On March 11, 2026, some 200 employees of Thomson Reuters – many of them based at the company’s Westlaw operations in St. Paul, Minn. – sent a letter to management with an unequivocal demand: Do not renew the company’s $22.8 million contract with ICE, set to expire on May 31.
(See Part 1 of this two-part post: How Thomson …
Continue Reading The Legal Tech Giants Powering ICE, Part 2 — The Pushback: Employees, Shareholders, Lawyers and the Fight Over May 31

Recorded live at the annual meeting of the Legal Marketing Association in New Orleans, this episode features my conversation with Rachel Shields Williams, president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel…
Continue Reading Legal Marketing Association President Rachel Shields Williams On AI, Innovation, and Why People Still Come First

8am, the parent company of a suite of practice and business management products for lawyers and accountants, is now guaranteeing next-day payments for customers of its LawPay and CPACharge payments platforms, it said today.
The company also announced new capabilities that it says streamline billing and improve visibility into financial performance for its customers.
The company said that next-business-day deposits…
Continue Reading 8am Now Guarantees Next-Day Payments To Its LawPay Customers

For the lawyers and other legal professionals who use Westlaw and LexisNexis every day, these platforms are familiar tools of the trade – essential systems for finding case law, checking citations and getting practical guidance.
But behind those familiar research services is a less-familiar story. The same two corporate parents that dominate legal research have, since the early 2000s, built…
Continue Reading The Legal Tech Giants Powering ICE, Part 1 — How Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Helped Support America’s Immigration Surveillance Machine

Gavel, the Los Angeles-based legal AI company, today announced the launch of Gavel Exec for Web, a browser-based expansion of its AI contract review and drafting product that until now has lived primarily as an add-in inside Microsoft Word.
“With Gavel Exec for Web, lawyers can chat with an AI purpose-built for legal work, benchmark documents against market standards…
Continue Reading Gavel Launches Web-Based AI Contract Platform, Expanding ‘Gavel Exec’ Beyond Its Word Add-In

Questel, an intellectual property software and services company headquartered in Paris, has released QaECTER, a new AI model designed specifically for semantic patent retrieval.
The company says the model outperforms competing systems, including those that are significantly larger, across every query type, technology domain and jurisdiction tested.
QaECTER is the product of Questel’s in-house AI Lab, which developed…
Continue Reading Questel Launches QaECTER, a New AI Model Claiming State-of-the-Art Performance in Patent Search

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Israeli entrepreneur Erez Vega-Kadoch kept receiving what he considered to be inappropriate text messages from an Israeli company. Never having consented to the messages, he decided to fight back and file a small claims case against the company.
But when he searched for a tool that would help…
Continue Reading Flash Justice Aims to Take Small-Claims Plaintiffs Not Just to the Form, But All the Way through Filing

A New York-based legal tech startup called Abstract is making a push into the market for legislative and regulatory monitoring, offering law firms and corporate legal departments what it describes as a fundamentally different approach to keeping clients and businesses informed about government activity that may affect them.
At Legalweek in March, I had a chance to meet with Abstract…
Continue Reading Abstract Brings AI-Powered Legislative Intelligence to Law Firms and Corporate Legal Teams

Legal AI has made lawyers faster. Faster contract review. Smarter redlines. Drafting assistance that saves real time.
For the most part, legal AI products have been built around lawyers: how they work and how to make that work better. This isn’t surprising when you consider whose budget pays for legal AI.
But the first friction that clients and business users…
Continue Reading Guest Post: The Intake Form Is Dead. Long Live the Template.

Clio has made Clio Work — the AI workspace for legal research, analysis and strategy it launched last October — available as a standalone product for  solo, small and mid-sized law firms, removing the requirement that customers also subscribe to its flagship practice management platform, Clio Manage.
The Vancouver-based company, which describes itself as the global leader in legal AI,…
Continue Reading Clio Work, Clio’s AI Workspace, Is Now Available To Solo and Smaller Law Firms As A Standalone Product

LexisNexis and Luminance today announced a partnership that will let mutual in-house legal customers access LexisNexis’s Protégé AI assistant from inside Luminance’s contract negotiation platform, with a pathway to move into Lexis+ with Protégé for more involved legal work.
Under the arrangement, users working in Luminance’s natural-language assistant, Lumi, can pose legal questions and receive answers drawn from LexisNexis’s case…
Continue Reading LexisNexis and Luminance Announce Partnership to Embed Protégé Inside Luminance’s Contract Platform

It started with Harvey, the legal AI company that signed Gabriel Macht – the actor who played Harvey Specter on Suits – as a brand ambassador. Then Legora one-upped everyone by signing the actor Jude Law, building a whole campaign around the tagline, “Law just got more attractive,” and shooting the thing with an Oscar-winning cinematographer.
Harvey also locked up…
Continue Reading A Public Service Announcement: Legal Tech Companies, Here Are Your Celebrity Endorsers

In its sixth acquisition, Alt Legal, the cloud-based trademark docketing and management platform, has acquired WebTMS, a UK-based provider of IP portfolio management software with more than 25 years in business and over 500 clients globally.
The acquisition, announced today, brings together Alt Legal’s automation-driven approach to trademark docketing with WebTMS’s deep configurability and global portfolio management capabilities.
Continue Reading Alt Legal Acquires UK-Based WebTMS, Adding Global IP Portfolio Management to Its Trademark Platform