Nashville had a party, but it was Google’s new Gemini Enterprise for Legal that stole the show – see AL coverage here – and what it all means here (hint: centrality). But, the even bigger news in this week’s Wrap is that the legal market is booming. And that’s good for everyone in this sector.
We all know that hourly rates are surging, so too law firm profits, but another more prosaic, but solid, indicator is office space. New data from Cushman & Wakefield shows that law firms in the US are leasing more room to meet growing demand than ever before.
‘Year-to-date legal leasing reached nearly 12.2 million square feet, almost two-thirds of last year’s record annual volume despite being only halfway through 2026.’
The reason? ‘Expansions accounted for 43% of legal leases signed during the first half of 2026, the highest share since 2019,’ they said.
Given that Covid and the WFH surge it triggered are now in the rear-view mirror, these numbers show – in bricks and mortar – how well the commercial legal world is doing today.
Plus, AL checked and the US legal market is still adding around 36,000 new law grads per year, and even though many Baby Boomers are retiring, total lawyer numbers in the US are still rising. In short, more lawyers, higher rates, bigger offices, and overall what must be more demand. ‘End of lawyers’ anyone…? Not this week.
Plus, add in how AI will support undeveloped and unmet legal needs, and then include how Jevon’s Paradox will accelerate demand, then legal tech has a very, very positive outlook across multiple market segments. The only question now is: which companies will benefit the most in terms of taking market share within this growing pie?
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And now a couple of great AL webinars before we do the rest of the news:
Chamelio Webinar: Why is the ROI Conversation Still Broken? Wednesday, September 16, 4:00 PM BST, 11AM ET, 8AM PT – RSVP here.
Overview:
Every legal team can tell you what they spent on their tech stack. Almost none can tell you what it actually bought them.
That’s not for lack of trying. Legal leaders have spent years bolting together dashboards, contract counts, and ‘time saved; estimates to prove the function is more than a cost center. But most of these metrics were never built to measure impact – they were built to justify a purchase. Counting signed contracts or logged hours tells you activity happened. It doesn’t tell you whether legal moved the business forward, reduced risk, or got out of anyone’s way.
This session digs into why that gap exists and why it’s gotten more urgent as legal teams adopt AI. When the tools change but the measurement stays the same, leaders end up defending spend with numbers that don’t hold up in a budget conversation, and legal keeps getting treated like overhead instead of a function that drives outcomes.
We’ll break down:
- Why traditional legal ops metrics (contract volume, turnaround time, tool logins) measure motion, not value
- What “impact” actually looks like when legal is proactive instead of reactive, fewer bottlenecks, faster deal velocity, risk caught before it’s expensive
- How to build a data narrative that connects legal’s work to business outcomes leadership already cares about
- What changes about ROI measurement once AI is doing part of the work and how to avoid just automating the same broken metrics
— And also:
On September 15, at 12 noon ET / 9 am PT / 5PM BST, LegalOn CEO, Daniel Lewis, will lead a live conversation with Artificial Lawyer founder, Richard Tromans, and Vanessa Wu, Senior Counsel at Rippling, about what could be a looming tidal wave of legal matters – driven by wider AI use – that inhouse teams may have to deal with.
RSVP here for what will be a fascinating and timely discussion.
Webinar Overview:
What if AI doesn’t shrink in-house legal teams’ workloads — but instead creates a tidal wave of demand?
In-house legal work has always run on a form of self-rationing by the business: when legal answers take time and cost, business stakeholders only ask for the essentials. But as AI makes legal answers faster, cheaper, and more generally available, will we see a surge in demand as business teams ask the questions they’ve always held back on? And, will they be coming to legal as ‘armchair lawyers’ with strong opinions and sometimes faulty rationales from their own AI inquiries?
On September 15 at 12pm ET / 9am PT / 5PM BST, LegalOn CEO Daniel Lewis will lead a live conversation with Artificial Lawyer founder Richard Tromans and Vanessa Wu, Senior Counsel at Rippling.
We’ll discuss:
- Why efficiency alone won’t solve legal’s capacity problem
- What AI ROI should really measure once hours-saved stops being the answer
- Why matter intake and triage are shaping up as the next opportunity for in-house teams
Register now to hear how legal leaders are preparing for a surge in demand and rethinking what capacity, efficiency, and ROI actually mean in an AI-enabled legal function.
