By Caroline Hill, editor, Legal IT Insider
“When you think about the overall strategy of Bloomberg and extending into workflows using our proprietary data and intelligence, that really is what, to me, the Bloomberg brand is all about and trying to figure out ways to combine the power of both software and that data set or assets that we’ve built over 25 years.”
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I’m speaking to Kara Delvechhio, chief revenue officer of Bloomberg Industry Group about where Bloomberg Law has, or at least had, been hiding as competitors announce back-to-back AI products and development.
We’re speaking in the run up to ILTACON, where Bloomberg unveiled its new AI powered experience, definitively answering the question of what it has been working on, although not, perhaps, why it has taken so long. Key to that announcement was BLAW AI for legal questions and analysis; Workspaces to create an environment for research; and AI agents for guided workflow.
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In terms of Workspaces, Delvecchio says that “…Workspaces are where you’re taking the context of your own documents, your own thinking from your firm, for example, and our AI outputs together to drive work product,” observing, “I don’t think that that’s necessarily breaking news. I know that there are other vendors that do this. But I think where we’re special is combining, again, that context, particularly with the news, with the dockets, with the proprietary content we have and that AI output and what your firm is thinking and putting that all in one space.”
Perhaps most significantly, however, was the announcement that Bloomberg Law is previewing new interoperability capabilities to bring its intelligence and data into a legal organisation’s own platform. Using MCP, Bloomberg Law now offers an integration with Anthropic’s Claude. This is interesting because it’s a recognition that firms may want to consume the data without the UI that legal publishers at large have progressively had to let go of.
MCP
Bloomberg Law has partnerships with some of the biggest law firms including Latham & Watkin, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden Arps. Without naming any names herself, Delvecchio says the company has been talking to customers about what it needs to do to provide the best content and how they want to consume it.
While workspaces may be the right answer for many firms, it is Bloomberg’s most progressive firms and in-house counsel that are asking for MCPs to enable Bloomberg’s system and data assets to talk to their own system.
“[They’re saying] we don’t actually need your interface. We just want to get the data and our systems together. So I think that’s actually what’s coming next in this race,” Delvechhio says.
Delvecchio’s dialogue is refreshing on the topic, couched in an awareness of what customers are trying to achieve. “It depends on how organisations need us to serve up that information,” she says. “There’s a wide continuum. Some of our law firms have built their own LLMs internally. And so they don’t want another LLM or Claude to come in and sit on top of that. They want the trusted data source to integrate with the LLM that they’ve built, or the internal systems they’ve built, or the internal container that houses their data in a secure environment. And obviously, as you know, lawyers and law firms care a lot about this. And so our MCP protocols actually allow us to do that in a way that a lot of our customers need us to right now.”
She adds: “I think that next frontier of ‘how do we get the data to you in a different way’ is really where we’re trying to think ahead. A lot of our customers already use things like our dockets API or our news API, where they’re taking some of that information and feeding it into the workflows of the firm already. So this is really an extension of that and just an easier way for us to connect those contexts.”
This is the culmination or at least a major deliverable of an interoperability strategy that Bloomberg has long been working on led among others by Bloomberg Industry Group’s chief product officer Bobby Puglia, who has a background in financial data systems and who last year told Legal IT Insider: “Since the advancement of GenAI one side effect has been more of a push for interoperability and the need for systems to talk to each other – integration is where we see the longer term future.”
It’s important to note that the recent news wasn’t Bloomberg’s first GenAI announcement – it publicly launched its AI assistant in January last year, alongside Bloomberg Law Answers. Delvecchio says adoption has been “incredible,” citing the fact that users can leverage all Bloomberg’s proprietary content, including its news, which is a huge part of the context.
The background work
As to why Bloomberg has, by its own admission, nonetheless been quiet until now, Delvecchio says that the company has been “thoughtful and careful” about how they deliver results to attorneys when “there’s not really a lot of room for mistakes in their work.”
She flags the acquisitions of project management and workflow tool Dashboard Legal two years ago and, more recently, in June, Regology, an AI regulatory intelligence platform.
It is Dashboard that helps you work out who is working on what cases and matters and how they are using AI to do their work in a team environment. “We’ve already invested in that and we’re building agents within Dashboard Legal to help you do the work, particularly around how you get work done across a very large firm,” Delvecchio says. The new Workspaces are a result of this work.
Regology is “by far the most exciting thing we’ve done since I’ve gotten here,” she says. It helps in-house counsel but also law firms keep up with regulatory changes internationally. Bloomberg is looking at combining the data and assets of Regology with Bloomberg Law and Dashboard Legal, with Delvecchio commenting, “we’re trying to think about a broader perspective when we think about our AI tooling and workflows.”
The future
Visibility in this market, rightly or wrongly, takes continual effort and reinvention, at a time when FOMO is still arguably driving decision making.
For end users looking behind the headlines, however, perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the recent announcements shouldn’t necessarily be ‘Bloomberg Law launches more AI stuff’ but that Bloomberg is trying to turn legal research into an ongoing workflow. Research is becoming a component of a larger legal AI working environment rather than a destination. And, particularly in a world where frontier AI models are increasingly focusing on legal, the reliable data and context layer is proving more defensible than the interface.