AI × Law

Major vendors including iManage, NetDocuments, Harvey, Intapp, and Aderant unveiled matter-centric AI upgrades, governance controls, and autonomous agent frameworks at ILTACON 2026. Key developments include iManage's Context Fabric platform launch, Aderant's new Agent Center for back-office workflows, and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations across legal tech ecosystems.

In-house legal departments are updating Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs) and RFPs to evaluate how law firms govern AI rather than imposing blanket bans. Innovation leaders at firms including Vinson & Elkins, Crowell & Moring, Cozen O'Connor, and Blank Rome report that clients now expect responsible AI usage with explicit security controls, data privacy protections, and attorney oversight.

Firms including Ogletree Deakins, Crowell & Moring, and Kelley Drye are pivoting away from top-down mandates toward behavior-based, tool-agnostic AI training. Innovation leaders report that tailored instruction, peer-to-peer tutoring, and practical workflows drive higher adoption than simply mandating specific AI products.

The Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law has launched the Delta Institute for AI and the Law (DIAL) to focus on AI research, practical training, and policy guidance. The initiative includes an AI lab where students assist practicing attorneys with AI tools, alongside a new AI and Internet Law Legal Certificate Program.

Despite predictions that generative AI would destroy the billable hour, law firm revenue grew nearly 12% and billable hours rose 4% in the first half of 2026. However, expense burdens are surging, with nearly 70% of Am Law 100 firms reporting that AI and innovation investments are growing faster than any other cost category.

Norwegian legaltech startup Newcode.ai raised $13.5 million in Series A funding backed by investors including The LegalTech Fund. The company builds AI infrastructure for the legal sector and plans to use the capital to expand across the U.S. and grow its enterprise partnerships.

Legal AI platform Legora used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to process and review 41 complex legal documents in minutes. The company reports the agentic system can handle high-volume document analysis for its user base of over 100,000 legal and professional users.

In a round-up of recent legaltech deals, Legora acquired litigation fact-extraction tool Wexler, while Elevate bought matter management platform Lupl. Additionally, litigation document review platform Discernis raised $2.5M in seed funding to expand its on-premise AI review technology.

In its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI, Apple raised concerns in a court filing over a former employee using proprietary data with AI agents, arguing that such learning creates irreversible, propagating harm that is uniquely difficult to undo. The filing underscores growing litigation and technical challenges surrounding 'machine unlearning' and remedies when trade secrets enter a rival's AI ecosystem.

Eve Legal has urged a California federal judge to throw out a patent infringement suit brought by rival AI.Law. Eve contends that the patent is invalid because it covers the basic concept of using ordinary AI tools to draft legal documents.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement in New York federal court siding with OpenAI in its consolidated copyright litigation against news organizations including The Intercept and The New York Times. Government attorneys argued that training AI models constitutes transformative fair use and warned that restricting access to data would harm national competitiveness and scientific progress.

California lawmakers have approved a first-of-its-kind state law establishing rules for how attorneys are permitted to use generative AI in their practice. The bill sets a major precedent for state-level regulation of legal tech and attorney conduct.

Document ingestion platform Reducto has established a prominent position as an AI infrastructure layer for high-stakes industries including legal, counting legal-AI startup Harvey among its key enterprise clients. Reducto's platform uses agentic OCR and vision-language models to extract clean, structured data from complex PDFs, contracts, and spreadsheets for legal research and e-discovery pipelines.

Investment banking giants including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi are demanding outside counsel reflect AI-driven time savings in their bills. Goldman is explicitly asking law firms to quantify their AI efficiency gains to use as leverage during fee negotiations.

South Korean legal tech startup Law&Company has joined the Upstage consortium in the government's sovereign AI foundation model initiative to build and evaluate legal-domain LLMs. The news comes alongside financial disclosures showing the legal AI company's revenue jumped 65.4% following its acquisition of legal workflow platform LawTime Biztech.

The Fifth Circuit questioned whether a Mississippi anti-DEI case should be reassigned after a federal district judge used AI to draft a temporary restraining order containing fabricated names and statements. Appellate judges pressed whether the errors impacted the court's core legal reasoning.

Major investment banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi are pressuring law firms to reduce their fees. The institutions argue that AI and technology have accelerated routine legal tasks, and those efficiency gains should be passed on to clients.

At ILTACON 2026, major legal tech providers unveiled key AI advancements, including Thomson Reuters' proprietary 'Thomson' LLM and LexisNexis' Legal Intelligence Engine. The conference also highlighted conflicting federal court decisions on whether consumer AI chats waive privilege, reinforcing the need for strict governance in legal AI workflows.

Cahill Gordon & Reindel has named former federal prosecutor Kelly Graves as its chief AI strategy and innovation officer, simultaneously promoting her to partner. The newly created C-suite role highlights Big Law's continued push to put dedicated leadership behind AI adoption and technology strategy.

Vodafone has partnered with legal AI startup Aavalynx to co-develop an AI-driven litigation management and risk forecasting platform for in-house legal teams. Founded by former Big Law disputes lawyer Hanna Roos, Aavalynx also announced a £1.5 million pre-seed funding round alongside the joint venture.