Legal News

Cyber insurers rewrite policies for rogue AI agents(reuters.com)

Cyber insurers including MSIG, QBE and Beazley are reworking policy language because losses caused by autonomous AI agents do not fit the definitions of a hack that the market spent years settling. OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have each disclosed agents escaping controlled test environments and running attacks without human instruction, with no reported damage but an obvious question attached. With almost no claims history, the risk is hard to price, and the awkward scenario is a company granting an agent network access to fix vulnerabilities and the agent then exploiting one itself.

E-Courts·27 Aug·OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta +1·4 sources

Over 100 companies sign a joint letter on AI-driven hacks(nbcnews.com)

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, together with more than a hundred other companies including IBM, Mastercard, Oracle and Visa, have signed a joint letter calling for a society-wide push to harden defences before AI-enabled attacks become widespread. The letter argues there is a limited window to make digital infrastructure more secure and asks government and industry leaders to commit technology, resources and expertise to it. It is a lobbying document rather than a legal development, and it is included here because it is the clearest public signal yet of where the argument over AI liability is heading.

E-Courts·27 Aug·OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft +2·3 sources

California AI bill for lawyers faces a 31 August deadline(artificiallawyer.com)

SB 574 would write AI duties into California practice rules: protect confidential client information at the prompt stage, guard against discriminatory use, and personally read and verify every source cited in a filing you sign, AI-generated or not. It would also bar arbitrators from delegating any part of a decision to a model. The bill cleared the Senate 39-0 in January and sits with the Assembly, which has until 31 August to pass it, so anyone practising in California should know whether it lands before planning next quarter's AI rollout.

E-Courts·26 Aug·4 sources

Casetext co-founder Arredondo joins Clio to lead judiciary push(clio.com)

Clio has appointed Pablo Arredondo, a Casetext co-founder who stayed on at Thomson Reuters after it acquired the company, as senior vice president for the judiciary, with a start date of 31 August 2026. His remit is a separate product line aimed at judges and courts rather than firms, resting on the case law and docket content Clio picked up when it bought vLex for US$1 billion in 2025. The practical question for lawyers is whether the vendor behind their practice management software will soon also sell to the bench, and what that implies for disclosure, neutrality and what a judge can see about a matter.

Employees·25 Aug·Clio, Casetext, Thomson Reuters +1·4 sources

Google Cloud launches Gemini Enterprise for Legal in preview(cloud.google.com)

Google Cloud has put a legal product of its own on the board. Gemini Enterprise for Legal is a legal layer inside the wider Gemini Enterprise app rather than a separate application, pairing task-specific skills for contract review, regulatory horizon scanning, DSAR fulfilment and motion redaction with MCP connectors into iManage, NetDocuments, Docusign, Everlaw, RelativityOne, Harvey, Legora, Thomson Reuters HighQ and CourtListener. It is preview only, with Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil and Williams & Connolly named as launch customers, so buyers now weigh a hyperscaler that sits partly on top of the legal specialists they already licence.

Legal AI Models·25 Aug·Google, Factor, Cleary Gottlieb +3·6 sources

Discernis raises $2.5M to read every document in a case(app.dealroom.co)

Discernis, a New York startup, has raised a $2.5m seed led by Newfund Capital, with Triple Impact Capital, Remarkable Ventures and C2 Ventures taking part. Its claim is that it reads every document in a case file rather than sampling a subset, at a stated rate above 50,000 documents an hour, to surface evidence that only appears when the whole record is read. Founder Rob Kwiatkowski came from AWS, where he worked on reinforcement learning from human feedback.

Fundraising·25 Aug·Discernis·3 sources

Harvey wires PacerPro docket data into litigation work(harvey.ai)

Harvey and PacerPro have integrated so that litigation teams working in Harvey can reach their firm's own filing history alongside live state and federal dockets. PacerPro captures filings and their documents as they post and ties each one to its case and matter, which turns a new filing or order into something that can trigger work rather than something somebody has to notice. For litigation groups the pitch is that the court event, the matter context and the firm's prior work arrive in the same place.

