#legal-ai

#legal-ai

I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about, 'Why take a hard job? You could go work somewhere else,' Max Junestrand said.

Weinberg said that he's realized he does his best work when he goes to sleep, dreading just how busy he'll be the next day. "The weeks that I do the best work or feel like I did the best work is every single night before I go to bed, I'm like, 'Ah, shit,'" Weinberg told investor Harry Stebbings during a recent episode of Stebbings' "20VC" podcast. Harvey is one of the hottest names in the closely-watched legal AI startup space.

As every industry searches for applications that can turn AI from a novelty into productivity, momentum has swung toward automation and building "agents" to tackle mundane (or not-so-mundane, as the case may be) workflows. In that spirit, LexisNexis has hundreds of pre-built legal automation tools paired with a custom workflow builder intended to streamline everything from drafting motions to redlining contracts against firm playbooks.

"I would try to come up with prompts that were like, 'This is bad,'" Weinberg said.

Every year, TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield pitch contest draws thousands of applicants. We whittle those applications down to the top 200 contenders, and of them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a cash prize of $100,000. But the remaining 180 startups all blew us away as well in their respective categories and compete in their own pitch competition.

This notion masquerading as a truism sounds good. We like it. We want it to be true. It alleviates the need to worry about what AI is doing to our profession. It assures we will all have jobs in the future gazing out the window and thinking all day. And getting paid vast sums of money to do so. It's in every press release and white paper from vendors.

Harvey on Thursday confirmed it closed a round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, that values the legal AI startup at $8 billion after reports of the funding leaked in October. The startup raised $160 million in the round. This latest capital infusion came just months after it raised a $300 million in a Series E round at a $5 billion valuation in June. And that was just months after raising a Sequoia-led $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation in February.

Today, I'm talking with Sean Fitzpatrick, the CEO of LexisNexis, one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For years - including when I was in law school - LexisNexis was basically the library. It's where you went to look up case law, do legal research, and find the laws and precedents you would need to be an effective lawyer for your clients.

"Our partnership with vLex is a natural fit: Its legal data and workflows will enrich our environment, amplifying our ability to deliver intelligent, transformative solutions for clients," said Katherine Lowry, Chief Information Officer at BakerHostetler. "We're entering a phase where AI isn't just a tool - it's part of operations. We're focused on connecting AI to the data we already trust, both internally and externally, to drive better decisions and outcomes."

"A lot of the tasks junior [associates] do are going to get automated," Weinberg says. "That doesn't mean their job's going to get automated. It's just going to be a different job." Built atop language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Harvey's platform streamlines legal workflows by helping lawyers with drafting, contract analysis, legal research, due diligence, regulatory compliance, and case law review.

Some lawyers have learnt that the hard way, and have been fined for filing AI-generated court briefs that misrepresented principles of law and cited non-existent cases. The same is true in other fields. For example, AI models can pass the gold-standard test in finance - the Chartered Financial Analyst exam - yet score poorly on simple tasks required of entry-level financial analysts (see go.nature.com/42tbrgb).

Imagine a day focused on strategic, meaningful legal work instead of tedious, manual tasks. In this guide from our friends at Litify, you can move past the hype and explore the practical ways to use AI throughout your workflow, from intake to billing. Whether itʼs analyzing documents to identify the most important information or leveraging data to determine the next best step, legal AI can help unleash your full potential.

The only way to relieve that pressure is to completely level up and change how you operate,

Junior talent is very willing to try new tools," he said. "The younger you are, usually the more agile you are at adopting a new playbook and figuring it out.

* Google avoids having to spin off Chrome. [Law360] * Lawyers using time saved by AI for more work. [Legal Cheek] * Charging documents for former Biglaw associate arrested in D.C. say someone said hostile things to National Guard troops and a day later they decided it was him. We might have another no bill on our hands. [National Law Journal]