The starting gun has been fired and the legal tech world faces significant change. With the hire of Jason Boehmig, founder of Ironclad, OpenAI is now formally entering the legal vertical – as Artificial Lawyer first announced on May 18. But, what happens now to legal tech as Sam Altman’s AI giant joins fellow tech titans Anthropic and Microsoft in the battle for the legal world? Here are three scenarios.
One: Big Tech Eats Legal Tech
Ever since AL started there has been speculation that one day Big Tech would enter the legal tech field at scale and eat everyone’s lunch. As of today we now have three massive players all going after legal to a greater or lesser degree. Much now depends on how serious this trio are about gaining market share. In this scenario they really go for it.
So, let’s say that – especially as the IPOs come to fruition – management at OpenAI and Anthropic state that although legal will only ever be a small part of their total revenue, that the AI pioneers want it. They want it and they need it, because to keep that share price nice and buoyant they need growth, they need more revenue, they need to keep expanding beyond just selling a general LLM to the public and a random collection of businesses. So, legal helps. And so they really go after it.
In this scenario they hire in more talent – likely from legal tech companies and law firm innovation teams. They build out FDE – forward deployed engineering teams, and build service and support functions for legal, or do deals with a mass of consultants and outsourced providers that can handle this very human aspect of AI roll outs.
Microsoft for its part – with its massive ‘home team’ advantage, as the place where lawyers work, eventually builds a very good Legal Agent product and also goes on a growth surge in legal. (Note: market feedback is that the MS Legal Agent is just not good enough yet to make a real impact, despite how powerful having one would be in Word. But things can change. Maybe OpenAI and Anthropic will push MS’s management to take legal even more seriously.)
OpenAI and Anthropic make some headway with law firms (e.g. such as Freshfields and Claude), but where they make their largest impact is inhouse. They ramp up enterprise sales and go after the whole of the business, with now their dedicated legal offerings as well.
Inhouse lawyers – who have never been the main focus of most of legal tech, nor until recently that excited about AI – have few deep relationships that they want to hang onto, and slowly, but steadily, they go over to what the AI giants offer – which also improves significantly.
CLM and other contract-related companies face a precipice. Some sell quickly, others collapse. And AL has been given a list of legal tech companies ‘on the market’ by multiple sources, and wow….it contains both big names and small. As one legal tech insider told this site: ‘Nearly everyone is looking to sell at the moment.’ How true that turns out to be remains to be seen, but of the names AL has heard, there is plenty of potential M&A in the works. That said, plenty wish to sell but can’t find a buyer.
Some companies will feel the impact less than others, as noted many times by AL already, the data fortresses are well insulated, so too those that don’t sell productivity as their main offering, e.g. DMS companies.
The other aspect then is how does this impact law firms? Even with OpenAI in the mix, it seems unlikely that most Big Law firms will go all-in with one LLM maker. In part because any improvements they make in AI can then be tapped by the legal tech SaaS companies that use those LLMs; and law firms generally like to have a lot of choice and not get backed into a corner by one big supplier.
AL’s estimate then is that in this scenario inhouse legal tech largely goes over to the ‘Giant Three’, especially where any routine work, especially around contracts is concerned. On the law firm side, there is some impact on Big Law, and smaller firms especially just use A or O, as why not – it’s just easier. But, overall, the survival rate is far better for those who focus on law firms. And some are barely impacted even in this most extreme scenario. Legal tech lives on, but with three giants sitting in the middle of it.
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Two: Half-Hearted Giants
In this scenario the main areas of impact are the same, i.e. inhouse mostly, then some Big Law, and a lot of smaller firms, but the Giant Three just don’t really go all-in on this. They dabble. They have some impact. They don’t make the tools so good that they kill the opposition. They tend toward allowing customers to vibecode and customise what is there…..which some like, but many others don’t and prefer a clean purchase of a finished product from a legal tech vendor.
They don’t really build out their teams, nor do they develop FDE for legal adoption, nor do support properly. The market moves somewhat, but the status quo – while shaken and now under some pressure – does not break. Legal tech continues, although there will be no ‘as before’, even if O and A are half-hearted here.
Either way, some market share will be lost and sales pitches will become harder. Legal tech companies will now have to market their products in a world where they know the buyer is also very aware of what O and A can offer, and maybe MS too. Getting heard will become paramount.
But, O and A never really do what they could with legal and are happy to let it provide a very small percentage of total revenue. Life goes on.
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Three: They Lose Interest
After a lot of sound and fury, O and A, and also MS, decide that legal is just not worth the bother. They decide they’ve put a lot into the vertical, not made as much revenue as hoped, and that although they don’t close those offerings down, they don’t do anything new with them. They are allowed to languish.
Team members leave and move on. The AI giants decide there are other and better ways to make money. Legal tech breathes a sigh of relief and the status quo, albeit an evolving one with many fast-growing dynamic players, continues.
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Which is the more likely scenario? It’s really hard to say right now. AL does not believe they will abandon legal any time soon. Why? Because it’s part of enterprise, and that’s where the real money is for the AI giants. MS might drop out of the race, but O and A won’t.
The question therefore is this: how much in terms of resources will OpenAI and Anthropic put into taking legal sector market share? How much will they build out support functions to drive sales and uptake?
That really is the central question. They have huge resources and after their IPOs will have even more. Broadly ‘they can do anything they want to’. But, how much do they really want a big slice of legal? If they want it, they can probably have a very large chunk of legal tech market share. If they don’t, they’ll still make an impact. Which way will they go…?
We shall soon see.
Either way, legal tech as we all knew it over the last decade has well and truly changed into something new and with a very different market shape.
Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer, June 2, 2026.
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More reading on these topics from Artificial Lawyer:
- How AL broke the OpenAI news on May 18 and the plan for Codex for Legal.
- The hire of Jason Boehmig to lead product at OpenAI.
- The arrival of the MS Legal Agent.
- The arrival of Claude for Legal – Interview with Mark Pike at Anthropic.
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