype and communicate requirements to development teams, I’m also mindful that for now, there remains a gap between a compelling prototype and an enterprise production-ready product. Software → Services Software platforms continue to expand directly into service delivery. 🎧 Legora CRO on the Services Opportunity: On 20VC, Legora’s CRO Patrick Forquer discusses the trillion-dollar opportunity that supports their valuation, and hints at a potential services play. Worth a listen LINK or watch the 42-second video below… 🏢 Carta Buys Avantia, Launches Carta Law: Carta acquired UK ABS-regulated ALSP Avantia (13 solicitors, used by 200+ asset managers) to launch “Carta Law” - an AI-native firm for the private capital sector. LINK 🏠 Orbital Launches Farringdon: Property AI platform Orbital launched its own AI-native conveyancing firm “Farringdon” in the UK, where workflows developed in live transactions feed back into the platform. LINK AI 📂 NetDocuments Unveils ‘Legal Context Graph’ and Reimagined Platform NetDocuments unveiled its ‘legal context graph’ that continuously maps relationships across matters, documents, communications and personnel, alongside a reimagined platform with auto-matter summaries, natural-language search and AI document classification. LINK 🧠 Thomson Reuters Launching Its Own LLM This Summer Thomson Reuters is preparing to launch “Thomson” - its own legally trained LLM - this summer, built on open-source foundations and TR’s vast legal data. LINK Sidenote: Can smaller domain-specific models outshine frontier models? Years of debate, and the answer so far is no. But let’s see if that changes! 📄 DealCloser Embeds CoCounsel Legal Transaction management platform DealCloser integrated Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel for AI doc review directly into the platform - one of the first third-party platforms to embed CoCounsel outside Microsoft. LINK 💡 Linklaters Launches ‘Applied Intelligence’ Linklaters announced Applied Intelligence, a new practice combining lawyers and data scientists to build bespoke AI workflows for clients on complex matters that off-the-shelf tools can’t tackle. LINK 🛡️ Corgi Launches AI Liability Insurance Y Combinator-backed Corgi rolled out AI liability insurance covering legal defence and damages for businesses using AI, across three categories: model hallucinations, algorithmic bias, and training data disputes. LINK 📝 ClearyX Launches CX+ for Contract AI Needs ClearyX, Cleary Gottlieb’s ALSP, launched CX+, a contract insights and due diligence platform spanning CX+Insights and CX+Transact. Reports 40–60% cost/time savings across 150+ deals. LINK 📒 AI-Native Law Firm Directory Launches Lupl co-founder Matt Pollins launched The AI Firm Index, a directory of AI-native law firms. Already at 54+ listings. LINK PS - Matt’s Without Limitation podcast is also worth checking out. The recent episode with Addleshaw Goddard's Mike Kennedy is a good entry point: LINK Data Combos 💶 LexisNexis Owner RELX to Buy Doctrine RELX (LexisNexis’s parent) has agreed to buy Doctrine, the leading French legal AI platform, serving 27,000 professionals across France, Italy, Germany and Spain. LINK 🔗 Luminance Links to LexisNexis Protégé LexisNexis and Luminance announced a strategic alliance that embeds Protégé within Luminance’s contract workflows. Users can check contract language against case law without leaving the platform. LINK 🤝 Noxtua Integrates US Legal Data via Midpage Noxtua, the German “sovereign” legal AI backed by CMS and Dentons, partnered with Midpage to give European lawyers access to US federal and state law, hosted on European cloud infrastructure to address GDPR and CLOUD Act concerns. LINK Acquisitions ⚖️ Solve Intelligence Acquires Palito.ai London-based AI patent platform Solve Intelligence acquired Munich-based AI patent-litigation startup Palito.ai, deepening capabilities in validity analysis, case law research and European patent workflows. New Munich office opening. LINK 🌍 Anaqua Acquires Patrix IP management