The University of Chicago Law School yesterday released a comprehensive AI Strategy Statement that will reshape how it teaches first-year students, how it assesses upper-level writing, and how it integrates AI tools across its curriculum — including a pilot program that will prohibit laptops, tablets and phones in all core 1L classes starting this fall.
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Two Years After Launching Its AI Assistant Archie, Smokeball Rolls Out the ‘Next Generation’ Built on Agentic AI, and Embedded in Word and Outlook
Two years ago, the law practice management company Smokeball gave me an exclusive preview of its plans for an AI ecosystem spanning the full client lifecycle, anchored by an AI matter assistant called Archie, which it formally launched in July 2024. Now the company has released the next generation of Archie AI, a major overhaul…
Centari Launches External Views, Enabling Firms to Share Deal Intelligence Dashboards Directly with Clients
Centari, an AI platform for managing complex transactions, today launched External Views, a capability that allows law firms to create white-labeled dashboards and share them directly with clients. The feature builds on Centari’s Views capability, introduced earlier this year, which enables firms to analyze transaction trends, benchmark market positions, and visualize deal data across their…
Norm Ai Hits Unicorn Status with $120M Series C at $1.2 Billion Valuation
Norm Ai, the New York-based legal and compliance AI company, today announced a $120 million Series C round at a $1.2 billion valuation, crossing the unicorn threshold and joining a growing but still select club of legal AI companies valued at $1 billion or more. Khosla Ventures led the round, in its first investment in…
On LawNext: Inside Claude for Legal — Anthropic’s Mark Pike on AI’s Next Frontier in Law
When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company’s biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that’s been simmering since Anthropic’s first legal plugin briefly rattled the…
Fastcase And Alexi Head To Court This Week In High-Stakes Fight Over Legal AI, Caselaw Data And Clio’s $1B vLex Deal
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments this week in a case that could help define the rules of the road for legal AI companies that rely on licensed caselaw data. The case, Fastcase Inc. v. Alexi Technologies Inc., pending before Judge Richard J. Leon in the U.S. District Court for the District…
Universal Migrator Now Supports Migrations From More Than 170 Applications
Universal Migrator has expanded its migration library to support more than 170 legal and business applications, giving legal technology consultants access to one of the industry’s broadest collections of reusable migration scripts. The expanded library enables consultants to migrate data between a wide range of practice management, document management, CRM, billing, accounting, and other business…
Frontline Justice and Josef Partner on Multi-State Rollout of AI to Protect Access to SNAP Benefits
The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is a critical benefit that helps to alleviate food insecurity for vulnerable populations, supporting over 40 million low-income individuals, nearly three quarters of whom live at or below the federal poverty level. But recent changes to the program enacted as part of H.R. 1 (aka the Big…
On LawNext: Legal Research for Everyone: Inside the CourtListener-Claude Partnership
Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced a major push into legal, much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem. But the less talked about side of the story…
After the BARBRI Deal, Lega’s Christian Lang Says the Governance Platform Isn’t Going Away, But It Is Going to School
When I wrote last week about BARBRI’s acquisition of Lega, I had not yet had the chance to speak with Lega founder Christian Lang, who was traveling. So I closed that post with what was admittedly conjecture on my part – that the large-language-model governance product that defined Lega when it launched in 2023 was…
Supio Hires COO of Nevada’s Largest PI Firm As Its First VP of Industry, To Help Drive Innovation Strategy
Supio, the AI platform built for plaintiffs’ personal injury firms, has hired Melissa Graham, chief operating officer of Nevada’s Richard Harris Law Firm for the last 15 years, as its vice president of industry, a newly created role aimed at narrowing the gap between the people who build legal technology and the people who actually…
At 3rd Circuit, Judges Press ROSS and Thomson Reuters on Fair Use, AI Training and Market Harm
The closely watched copyright litigation between Thomson Reuters and ROSS Intelligence returned to the spotlight this month as a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether ROSS’s use of Westlaw headnotes to train its legal research system was protected by fair use. At oral argument June 11 in…
Perplexity Makes Its Move Into Legal, Unveiling Industry Features at ‘Computer for Counsel’ Event
Perplexity, the AI search engine known for delivering sourced answers to user queries, is making an explicit move into the legal market, rolling out legal-specific features within its agentic platform, Perplexity Computer, and positioning the product as what it calls “Computer for Counsel.” The company highlighted the legal push yesterday at an invitation-only event in…
Sapphire Legal Has Built A Legal Platform for a Market Almost No One Else Is Chasing: The Fractional GC
Recently I sat through a demo of a product unlike anything I’d seen before, aimed at a segment of the legal profession that legal tech companies have largely ignored – the fractional general counsel, lawyers who serve as outside in-house counsel for multiple companies too small to have their own legal departments. The product is…
Abstract Extends Its Legislative Intelligence into Agentic Workflow Automation with Launch of ‘Abstract Workers’
When I wrote about Abstract in April, I reported on how the New York-based startup was making a push into the market for legislative and regulatory monitoring, alerting law firms and corporate legal teams to the bills and rules that matter to a client, even when they never mention that client’s industry by name. Now…
Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker on the Next Generation of CoCounsel, the ‘Future of Professionals’ Report, and Why TR Is Building Its Own LLM
Yesterday, Thomson Reuters made two announcements. It opened early access to the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, the most substantial reworking of its flagship legal AI assistant since the company acquired Casetext in 2023, and it released its Future of Professionals Report 2026, which warns of a widening gap between AI adoption and the value…