Topic
A category of AI software for legal research, contract review, and drafting, used by law firms and in-house teams; vendors include Harvey and Legora.
Venture-backed AI companies bought 195 AI startups through Sept. 29, Crunchbase data shows, 14% more than all of 2025, while buyers rose just 2%. The same companies are buying more often, so sellers face a pool of acquirers that has barely grown.
Reality
LawVu has launched Lens, contract analysis AI that works from the structured data a legal team already keeps inside LawVu's LegalOS platform. What it can tell a buyer depends on how much of that team's contract record is already there.
Reality
A developer's GraphRAG build turns Thailand's 96-section PDPA into a 190-node graph so an agent can walk from Section 26 to the fines that cite it. The published part argues the vector-search gap from vocabulary and reports no measured recall figures.
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Google and Anthropic are pitching lawyers AI that pulls citations from legal databases as one researcher's tally of fabricated-citation cases nears 2,000. The firm that signs the filing still has to check every citation, whichever lab's connectors produced it.
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Tenet is post-trained on Moonshot's Kimi K3, converting per-call payments to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google into a fixed training bill. The counterparty risk moved rather than disappeared.
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Lightspeed and Diffusion co-led $550m at a $15.6bn mark, which added $4.6bn of paper value in six months and only reads as ordinary software if $400m of ARR becomes about $1.56bn. Eighty of the Am Law 100 already buy.
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Astra for Law is GPT-6 Astra with a legal search index and analysis instructions wrapped around it. OpenAI will also sell that index through an API to Harvey and Legora, at a price it has not published.
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Fearn charges $2,500 for a provisional patent filing and $9,000 for a non-provisional, with its drafting fee at risk if the patent office allows no claims at all, a condition that any single allowed claim clears. Its launch customers talk about turnaround.
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Noxtua's Series C runs past 100 million euros and gives C.H.BECK a qualified majority, while five earlier backers, among them CMS, Dentons and Global Brain Corporation, leave a company built on publishers' data.
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Noxtua's Series C passes 100 million euros and five existing backers exit in the same transaction, so the money is harder to read than the change of control it hands to a 60-million-document publisher.
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Max Junestrand told Politico that Europe's opportunity is in applications, and in the same conversation he agreed that European customers waiting longer for new American models is a competitive disadvantage.
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A March 2026 update lifted usage and inverted Harvey's gross margin, from about 50% to minus 50%. Its answer is Tenet, a legal model post-trained on the open-weight Kimi K3 base and run on compute it controls.
Reality
The legal toolkit ships as its own entry in the ChatGPT model picker and its own API string. Firms weighing it against retrieval stacks they already built still have no price to compare.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
A dev.to guide scores every action an AI legal agent takes by reversibility, blast radius and stakes, then attaches controls by grade: maker-checker on anything executed or filed, attorney review on all substantive work product.
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Supio told SiliconAngle its long-horizon agents own a records request end to end, alerting staff only when it stalls. The company says roughly two-thirds of the work in a case is communication with outside parties.
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Insight Partners manages more than $90 billion and holds late-stage co-investment exposure to both OpenAI and Anthropic, but its direct AI money goes to vertical applications. The legal AI round it skipped is now priced at $5.55 billion.
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Harvey puts roughly 180 former practicing attorneys, most with eight to ten years behind them, into every customer deployment. At its own published pay band that bench costs $39.6m to $57.6m a year in on-target cash.
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Crunchbase counted four U.S. rounds of $1bn or more in one week. Tunneling, truck fleets and reusable rockets took $5.3bn of the $7.3bn, and the United Arab Emirates led the biggest check of the four.
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The band it joined is one where the best closed models still finish under 10% of tasks end to end at roughly $50 and 20 minutes each, so what post-training buys a law firm is price and hosting rather than capability.
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The $15.5 billion price works out near 39 times annual recurring revenue above $400 million, and it rests on a margin claim Harvey has not quantified: that tuning Kimi K3 beats paying OpenAI per call.
Reality
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