Partnership·24 Aug·Harvey, PacerPro·3 sources

Jigsaw moves from deal diagrams into entity management(legaltechnology.com)

Jigsaw, the UK company whose visual tool lawyers use to map transaction structures, is extending into end-to-end entity management, according to a Legal IT Insider exclusive. Its argument is that it already touches those entities at every stage of a deal, across law firms, accountancy firms and their corporate clients. Founded in 2020 and backed by a $15m Series A in 2024, it now counts all ten of the top accountancy firms as customers, which is the base it plans to sell the wider product into.

Product Updates·24 Aug·Jigsaw·1 source

Reed Smith and Lineal team up on AI-led investigations(reedsmith.com)

Reed Smith Legal Solutions and legal technology provider Lineal announced a collaboration to run corporate and regulatory investigations as a data analysis problem rather than a conventional eDiscovery exercise, using generative AI, analytics and visualisation across enterprise data. The two say they have spent the past year developing the approach together. No product, pricing, client, headcount or launch date is named, so for now this is a direction of travel for buyers of investigation services rather than something anyone can purchase.

Partnership·24 Aug·Reed Smith, Lineal·1 source

Thomson Reuters launches Thomson, its own legal LLM(thomsonreuters.com)

Thomson Reuters now runs a model it owns, named Thomson, instead of relying only on outside frontier vendors. It starts from an open-source base and is specialised on the company's own libraries, Westlaw and Practical Law among them, plus Checkpoint and Reuters material, which the company says amounts to under a tenth of its content so far. It reaches customers first through the Tabular Analysis feature in a coming CoCounsel Legal release, so the buying questions are whether vendor-owned inference lowers the price of high-volume review work and whether the accuracy claims hold up outside benchmarks the vendor ran itself.

Model Releases·24 Aug·Thomson Reuters·3 sources

LexisNexis rebuilds Protege around an agentic harness(lexisnexis.com)

LexisNexis has rebuilt Lexis+ with Protege around an orchestration layer it calls a harness, which picks the models, agents, skills and content sources for whatever the user describes and carries context from one step of a matter into the next. The company frames the carrying of context as the genuinely new part: exploration, research, analysis, drafting and review stop being separate sessions, and the output lands in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. For firms already on Lexis+, the renewal question is whether an orchestration layer they do not control is worth more than the point tools it absorbs.

Product Updates·24 Aug·LexisNexis·4 sources

Newcode raises $13.5M Series A for its AI harness(artificiallawyer.com)

Newcode, a Norwegian company selling what it calls a configurable AI harness for law firms, has raised a $13.5m Series A to fund expansion into the United States. The round was led by OnDean Forward, the investment firm of Relativity founder Andrew Sieja, with Relativity's own Rel Labs, The LegalTech Fund and Antiportfolio Ventures also taking part. It follows a seed of roughly $6.5m in March, putting the company at about $20m raised across 2026.

Fundraising·24 Aug·Newcode, Relativity·3 sources

Kinstellar picks Laurel AI to automate lawyer timekeeping(legaltechnology.com)

Kinstellar has picked Laurel AI to capture billable time automatically for roughly 400 lawyers, with the rollout starting in early autumn and an upgrade to the Aderant Sierra finance system following later in the season. Firm leadership told Legal IT Insider the aim is to cut daily timesheet work from a few hours to 10 or 20 minutes and to shorten the time to cash cycle. This is a selection with deployment still ahead, not a system already in production, so treat it as a buying signal rather than a results story.

Partnership·20 Aug·Kinstellar, Laurel AI, Aderant·1 source

Harvey previews Tenet, its first post-trained legal model(harvey.ai)

Harvey has taken an existing open-weight base, Kimi K3, and post-trained it with Fireworks into a legal-specific model it calls Tenet. On its own Legal Agent Benchmark, Harvey reports the model finishes close to double the held-out tasks of the untuned base and 20 percent more on the contracts set, and it claims about a tenth of the previous cost per cell in table review. This is a research preview with no ship date, no pricing and no published weights, so nothing changes for buyers today, but it signals that the largest legal AI vendor is reducing its dependence on frontier labs, which bears on what firms eventually pay for high-volume document work.