vendor Anaqua acquired Gothenburg-based rival Patrix (Patricia platform), adding nearly 400 IP customers and meaningfully expanding Anaqua’s European law-firm footprint. LINK 🏷️ Alt Legal Acquires WebTMS Trademark docketing platform Alt Legal completed its sixth acquisition, picking up UK-based WebTMS, a global IP portfolio management vendor with 25+ years of operations and 500+ clients. LINK Raises 💰 Manifest OS Raises $60M at $750M Valuation Manifest OS is building an AI-native law firm operating system that runs under a branded network of affiliated attorneys, on a fixed-fee basis rather than billable hours. LINK 💵 Crosby Raises $60M Series B The AI-native firm that combines legal services with proprietary contract-automation tech raised $60M at a $400M valuation. Has negotiated $1bn+ in contracts in under a year. LINK 💸 Steno Raises $49M Series C Court reporting and litigation support firm Steno raised $49M to expand its US footprint and accelerate Transcript Genius, its AI transcript analysis tool. LINK 🤑 Patlytics Raises $40M Series B End-to-end AI patent platform Patlytics (used by 40%+ of the AmLaw 100) raised $40M, bringing total funding to ~$65M. LINK 💳 PointOne Raises $16M Series A AI passive-timekeeping platform PointOne raised $16M, bringing total capital to ~$20M. Tracks billable activity across email, calendar, calls and documents. 10x revenue growth in six months. LINK 💷 Avvoka Raises £14M UK contract automation platform Avvoka raised £14M to expand its US footprint and platform capabilities. Customers include A&O Shearman, Fried Frank, Ropes & Gray, and Warner Bros. LINK 💰 Haast Raises $12M Series A AI-powered compliance automation platform Haast - helping marketing, legal and compliance teams approve content faster - raised $12M, bringing its total funding to $17M. Reports 4.5x revenue growth in 12 months. LINK 💵 General Legal Raises $11.5M AI-native law firm General Legal closed $11.5M across combined seed and pre-seed rounds since launching 3 months ago. Worth noting that their co-founder, Ryan Walker, was the previous CTO of Casetext, they charge fixed fees, and support clients via private Slack channels. LINK 💸 Moritz (formerly Arcline) Raises $9M Seed AI-native law firm Moritz (rebranded from Arcline) raised $9M from YC, 20VC and 20+ unicorn founders. Has helped 100+ companies complete deals worth $2.3bn+ in combined contract value, with an average turnaround time of 4 hours. LINK 🤑 Newcode.ai Raises $6.5M Norwegian legal AI startup Newcode raised $6.5M to build an AI-native operating system for legal work, allowing lawyers to delegate complex multi-step tasks by defining outcomes. LINK Podcasts 🎙️ Law://WhatsNext - The AI Dividend: David Bushby on Corporate Teams Going It Alone Canva’s legal team are at the forefront of AI adoption in legal, and every chat with David leaves me impressed by how fast his team moves. The podcast is excellent, especially the bit on Claude Cowork and whether law firms are genuinely passing productivity savings on to clients. LINK Canva's AI-Native Legal Team Charter is also a great source of inspiration: LINK 🎙️ Lenny’s Podcast - An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison Simon Willison is one of my favourite voices to follow in AI. In this episode, he discusses the coding agent inflection point last November, severe security risks, and much more! LINK That’s a wrap! Enjoyed this edition? Forward it to a colleague or join the conversation on LinkedIn. Have a great Friday! Peter About me I’m the founder of TITANS, a LegalTech and AI consultancy for leading law firms and new law companies. We help some of the largest legal service providers shape their AI strategies, expedite vendor evaluation, and accelerate user adoption. Legal Tech Trends is my fun outlet to share my hype-free positive take on LegalTech and AI market developments, informed by my 10+ years technology consulting with leading corporate clients and legal service providers. Connect with me on LinkedIn for more LegalTech insights Here 👋