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Plus, following Artificial Lawyer’s founder, Richard Tromans, being named as an AI Visionary by Relativity earlier this year, they have also published an article exploring several themes connected to legal AI. You can read it here. Many thanks once again for including me.
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And now some news, in traditional Wrap summarised fashion:
- Pablo Arredondo has joined Clio as Senior Vice President, Judiciary, to lead the strategy behind its move into the courts. He was co-founder of Casetext – which was sold to TR for an enormous sum – and is ‘one of the early builders of modern legal AI’. Congrats to Pablo!
- Plaintiff AI company Eve has announced that EveOS has reached general availability, along with the launch of Analyst and Atlas. ‘Analyst gives firm leaders a real answer about the business itself, the moment they ask. Atlas keeps every case current automatically, so nothing falls through the cracks – this means more time spent winning the case,’ they said.
- And there are more and more partnerships…..After doing a partnership with Harvey and launching Curate (their template maker), Avvoka has now done a hook-up with Legora. P.S. Legora has done a partnership deal with Intapp as well. And probably a dozen other companies have done deals. As AL noted in the Google analysis piece, this is all about centrality and legal tech companies going where the action is.
- Lawbster, a free platform for working with EU digital law, has opened its beta to all. Built by a Munich tech lawyer who deals with these laws day in day out, it pulls the scattered source texts such as the GDPR, AI Act, NIS2 and DORA into one place, in EN, DE and FR. You can now read the 15 key acts with recitals and official guidance linked right where you need them, follow cross references with one click, highlight and annotate the text, and work in side by side view. Founder Dr Richard Falk commented: ‘EU digital law is like a box of chocolates. You never know which version you are going to get.’ See: www.lawbster.eu
- Litera has launched ‘Firm AI Search’, which is accessed through Lito, its AI agent, ‘letting lawyers query their firm’s matter, client, and expertise data directly in the tools they already use. Litera also announced new growth intelligence capabilities that surface proactive business development signals with monetary value directly inside Foundation 365’, they said.
- iManage has announced that its ‘next-generation platform’ will be generally available in October. At the centre of the platform is ‘Context Fabric’, a governed intelligence layer that understands the complete, connected story of every matter or project, the documents, communications, parties, and relationships, enriched with relevant context from practice management and financial systems. Every answer draws on an organisation’s own accumulated knowledge and traces back to it, they explained.
- Oddr, an invoice-to-cash platform for law firms, has announced early access to Cash Flow Forecasting, a new capability that gives law firm leadership real-time visibility into the firm’s financial future.
- Nuix has announced ‘AI Chat’, a conversational interface that lets reviewers, attorneys, and investigators interrogate their case data in natural language and receive synthesized answers drawn directly from document content; with citations to documents and every interaction logged for a complete, court-ready audit trail, they said.
- Everlaw, an AI-powered litigation and investigations platform, has launched partnerships with Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal and Harvey, along with MCP connectors for Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Legal and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Yep, more partnerships. And more will come.
- Timo and his Cosmonauts team are doing more events with ILTACon in the US and EU.
- And finally, Discernis, which focuses on doc analysis in litigation, has raised a $2.5m seed round. They said: ‘Instead of sampling a document collection, Discernis reads every document and provides legal teams with complete answers to their questions.’
And now some videos. A great interview with Andrew Simon at Weil about their work with Google on Gemini Enterprise for Legal, then a product walk through with Monjur, and an in-depth interview with Thomson Reuters CEO, Steve Hasker, all about Thomson 1, their own LLM, and their wider legal AI strategy.
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(All videos AL TV Productions, 2026)
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And of course…now that we are heading into Q3 and Q4 of 2026….
Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators, where the leading thinkers and doers explore the intersection of legal AI and the business of law.
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day.
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That’s all for now folks! Have a great weekend.
P.S. in the UK it’s a Bank Holiday on Monday, so AL will be on hols.
P.P.S. I really wanted to publish the next chapter of Katie’s adventures in ‘The Innovators’ this week, but there was so much news it got pushed off the front page. It will start again next week for sure.
Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Chair of the Legal Innovators conferences.
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