Legal News

Morgan & Morgan commits $1 billion to its own legal AI(forthepeople.com)

Morgan & Morgan, the plaintiff firm best known for its television advertising, has unveiled MX2, an AI platform it built in-house over several years, and pledged more than $1 billion in legal-technology spending over the coming decade. MX2 already runs at scale inside the firm, with close to 5,000 monthly users across four tools: a case-insight agent tied into its own case-management system, a document drafter, a medical-record extractor and a case-data search engine. The firm says it plans to offer MX2 to outside firms by invitation once the platform has proven itself further, with an external rollout targeted for late 2027.

Product Updates·14 Sep·Morgan & Morgan·3 sources

White & Case invests in Saudi legal AI platform Clauze(legaltechnology.com)

White & Case has taken a stake in Clauze.AI, an AI system aimed at contract review, governance and due diligence for companies operating in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, in what the firm says is its first stake in a Middle Eastern technology venture. The product was founded by Waad Alkurini, who spent a decade at White & Case's Riyadh office; it works bilingually in Arabic and English, and keeps client data resident inside the Kingdom. Neither side disclosed how much was invested.

Fundraising·10 Sep·White & Case, Clauze.AI·3 sources

California signs first-in-nation AI chatbot child rules(gov.ca.gov)

Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a package of bills his office calls the country's strongest child-safety rules for AI companion chatbots and social media. SB 1119, named for Adam Raine, requires chatbot operators to run a risk assessment before a rollout, build in a crisis protocol for suicidal ideation, and pass an annual independent safety audit; AB 1709 bars addictive autoplay and algorithmic feeds for users under 16. A company found to have negligently harmed a child through either can be fined up to $1 million per child. The package regulates consumer-facing AI generally rather than legal practice, but it is the first state law to put a per-child dollar figure on an AI-related harm.

E-Courts·10 Sep·2 sources

Harvey raises $550M, buys AI-safety startup Guardrails(harvey.ai)

Harvey has raised $550m at a $15.5bn valuation, in a round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Diffusion, and paired the announcement with its fourth acquisition of the year: Guardrails AI, a San Francisco team whose open-source tooling monitors what an AI agent actually does and flags drift from what it was told to do. Guardrails' two co-founders and their team join Harvey's product and engineering group, and their framework, downloaded more than 250,000 times a month, becomes part of how Harvey checks its own agents before they touch a matter.

Fundraising·9 Sep·Harvey, Guardrails AI·3 sources

ILTACON 2026 turns context into the product legal AI sells(legaltechnology.com)

The vendor announcements at ILTACON this year converged on one idea: the model is no longer the differentiator, and what a firm is actually buying is the layer that feeds the model its own matters, history and house rules. iManage, NetDocuments, Litera, Harvey and Aderant all pitched some version of that layer, and most of them are plumbing it with the same open protocol rather than private connectors, which makes the switching costs a real question for the first time. For a firm mid-way through a procurement, the practical read is that a demo of answer quality now tells you much less than a demo of what the system can see.

Product Updates·2 Sep·iManage, Litera, Harvey +2·2 sources

Egypt trains state lawyers on AI under a new protocol(masrawy.com)

Egypt's National Telecommunication Institute and the State Lawsuits Authority, the body that represents the state in litigation, have signed a protocol to build shared training in AI, cybersecurity and digital transformation for its counsellors and for members of other judicial bodies. It follows a 2025 pilot, the AI Ambassadors programme, that put more than 600 counsellors through training, with a second cohort now under way. The protocol is about capacity-building rather than deployment: it sets no budget, timeline or target for actually putting AI into a case.

E-Courts·31 Aug·3 sources

California AI bill for lawyers now sits with the governor(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 legislature cleared it on 31 August, the Senate concurring in the Assembly's amendments 39-0, so the only remaining step is the governor. Anyone practising in California should plan next quarter's AI rollout on the assumption it lands.

E-Courts·31 Aug·5 sources

Eve opens EveOS to plaintiff firms with Analyst and Atlas(artificiallawyer.com)

Eve's operating system for plaintiff firms has come out of its staged rollout into general availability, and it arrives with two additions aimed at the parts of a contingency practice that are not legal work. Analyst answers questions about the firm itself, so a partner can ask for a report in plain English instead of commissioning one. Atlas assembles a live picture of each matter by reading the systems a case already generates, including filings, medical records and client correspondence, which is a direct attack on the manual data entry that plaintiff firms carry.

Product Updates·28 Aug·Eve·2 sources

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

Legora and Intapp link AI work to walls and time capture(intapp.com)

Legora and Intapp have agreed a partnership that runs Legora's AI work through Intapp's confidentiality controls, so an ethical wall applies to what the model is allowed to touch rather than only to what a person can open. The second half is billing: work done inside Legora is meant to generate time entries automatically in Intapp Time, which targets the gap between AI-assisted work and what actually reaches an invoice. The two also say they will build shared agent workflows spanning the practice and the business sides of a firm.

Partnership·25 Aug·Legora, Intapp·2 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

iManage puts a Context Fabric under its October platform(imanage.com)

iManage will ship its next-generation platform in October, built on what it calls a Context Fabric: a governed layer that enriches stored documents with the facts a model needs to place them, including jurisdiction, area of law and the parties involved, and links them to the practice management system. The detail that matters for outside counsel guidelines is that AI can be switched off for a named client or a single matter rather than firm-wide. iManage also opened its content to Thomson Reuters CoCounsel over an open protocol, so documents can be reached from a research tool without a bespoke integration.

Product Updates·24 Aug·iManage, Thomson Reuters·4 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

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

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

Abu Dhabi folds AI into its courts, starting in September(gulfnews.com)

The Abu Dhabi Judicial Department plans to fold artificial intelligence into every stage of a court case, starting in September, in what it calls a first for judicial systems anywhere: reading a file, researching the relevant law and precedent, and preparing a first draft of what a judge would otherwise write alone. Judges keep the final say on every ruling; the system prepares groundwork, not decisions. The change is scheduled to arrive in phases over eighteen months, so what a lawyer with a matter before an Abu Dhabi court actually notices will build up gradually rather than switch on overnight.

E-Courts·28 Jul·3 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

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