Wrap: Legal Spend Shock, Billions Battle, TR Deal, Legal Innovators California + More

Welcome to this week’s AL Wrap – and there’s plenty to explore today, from the next chapter in the Harvey/Legora funding Olympics, to 44% of clients saying they could halve their law firm spend and still do well, to a host of other news.

Let’s start with some news of our own: Legal Innovators California, the landmark West Coast legal tech event, will take place on June 10 and 11, in the heart of the Bay Area, the home to many of the world’s leading AI businesses – and plenty of legal tech pioneers as well!

When AL and Cosmonauts started Legal Innovators California in San Francisco, the full potential of generative AI was still a gleam in Sam Altman’s eye.

Today, in 2026, it’s probably the greatest transformative force the legal world has seen since Bill Gates developed MS Word. And we’ll be right at the epicentre of this AI movement with leading law firms, pioneering inhouse teams, top speakers from both Big Tech and legal tech, as well as from the investment community.

Last year we had amazing speakers from across the ecosystem, including from Y Combinator, Meta, Google and Salesforce, to name just a few. Plus of course, the crème de la crème of legal innovation experts from top firms such as Wilson Sonsini, A&O Shearman, and Cooley, among many others. And of course we had CEOs and CTOs from the leading legal tech companies on stage, such as Max Junestrand at Legora, and many others.

Our June 2026 event, which as always is on two days: Day One – Law Firms, Day Two – Inhouse, with ALSPs and NewMods / AI-first firms fitting into both, will be even bigger and more star-studded!

If you’d like to apply for a ticket please see here.

If you would like to be a speaker, especially if you are at a law firm or inhouse legal team, then please contact Phoebe at Cosmonauts: phoebe@cosmonauts.biz

Note: if you are a legal tech company, please contact Robins: robins@cosmonauts.biz or Anjana anjana@cosmonauts.biz

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OK, let’s do some other news.  

First, just a quick one to start with. Those VC folks just can’t stop leaking it seems and rumours are now out again about both Legora and Harvey raising more money. AL tends not report on things until the facts are clear. But suffice it to say that some people are amazed at the scale of investment.

But…they should not be surprised. Legora and Harvey are playing the game of ‘category leader’ and that’s a global game within the $1 trillion legal market. Rounds of $10m and $20m are just not going to be sufficient if that’s the goal. It all comes down to what place in the market you want – and believe you can get to. AL has to say kudos to the top teams of Harvey and Legora – and their investors – for their confidence and ambition.

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Growing up in the UK in the 1980s, ‘Dallas’ was always the TV show that blew my mind. Did people like JR really exist? Did everyone in Texas wear a Stetson? So, it’s cool to mention that Harvey is going to open an office in Dallas, although there is no comment on local hat fashions in 2026.

They said: ‘Our Dallas office brings Harvey closer to the leading legal teams we already partner with across Texas, including in-house customers AT&T and KBR, as well as law firms such as Vinson & Elkins, Haynes Boone, Jackson Walker, Susman Godfrey, Kelly Hart & Hallman LLP, Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, and McKool Smith. This expansion strengthens our ability to meet accelerating demand for modern legal work at scale.’

Winston Weinberg, CEO and Co-founder of Harvey, commented: ‘Texas is home to one in ten publicly traded companies in the US, 7% of the AmLaw 200, 54 Fortune 500 headquarters, and 3.5M small businesses. It’s a massive opportunity for Harvey and we want a team on the ground to support those organizations and their legal teams.’

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Thomson Reuters has bought Noetica, a transaction data startup that was founded in 2022. But why?

Well, this is what it does: ‘It delivers qualitative and quantitative benchmarking, natural-language term search, term-trend analysis, and deal-level risk signals – enabling practitioners to confidently determine what’s market and what’s not.’

In short, it reminds AL quite a lot of what Spellbook is doing with its ‘what’s market’ / Moneyball capability that it launched recently. Litera has also been working for some time on collecting and surfacing deal data, including on the operational aspects.

TR said they’ll connect it to its broader CoCounsel offering. And of course, TR has Practical Law already, a store of contract data.

So, why? The short answer is that they’re trying to create new value in their transactional add-ons. TR is a legal data fortress, and that gives it a very defensible position in the market, no matter what Claude throws at it. But, TR’s top team don’t want to rest on their laurels.

Thus, it’s clear they’re not backing off the idea that TR will become a major platform for deal work – rather than being seen as mainly for legal research, and that they will compete in this field with the other, broad platforms out there.

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A Juro survey of 130+ in-house lawyers found that ‘44% think they could cut outside counsel spend in half and still manage risk effectively’. Wow – that is a major slap in the face with a wet kipper.

Also, many GCs are annoyed that ‘law firms aren’t passing on the savings they’re making with AI – and are preparing to insource the work themselves instead’.

