AI × Law

Stockholm-based Legora is in talks to raise at least $300 million at an $8.5 billion valuation, up over 50% from its Series D round six months prior. The legal AI platform recently passed $100 million in ARR and serves over 1,000 legal teams, including Linklaters and White & Case.

Israeli legaltech startup Chamelio raised $26 million in a Series A round led by Entrée Capital to replace traditional contract lifecycle management systems with AI agents. Designed for corporate legal departments, the platform automates routine drafting, review, negotiation, and cross-departmental workflows while escalating complex cases for attorney oversight.

A survey of federal appellate decisions reveals courts are relying on traditional Rule 11 and ethical obligations rather than enacting tech-specific rules for AI errors. Judges are increasingly penalizing lawyers who fail to independently verify filings or act evasively after hallucinated citations are uncovered.

eDiscovery provider Cimplifi has unveiled Maestro, an AI orchestration layer, and CI Lake, a legal data repository designed to complement and extend Relativity aiR. The platform uses natural language interfaces and agentic workflows to prepare, manage, and reuse legal data before and after review.

State court systems are actively deploying AI for internal staff training, public-facing chatbots, and plain-language opinion summaries. Implementations include Orange County Superior Court's internal chatbot and Alaska's AI assistant for probate litigants.

The 5th Circuit heard arguments on whether to remove U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate from a case after his law clerk used a generative AI tool to draft a temporary restraining order containing hallucinations and inaccurate facts. The incident triggered inquiries from the Senate Judiciary Committee and highlighted the growing push among state and federal courts to restrict AI use by judicial personnel.

A panel of current and former judges alongside legal scholars released 'The Judicious Judge's Guide to Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models' to help jurists responsibly adopt AI. The guide outlines ethically permissible uses, such as brief summarization and hearing prep, while emphasizing a 'sandwich approach' to human verification.

A 2025 ethics opinion clarifies that attorneys cannot use third-party consultants or AI tools to engage in discriminatory jury selection. Lawyers remain professionally accountable for biases embedded in automated trial prep and voir dire systems.

New research from RSGI reveals that 92% of surveyed in-house legal teams using Harvey report faster turnaround times, while 36% are using AI capacity gains to bring work back in-house from external counsel. The report highlights real-world applications, including Repsol handling a mid-sized M&A transaction internally to save €200,000 in law firm fees.

Gibson Dunn is actively recruiting a Legal Technology & AI Attorney within its Business Restructuring and Reorganization Practice Group, offering a salary range of $250,000 to $300,000. Reporting to the Sr. Director & Counsel of Knowledge & AI, the role will focus on prototyping AI-assisted tools, automating workflows, and developing practice-support systems for chapter 11 cases and out-of-court restructurings.

Rising API fees from OpenAI and Anthropic caused legal AI startup Harvey's gross margin to plummet from ~50% early this year to -50% in June following a major product update. Harvey responded by launching a self-owned model supported by Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, helping restore positive margins while keeping Anthropic's Claude Opus for complex tasks.

Contract lifecycle management platform Chamelio secured $26 million in a Series A funding round led by Entrée Capital, with participation from Work-Bench, Emerge Ventures, and Bright Pixel Capital. Designed for in-house legal teams, the agentic AI platform automates routine contracting tasks and enables users to build custom agents.

A comprehensive market analysis shows legal tech funding is up 40.3% in 2026, reaching over $2 billion, though capital is heavily concentrated in mega-rounds for platform providers and legal AI assistants. Legal AI assistants absorbed 84.1% of all funding, dominated by massive mega-rounds for vendors like Harvey and Legora.

Aston University's Centre of Excellence for Enterprise AI and SuperTech WM have created the LOIL Benchmarking Toolkit to independently evaluate legal AI performance across core workflows. The framework assesses tools on document understanding, legal analysis, drafting, and client communications to help firms evaluate AI reliability and risks.

A Florida state appeals court warned that the abusive deployment of AI in filings is clogging court dockets and threatening the court's ability to function. The bench expressed frustration over the influx of AI-generated content from both attorneys and pro se litigants.

Wolters Kluwer launched an agentic AI tool that automates outside-counsel billing comparisons and guideline checks. Early adopters reported cutting quarterly billing review times from days down to hours.

Federal lawmakers have introduced the Halt Abusive Internet Lawsuits Act (H.B. 10263) to bar wiretapping and privacy claims targeting commercial website tools, including AI chatbots, cookies, and pixel trackers. The legislation explicitly targets claims brought under state wiretap statutes like the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

Thomson Reuters has acquired Safe Sign Technologies, an AI startup focused on developing domain-specific large language models for the legal sector. Founded in 2022 by a former A&O Shearman trainee alongside a former Google DeepMind research scientist, the deal is part of Thomson Reuters' planned $8 billion AI acquisition spree.

The California Supreme Court has allowed attorney sanctions over AI hallucinations to stand. One of the sanctioned lawyers warned that the decision should be of real concern to law firms using generative AI.

UK startup Keith has raised £2 million in seed funding to launch a regulated AI-native law firm focused on residential conveyancing. The firm plans to automate 80% of conveyancing workflows, aiming to allow fee-earners to manage up to 500 files simultaneously with human oversight at key regulatory checkpoints.