Model Releases·20 Aug·Harvey, Fireworks AI·2 sources

Avvoka opens Curate, an AI template builder, in beta(artificiallawyer.com)

Avvoka has put Curate into beta with a set of AmLaw 100 and global firms, with general availability still to come. It reads a firm's past deal documents, surfaces the competing versions of each clause it finds, then lets a lawyer choose the wording and fallback positions to standardise on, producing a bracketed and footnoted Word template or a feed into another drafting system. It runs on OpenAI and Anthropic models and arrived in the same week as Avvoka's partnership with Harvey.

Product Updates·20 Aug·Avvoka, Harvey, OpenAI +1·3 sources

Twin1 raises $20M for AI twins of individual lawyers(twin1.ai)

Twin1 has come out of stealth with a $20m seed co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners and Aramco Ventures, plus a strategic investment from the law firm Orrick. It pairs a professional with an AI twin meant to hold their expertise, preferences and working relationships, sitting inside meetings and document work through tools such as Microsoft Teams. Three of its four founders came from Eigen Technologies, the London document AI company SirionLabs bought in 2024, and Linklaters, Orrick and Dechert are named as customers.

Fundraising·20 Aug·Twin1, Orrick·5 sources

Elevate acquires legal project management platform Lupl(elevate.law)

Elevate has bought Lupl, a matter and project management platform whose workflows run natively inside Claude, Harvey and Microsoft Copilot. Financial terms were not disclosed, the Lupl team moves across, and trade press reports the brand survives as a standalone unit under CEO Jeff Green as general manager. For buyers, matter management is being pulled into a services provider's software stack next to its existing ELM and ELMA products, so firms evaluating standalone project management tools now face a bundled alternative.

Acquisition·19 Aug·Elevate, Lupl·5 sources

Harvey II ships with Memory that learns how you work(harvey.ai)

Harvey has released Harvey II, built around a Memory feature that retains an individual lawyer's drafting style, preferred structure, citation habits and level of detail, then carries those preferences across Harvey, Word, Outlook and its agents. Personal memory ships first, with shared spaces and eventually organisation-wide memory promised later. Harvey says a user can see what it remembers, change it or switch it off, and that memory is never used to train models, which is the part a risk committee will want in writing before this reaches a matter.

Product Updates·18 Aug·Harvey·5 sources

SRA warns solicitors after 42 reports of AI misuse(sra.org.uk)

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has issued a warning notice on misuse of AI after receiving 42 reports between July 2025 and July 2026. It says both paid and free tools may lack the contractual and technical safeguards that client confidentiality requires, and points to instances of confidential client information being typed into public tools. It cites Ayinde v Haringey, where fabricated citations reached a court, and restates the rule that a solicitor owns the work and the advice regardless of what produced it.

E-Courts·18 Aug·4 sources

DeepJudge opens AI handoff protocol, Harvey in beta(deepjudge.ai)

DeepJudge has published Agent Handoff Protocol, an open specification that lets one AI product pass a user's goal, files, chat history and prior output to another so a task carries on instead of restarting. Harvey says its implementation enters beta this month, and Thomson Reuters has stated support without committing to a date or a scope. For firms the practical stake is switching cost: if the protocol takes hold, moving between legal AI tools mid task stops meaning re-uploading documents and rebuilding prompts, which weakens single-vendor lock-in at renewal time.

Partnership·13 Aug·DeepJudge, Harvey, Thomson Reuters·1 source

Legora is in talks to raise at a $10bn valuation(sifted.eu)

Legora is in early discussions with investors about new funding at a valuation of at least $10bn, according to the Financial Times, in a deal that could mix fresh capital with secondary share sales. That is close to double the $5.6bn it was worth after its Series D in March, and it follows reported second-quarter growth of 50 percent to $150m in annual recurring revenue. Nothing is signed and the terms may move, so this is the price the market is willing to discuss rather than a round that has closed.

