By Neil Cameron
Wilson Sonsini has taken a paid commercial licence for LexText, a litigation drafting and analysis platform founded in San Francisco in 2024.
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Ben Crosson, a partner in the Palo Alto office and co-chair of the firm’s nationwide securities litigation practice, is quoted in the announcement. “LexText is powerful and built for the way litigators actually work. I’m excited to see how it can help us in our litigation practice,” he said.
Nothing beyond that has been put into the public domain. Seat numbers, offices, practice-group breakdown, timing and commercial terms are all unstated. LexText co-founder and chief executive Jobe Danganan told Legal IT Insider that the arrangement is a paid commercial licence rather than a pilot. That characterisation is the company’s; Wilson Sonsini has not commented on it. The firm has 17 offices and more than 250 litigators, so “licensed for its litigation practice” spans a very wide range of possible deployments.
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Stanford Law School licensed the platform in February. Wilson Sonsini is the first Am Law firm LexText has announced, though Danganan says the company also serves litigation boutiques that have not been named. Its investors include former general counsel of OpenAI, Oracle and Dropbox and former chief legal officers of Uber and Twitter, which goes some way to explaining how a two-year-old company reaches a client of this size.
Danganan was a technology general counsel and litigated at Boies Schiller and Ropes & Gray after clerking on the First Circuit, and he is precise about the product. Guided workflows cover common pleadings and discovery work; the main workflow handles motions and briefs, memos, deposition work, expert reports and case analysis. Lawyers upload the filings, discovery, transcripts and exhibits for a matter, and the case-specific factual record comes from those documents rather than from the model. It is not an eDiscovery platform and does not claim to be.
He is more precise still about what it does not do. Outputs grounded in matter documents identify the source material they rely on. Citations to authority are checked against public case-law records, but that check establishes only that the authority exists and that the citation resolves to it. LexText does not certify that a quoted passage fairly represents its source, or that an authority supports the proposition attached to it. Those, he says, remain lawyer judgments.
That is a sharper line than most vendors in this market are willing to draw. Confirming that a case exists is hallucination control. Confirming that it says what the brief claims it says is legal analysis, and no vendor I am aware of claims to certify that an authority supports the proposition it is cited for.
Asked how a homepage selling defensibility sits alongside terms of service placing review and validation on the customer, Danganan said a vendor can take on contractual obligations and liability but cannot take Rule 11, competence or supervision off the lawyer. Software, he said, can make review faster, more rigorous and easier to evidence. It cannot make the lawyer less responsible.
Worth setting that against the buyer. Wilson Sonsini builds: it runs Neuron and developed SixFifty before selling the business. A firm with that history licensing a two-year-old company’s litigation platform is the part of this worth watching.
Work does persist. Matter materials and generated work product remain in the customer’s workspace, and Danganan says customer data is not used to train models. Whether the system retains a record of what was retrieved for a given output – including material it considered and did not rely on – is a different question, and one he said he would not answer without confirmation from his chief technology or information security officer. That distinction matters. A lawyer returning to a matter needs the work. A court asking a firm to show its working needs the record of how the work was produced, and nothing in this category yet produces one as a matter of course.