The findings mirror what AL heard from a huge gathering of GCs in Stockholm this week, namely that if AI drives law firm efficiency, then how come the buyers of legal services are not seeing any of the benefits?

Moreover, if that’s how it will be, then why not do more inhouse, given that GCs are now becoming familiar with what genAI tools can really do for them?

Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of Juro, said: ‘This is a wake-up call for Big Law. You can’t charge premium rates for work that AI now handles in seconds, and not expect clients to vote with their feet. With 68% of in-house teams planning to claw back work for themselves, firms stuck in the billable hour paradigm are on borrowed time.’

The Juro report is here.

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DISCO has launched an agentic AI tool for fact investigation and eDiscovery, which adds multi-step reasoning to its Cecilia Q&A tool, and that ‘returns significantly more detailed and thorough results – even on very large data sets’, they said.

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Justpoint, a consumer-protection company using AI to uncover hidden toxins in everyday products, has announced the launch of Justpoint Law, LLP.  This follows approval to operate as an Alternative Business Structure law firm by the Arizona Supreme Court last July. The approval makes Justpoint Law the first US personal injury/mass tort law firm approved under an ABS framework that uses proprietary AI technology across harm identification, case evaluation, and litigation pathways.

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Laurel has launched a feature to show the ROI on AI use. The legal billing pioneer found that ‘AI isn’t just making people faster, it’s absorbing the administrative and coordination work (~30% of a professional’s time) that prevents people from focusing on high-value client delivery’. I.e. it’s absorbing non-billable time.

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There’s a new legal AI company in town: Clearnote, which is focused on handling contract needs in the entertainment world. (Last week AL covered another one that launched for the sports sector.)

AL put some questions to Cameron Siasi, Clearnote Founder and VP of Operations at Good Boy Records. Here’s what he said:

‘I don’t have a formal legal background, my background is in music operations, management, and running a label, which is actually why this product exists. I’ve spent years working directly with contracts, negotiating deals, and dealing with the friction that comes from not having accessible legal infrastructure.

That said, lawyers have been deeply involved alongside us advising and helping to build Clearnote. Clearnote isn’t built to replace legal counsel, it’s built to make legal work more efficient. Attorneys use it to manage volume, standardize workflows, and spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time on higher-value work.

We built Clearnote out of necessity. Inside Good Boy Records, we were dealing with a high volume of contracts, and the existing tools were either too expensive, too complex, or not designed for how independent teams actually work.

At the same time, we were seeing artists and managers rely on random templates or outdated agreements because they didn’t have better options. That’s risky for everyone involved. Clearnote started as a way to give people access to solid, standardized agreements and a better workflow, and then it quickly became clear that this problem extended far beyond music.

We absolutely work with lawyers. The idea isn’t full automation. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it needs oversight. Clearnote is designed to help people move faster and manage contracts more efficiently, not to replace legal judgment.’

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Province, an advisory firm, has acquired global disputes and investigations business StoneTurn, to create an integrated platform ‘spanning restructuring, litigation support, forensic accounting, and financial crime investigations’.

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OK, and now this week’s AL TV Product Walk Through, with Kira – Litera.

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And two webinars arriving in the next couple of weeks:

Litera and Artificial Lawyer Webinar – March 3^rd – 11AM EST, 4PM GMT

‘Your firm’s deal expertise lives in scattered folders and individual heads. When that knowledge disappears, negotiations slow, mistakes repeat, and client trust erodes. 

Join us March 3rd for The Memory Layer: How Firms Preserve and Scale Deal Expertise. Learn how leading teams capture and surface the insights that shape better outcomes 

You’ll learn how to: 

• Capture diligence insights that inform negotiations and client alignment
• Surface precedent language and firm patterns at the right time
• Use templates and structured workflows to accelerate future deals.’

It’s free to attend, but please RSVP. See you there!

And,

On Thursday, February 26, Harvey, in association with Artificial Lawyer, will be holding a live webinar: ‘AI, Collaboration and the Future of the Law Firm-Client Relationship’.

It’s free to attend, but please RSVP here

Speakers:

• Karen Buzard, Partner, US Head of the Markets Innovation Group, A&O Shearman
• Ryan Samii, Head of Innovation, Harvey
• Moderator: Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer

Time: Thursday, February 26, at 9AM PT, 12PM ET, and 5PM GMT

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And, if you missed it, here’s a new Excellent Adventure with Zach Abramowitz!

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P.S. it seems like many people are already preparing for Legal Week in New York, I’ll be there all week, so if you’ve got something cool planned, please drop me a line.

Also, AL and Cosmonauts will be hosting another of our Big Apple Breakfasts to catch up with you all and share more about our upcoming Legal Innovators conferences in California (June) and New York (November). See you there!

That’s all folks, have a great weekend!

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer