The market for legal technology is booming, fuelled by artificial intelligence, which is automating tasks from drafting contracts to providing initial legal opinions.<\/p>\n
By 2030, the global legal technology market will be worth about $47bn, up from about $27bn in 2024, Grand View Research has forecast.<\/p>\n
Here we highlight six legal tech companies that are making a mark as they explore the potential of artificial intelligence to enhance legal services. <\/p>\n
They were chosen from a longer list of 20 contenders compiled by the FT\u2019s research partner RSGI, based on funding, acquisitions, growth and commentary from law firms and in-house legal teams. The final selection was decided by a panel of legal tech experts: Sandeep Agarwal, partner, PwC; Connie Brenton, founder, LegalOps.com; Caroline Hill, editor-in-chief, Legal IT Insider; Joy Heath Rush, president, International Legal Technology Association; Kerry Westland, partner, Addleshaw Goddard; and RSGI. <\/p>\n
Clioindustry veteran expands capabilities<\/p>\n
Canada\u2019s Clio<\/a>, whose software is used by more than 150,000 legal professionals, is among legal AI start-up Harvey\u2019s closer competitors, based on financials. The company was valued at $3bn in a July 2024 funding round. <\/p>\n In June, Clio announced it had agreed to acquire vLex<\/a>, a Spanish legal tech and AI supplier, for $1bn. The deal, when finalised, will add legal research and AI functionality to Clio\u2019s software, which manages clients, billing and documents.<\/p>\n The vLex software includes an archive of more than 1bn legal documents drawn from court decisions, governments and publishers in more than 100 countries. Clients use it for legal research and litigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere will be a flight to quality in legal AI and, ultimately, quality is going to be determined by the quality of the data that your AI models are built on top of,\u201d predicts Jack Newton, Clio chief executive and founder.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n EudiaPlatform-plus-services upstart<\/p>\n Despite the automation trend, some legal tech start-ups are choosing to bundle human intelligence \u2014 and gut instinct \u2014 into their products.<\/p>\n In July, early-stage US start-up Eudia<\/a> recruited a large team of legal experts to act as quality control for its agentic AI software, when it acquired Johnson Hana<\/a>, an Dublin-based legal services provider that employs more than 300 legal professionals.<\/p>\n \u201cJohnson Hana already had legal professionals that were acting as an extension of the in-house teams [including at] OpenAI and Stripe,\u201d says Omar Haroun, Eudia co-founder and chief executive.\u00a0<\/p>\n As AI improves \u2014 and becomes less prone to \u201challucinations\u201d in which it fabricates information \u2014 Eudia\u2019s new team of human lawyers may become less necessary, adds Haroun. But he is keen to use their \u201cinstitutional knowledge\u201d to support clients as part of an annual software fee.<\/p>\n Haroun believes that Eudia\u2019s software \u2014 used by companies including battery business Duracell and agricultural group Cargill \u2014 will augment lawyers\u2019 output, rather than replace it.\u00a0<\/p>\n A chief legal officer is often responsible for areas such as procurement compliance and HR, says Haroun. \u201cAnd in domains where you have\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009humans doing things manually, the accuracy needs to be 100 per cent \u2014 and therefore AI out of the box will never actually work [without human involvement],\u201d he argues.<\/p>\n HarveyBiggest and best known<\/p>\n Harvey<\/a> is the biggest and best-known of the legal tech start-ups included here. The San Francisco-headquartered company was valued at $5bn in a funding round in June, and has annual recurring revenue \u2014 expected income from subscriptions commonly used by start-ups \u2014 of $100mn<\/a>. <\/p>\n Backed by investors that include venture capital firm Sequoia and AI company OpenAI, Harvey supplies more than 500 law firms and company legal departments in 50-plus countries. It speeds up completion of legal tasks, including research, drafting contracts and document analysis.<\/p>\n \u201c[Law] firms are really starting to figure out how [to] mould this technology to\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009specific practice areas,\u201d says Gabe Pereyra, co-founder of Harvey and a former research scientist at DeepMind, Google\u2019s AI arm.<\/p>\n There is also growing interest in a subset of artificial intelligence, so-called AI agents<\/a>. In theory this software will perform tasks on its own \u2014 make decisions, take action or solve problems \u2014 with less human guidance than generative AI.\u00a0However, use of agentic AI in the legal sector so far has been minimal. <\/p>\n \u201cThe big question that a lot of these law firms and [corporate legal departments] are having is, how do we balance the [concerns about] data, privacy, security\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009with the benefits of AI being able to learn from our data?\u201d Pereyra says.<\/p>\n LegalOnexpansion out of japan<\/p>\n LegalOn<\/a> is among the lower-profile legal tech companies but also one of the most established. The Tokyo-headquartered company has a large customer base in Japan and is expanding in the US and the UK.<\/p>\n Founded in 2017 by a former company lawyer who spotted the potential for machine learning, a type of AI, to undertake some of the most tedious legal tasks, LegalOn makes contract review software for more than 7,000 companies and law firms.\u00a0So far, it has raised $200mn from investors, including Goldman Sachs.<\/p>\n Chief executive Daniel Lewis, who joined LegalOn in 2022, is leading the global expansion.\u00a0\u201cAs we dug into it [we] came away with a really strong conviction that the pain points that in-house, legal teams and businesses were having in Japan were very similar to the\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009pains that companies around the world were having,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that the solution that LegalOn had built in Japan was viable and scalable to the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n LegalOn is investing further in AI, including soon-to-launch agentic AI product features.\u00a0Yet, despite rapid advances in AI assistants generally, such as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini, Lewis insists the technology will not make specialist legal technology redundant.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[Conversational AI] tools are\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009very accessible for lawyers, but people want them grounded in trustworthy content, tuned to legal practice [and] connected to other parts of their workflow,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n LegoraFast-growing European challenger<\/p>\n Other recent entrants to legal tech, such as Sweden\u2019s Legora<\/a>, are growing through investment.\u00a0In May, the company was valued at $675mn in an investment funding round, less than two years after it was founded.\u00a0<\/p>\n Legora\u2019s technology incorporates AI to handle routine legal work, including research and drafting and reviewing contracts at more than 400 law firms and company in-house legal departments.<\/p>\n \u201cThis [AI] technology is ever evolving,\u201d says Legora\u2019s co-founder and chief executive, Max Junestrand. \u201cEvery three six to months, the chessboard of what you can build sort of gets reshuffled, and that means\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009[legal tech providers] need to be extremely agile, flexible.\u201d <\/p>\n Legora, which this year opened its first US office, wants its tech to interface with agentic AI technologies. \u201cWe need to build [Legora] for a human user and we need to build it for an [AI] agent,\u201d says Junestrand.<\/p>\n Workday (Evisort) integration with enterprise IT<\/p>\n An expanding legal tech market is attracting the attention of large enterprise software companies looking to expand their offerings.\u00a0<\/p>\n Workday<\/a>, US supplier of finance and human resources software to businesses, late last year acquired Evisort, which makes AI-powered document and contract software, used by legal teams and other business departments, for an undisclosed amount. In early October 2025, Workday\u2019s market capitalisation was $62bn<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were kind of really surprised that\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Evisort [was] being acquired by a company of Workday\u2019s size,\u201d says Aine Lyons, Workday senior vice-president and deputy general counsel.\u00a0<\/p>\n One reason Workday wanted the deal was to be able to offer its customers software to help manage thousands of contracts and order forms. \u201cThere\u2019s contracts sitting everywhere across the enterprise, but it\u2019s really difficult in many companies to see\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009where\u2019s the single source of truth for all of our contracts and who owns all those contracts,\u201d says Lyons.<\/p>\n Workday, which itself had been using Evisort software for years before the acquisition, estimates it has saved 180,000 hours of staff time annually by not having to manually review more than 100,000 customer contracts and order forms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The market for legal technology is booming, fuelled by artificial intelligence, which is automating tasks from drafting contracts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-63106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}