AI × Law

Former Sidley Austin executive committee chair Mike Schmidtberger has joined AI-native startup firm Norm Law as chairman and head of investment funds and regulatory. The firm, launched alongside AI platform Norm Ai, uses lawyer-designed AI agents to automate legal and compliance workflows for financial services clients.

Brazilian legaltech Enter raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, pushing its valuation past $1 billion to make it Latin America's first AI-focused unicorn. Greenberg Traurig and Brazil's KLA Advogados advised on the transaction.

Norwegian legal AI platform Newcode.ai raised a $13.5M Series A ($20M cumulative) led by OnDean Forward and Relativity's venture arm, Rel Labs. The startup plans to use the funding to expand into the U.S. with its agentic orchestration harness for law firms.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for England and Wales has struck a lawyer off the register of foreign lawyers for submitting AI-invented legal authorities to his regulator. The tribunal held that lack of expertise to verify AI output is not a valid defense, marking its first-ever ruling on generative AI misuse.

In Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu & Kashmir Bank Ltd., India's Supreme Court ruled that judicial decisions relying on hallucinated, AI-generated case law are automatically invalid. The court set aside tribunal orders containing fake citations regardless of whether the false precedents materially affected the outcome.

AI usage among Texas attorneys jumped from 30% to 62% over the past year, according to new data on legal industry trends. Legal research continues to lead as the most common application of the technology among practitioners.

A Singapore High Court judge ordered two lawyers to pay $5,000 each in personal costs for submitting non-existent AI-generated case authorities in closing submissions. The ruling follows Singapore's first reported phantom case sanction in July 2025 and similar rulings against pro se litigants using generative AI.

RELX, the parent company of LexisNexis, has finalized its acquisition of Paris-based legal AI platform Doctrine. The deal integrates Doctrine's civil law corpus of over 100 million documents into LexisNexis Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa to expand its legal AI research, analysis, and drafting capabilities across Europe.

Thomson Reuters sparked pushback from law librarians after a homepage update prioritized its 'AI Deep Research' section while removing standard content tabs without widespread advance notice. Following complaints conveyed by the AALL's CRIV committee, Thomson Reuters added a preference setting allowing users to manually restore the traditional Content Types navigation.

Legal technology platform Filevine has raised $400 million in an all-equity financing round. The capital injection underscores growing investor interest in Legal Operating Intelligence Systems and enterprise legal tech.

Harvey is expanding its Law Schools Program to Australia through partnerships with the University of Sydney Law School and UTS Faculty of Law. Beginning in February, students and faculty will gain access to the legal AI platform alongside Harvey establishing a new regional office and dedicated local team in Sydney.

Major law firms including Allen & Overy, Linklaters, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, and DLA Piper are deploying proprietary and third-party AI tools. Allen & Overy's Harvey-backed ContractMatrix tool has already been adopted by over 1,000 lawyers to draft contracts, while firms like DLA Piper are experimenting with AI for predictive outcome modeling.

LegalTech startup Vikk AI has raised $4.2M in Seed funding to expand its legal AI platform and AI-powered lawyer advertising marketplace. Originally founded in 2019, the company pivoted in 2023 to focus on an AI legal assistant that triages client issues for attorneys.

Legal tech startup AlphaLit has raised a seed funding round to automate legal intake and claims scoring for high-volume, lower-dollar civil matters. The platform uses voice AI to address the high rate of unreturned calls from potential plaintiffs and help firms economically evaluate smaller claims.

Former Replit GC Cecilia Ziniti launched GC AI, a startup providing AI assistants, contract analysis, and request-handling tools tailored specifically for in-house legal teams. The company has grown to serve roughly 2,100 corporate customers and raised a $60 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners and Northzone.

A new U.S. lawsuit seeks $10 million from OpenAI after an individual used ChatGPT to fire her lawyer and file over 40 AI-generated court documents with fake citations. An insurer claims it incurred massive legal fees responding to the frivolous filings, shifting the AI liability debate to third-party financial harm.

Authors participating in the Anthropic AI copyright class action settlement are reporting widespread conflicts over payout allocations, with publishers and literary agencies allegedly filing incorrect claims on reverted or in-print works. The Authors Guild and several major publishers noted that bulk submission errors and confusion over rights revertment dates are currently being rectified by the settlement administrator.

Jason Isbell and other musicians are testing a new legal strategy against AI music generator Suno. The artists argue the company violated their publicity rights by misusing their identities, artwork, and voiceprints to generate soundalike music, rather than relying solely on traditional copyright infringement claims.

An attorney representing a Deutsche Bank subsidiary apologized in a D.C. court filing after using a Google AI program to assist in preparing court documents. The incident underscores the ongoing risks and judicial scrutiny surrounding unverified AI use in legal pleadings.

A Thomson Reuters survey of 869 Australian legal professionals revealed that nearly one in three law firm workers use unapproved generative AI tools at work, while 32% want their firms to adopt a formal GenAI assistant. Additionally, 58% of in-house legal respondents said law firms should factor GenAI usage into their pricing and billing models.