The battle for centrality is now legal tech’s greatest strategic challenge – and Astra for Law just raised the stakes for everyone. That is to say: where does your legal work primarily live? And the answer to that will shape this sector.
Astra for Law joins Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Legal and also Claude for Legal – among the largest LLM makers in trying to provide a platform, an ecosystem, or a context, if you prefer that term, that you will stay within. You use their foundational AI, the tools that come with that platform, and when you need something else, e.g. legal data, you use ‘the feed’ into that context. In short, if you want to, you can stay there. Word docs – which are essential for lawyers – are of course part of this, but just part of operating within this platform. Astra becomes the centre of your working life, Gemini does, Claude does…..
At the same time, many large legal tech companies are trying to do the same thing. Harvey and Legora would prefer it if you stayed within their context. If you need to find legal data or point solutions that are not already ‘hard-wired’ inside those platforms, then they will seek to connect to them – or at least as much as possible – in a way that again, keeps you there.
But then, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis want you to come to them for their legal research data and then stay within their context for drafting and also transactional needs as well. They also connect to many other offerings. The want the same thing: for you to stay where you have landed.
The strategic goal is always the same: centrality. I.e. keeping you there, because the more you see X, Y or Z platform as your ‘home’, the more you will get used to staying there. Then, that platform can build additional features over time that cement you into it.
For example, ask yourself the question: have all the large legal tech platforms produced more features each year, or cut back to their core offering?
Yep, exactly. They have all expanded, outwards, and outwards, and outwards again. If they can also bring in other legal tech solutions and/or legal data where applicable, into that platform, the better it is for them. No platform wants to be ‘a loner’, they want to be gregarious, extroverted, and friends with everyone. But, also the centre of the party – to be ‘where the action is’. They want to look like a legal tech conference exhibition hall – but their stand is the largest and in the middle of it all…!
Why? It’s always the same reason: so you come to that platform, and you stay there.
Dangerous Game
This is all a dangerous game, of course. Legal tech companies connect to Astra, to Claude, to you name it…..because they want to keep their customers and allow them to use what’s in the market.
Everyone is putting on a brave face. But, does Legora really, actively want its customers to fly over to Claude, or Astra and do their legal work from there, and then keep going back there? Would they prefer you stayed with them all of the time? Of course they’d prefer you stay with them.
Also, in a world where usage-based (i.e. token) pricing is becoming more relevant to some companies, then such companies really, really want you to stay where you are.
Now, does going over to Astra for some work kill off legal tech companies? No. In fact, in the short term all of those plugins (see here) could drive some extra traffic to them.
But the fear is always that software companies rarely stay as they are. They build new features….and those features often look like the things others might be offering today as a plugin.
OpenAI wants your eyeballs, your clicks, your spend, your attention.
And Anthropic does.
And Google does.
And (naturally) Microsoft does (although they may have become a bit complacent about this battle that is raging all around them…)
And Harvey does.
And Legora does.
And Thomson Reuters does.
And LexisNexis does.
And so on.
It’s the battle for centrality.
Conclusion
Can anyone win this battle? Possibly. For decades Microsoft was the centre of the legal world. Legal tech added itself into that picture. But things stayed the same.
MS will remain fundamental to legal – perhaps forever. But it doesn’t always have to be at the absolute centre of things. There are now so many other places where your work can ‘live’.
And then we get to ask: which of the above is more likely to win here? If some realise they cannot win, what then will be their strategy? Does that drive consolidation? If you can’t beat OpenAI, why not seek to be bought by them? Or maybe TR combines with a productivity platform to counter-balance things in their favour?
And how will lawyers and legal innovation teams respond? Where do they put their focus? So many choices now.
But, no lawyer wants to be totally locked into one LLM maker. Nor do lawyers in general like to be locked into any system. Lawyers tend toward independence – if they can find it.
Now they have a lot of contexts to choose from. Will any of them take the majority of market share? Or will the market fragment, with multiple big players as ‘legal tech poles’ within the ecosystem?
It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.
Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer, Sept 2026
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