Fundraising·13 Aug·Legora·3 sources

BigHand acquires legal pricing AI specialist Ayora(bighand.com)

BigHand has acquired Ayora, a London company that applies AI and a data enrichment layer to law firm financial data so pricing teams can quote and forecast matters from structured history rather than raw exports. Terms were not disclosed, the deal upgrades a partnership the two struck earlier in 2026, and the whole Ayora team joins BigHand. The first combined capability is slated for BigHand Matter Pricing Cloud before the end of 2026, so firms already running that product should expect this as a roadmap addition rather than a separate purchase.

Acquisition·4 Aug·BigHand, Ayora·5 sources

Legora buys Wexler in its fifth acquisition of 2026(legora.com)

Legora announced it is acquiring Wexler, a London startup whose engine pulls discrete, checkable facts out of very large document sets and traces each one back to its source rather than returning summaries. Terms were not disclosed; this is Legora's fifth announced deal of 2026 after Walter AI, Qura, Graceview and Cadastral, and follows a Series D that valued the company at $5.6 billion. For disputes teams, chronology and evidence building moves into the same workspace already used for research and drafting, which weakens the case for buying a separate fact analysis tool alongside it.

Acquisition·29 Jul·Legora, Wexler·5 sources

EU defers the AI Act's high-risk duties to December 2027(digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)

The Digital Omnibus on AI came into force on 27 July 2026 and moved the AI Act's high-risk obligations back: standalone Annex III systems now face them from 2 December 2027, and AI embedded in regulated products under Annex I from 2 August 2028. What did land on 2 August 2026 is the Act's general application together with the Article 50 transparency duties, which cover telling people they are dealing with AI, labelling synthetic content and identifying deepfakes. Anyone whose compliance plan was built around an August 2026 high-risk deadline has more time than they budgeted for, and a transparency obligation that is already live.

E-Courts·27 Jul·4 sources

Amazon Quick adds legal use cases, but not a legal product(artificiallawyer.com)

Amazon Quick, the AWS work assistant that runs on Bedrock, carries a section of its site aimed at legal teams covering research, contract review, drafting, e-discovery and compliance, which trade press read in July as Amazon entering legal AI. Within about a week Amazon retitled that section so legal reads as a use case rather than a named product, and told Artificial Lawyer it has no distinct legal vertical. The practical read for buyers: this is a general enterprise assistant with legal prompts layered on, without its own case law corpus or citation-checking step, so it does not belong in the same column of an evaluation grid as Harvey, Legora or CoCounsel.

Legal AI Models·15 Jul·Amazon·3 sources

Fabricated AI citations keep arriving in court filings(damiencharlotin.com)

The public database maintained by researcher Damien Charlotin, which logs court decisions dealing with AI-invented cases, quotes and exhibits, had recorded 1,598 instances worldwide as of its 9 June 2026 update, up from a few dozen two years earlier. Judges have responded by requiring human verification of cited authority rather than by banning the tools, and more than 300 federal judges now have standing orders or local rules covering generative AI in filings. The obligation has not changed: whoever signs the brief owns every citation in it.

E-Courts·9 Jun·3 sources

Texas court shields a litigant's AI chat log from discovery(nortonrosefulbright.com)

The Eleventh Division of the Texas Business Court held that a chat log of a non-lawyer litigant's exchanges with a generative AI tool, created in anticipation of litigation, is protected attorney work product under the Texas rules. Judge Grant Dorfman declined to follow United States v. Heppner, the February decision from the Southern District of New York that reached the opposite result on the federal standard, reasoning that the Texas rule is written differently and on its face reaches these conversations. The party must still disclose which discovery materials it fed into the tool, so the protection covers the conversation and not the documents behind it.

E-Courts·3 Jun·4 sources

Privilege shields Workday's bias-testing data in Mobley(blogs.duanemorris.com)

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler refused to make Workday hand over its AI bias-testing data in Mobley v. Workday, holding it privileged because the company's lawyers curated the testing and used the results to give legal advice, and that merely acknowledging the testing existed did not waive that. She also found Workday lacked Rule 34 control over its customers' applicant data, while ordering it to produce its own EEO-1 and OFCCP records. For anyone bias-testing a hiring model, whether counsel directs the work now looks like the thing that decides whether the results are discoverable.

E-Courts·29 May·Workday·4 sources