In the past week I’ve given a talk to a group of leading general counsel about some of the legal tech adoption trends to be aware of and I’m preparing a talk at Legal Geek on a similar theme, albeit with a very different tone! I thought I’d share a few of those points with you here, as there have been a few fairly revelatory events since the last Orange Rag came out in early August.
The first is ILTA’s survey on who is using what tech was an eye opener, albeit perhaps confirming what we all suspected. Five hundred law firms were asked which technological area they concentrated their efforts on over the past year. By far the largest chunk – 40% – was GenAI. The second largest was cloud applications/SaaS on 25%. That is despite the fact that the survey also shows that 52% of firms still have their accounting system on premises. I’m not saying the focus is wrong, it just shows how much work there is to do.
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Microsoft Copilot is very much at the top (76%) of tools that firms are using followed by Claude (Anthropic) (44%); Thomson Reuters CoCounsel (44%); and Harvey (43%). If you look at how many firms have rolled any tool out to above 30% of staff, the figures drop off a cliff.
The past few weeks has seen the frontier AI providers focus on the legal sector in earnest. OpenAI launched Astra for Law; Google launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal; and Anthropic hired Robert Mahari to head its legal vertical. Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters and Harvey are building their own open-weight and open source models, and Latham & Watkins has bought its own Nvidia GPU servers to fine-tune open-weight AI models in-house. The question is no longer just ‘which tool’ but ‘whose stack?’
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Driving much of this activity is the very real and rising fear over the shift from subscription to consumption when it comes to AI tokens. If you read nothing else, take a look at James Harrison’s piece this month on the AI bill many law firms haven’t priced in and his strategies to cope with the forthcoming changes.
This was also a big month for AI security scares, and our lead analyst Neil Cameron has covered extensively the rogue activity by OpenAI agents, take a look below for a summary of some of the key findings.
THE MONTH IN NUMBERS
$15.5bn Harvey’s valuation after a $550m round, with ARR of $400m
$40m invested by Thomson Reuters to train its own legal LLM, “Thomson”
$1bn Morgan & Morgan’s committed tech and AI spend over the next decade
63% of law firms still price matters using traditional methods (BigHand)
141,006 53,000 historical evaluation runs reviewed by Anthropic after the Hugging Face incident
26 partner plugins at launch for OpenAI’s Astra for Law
<10% of Thomson Reuters’ content used to train Thomson so far
5,700 people at ILTACON 2026 in Nashville over four days
14x rise in token usage at Harvey in six months
53,000 Elite SaaS users. Cloud customers will outnumber on-prem by year end