Nominations are now open for the 2027 Alli Gerkman Legal Visionary Award, which recognizes an innovator who, early in their career, has made a significant impact toward making the American legal system work better for everyone.

That description fits the person for whom the award is named. Alli Gerkman died of breast cancer…

A legal operations professional requested a demo earlier this year with a note that intrigued me. She said that she was going to “stack” a CLM solution, and she was looking for the workflow portion (which is what my product, Josef, does).

When we met, I dug in further, finding…

Yesterday, OpenAI released Astra for Law, a GPT-6 model tailored for legal work, as I reported here. The announcement included news of 26 new ChatGPT plugins from legal tech vendors, but it mentioned only four: Harvey, iManage, Legora and Thomson Reuters. When I asked OpenAI for the full list, I got no answer.

However,…

Calling it the beginning of its long-term investment in law, ChatGPT developer OpenAI today released Astra for Law, a version of its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, configured for legal work, including a dedicated legal search index and custom instructions for legal analysis and writing.

“Today, we’re introducing Astra for Law: a new foundation…

Call it Alex Su, redux. We do not usually have the same guest on LawNext twice in the same year, but there is good reason to have Alex back, as he has just been named president of Latitude Legal, the flexible legal staffing company.

Last February, Alex and I recorded…

Perhaps it is only fitting that a product launched in the cloud should be renamed for the atmosphere it occupies.

The e-discovery company Relativity announced today that it has renamed RelativityOne, its cloud-based platform, as Relativity aiR, giving it the name that had previously been assigned to Relativity’s suite of AI and agentic capabilities.

The…

The mystery of Bridget M. McCormack’s destination has been solved.

Last week, I reported that McCormack, current president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association and former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, was leaving her job for an undisclosed opportunity that, as she said at the time, “I could not turn…

At the recent conference of the International Legal Technology Association, the big legal AI vendors CoCounsel, Harvey and Legora had outsized presences, with ginormous booths in the exhibit hall, major-name performers at their parties, and advertising so ubiquitous it even popped up in people’s Uber apps. (See: Have We Reached ‘Peak Legal Tech?’ Sure…

Wednesday morning’s keynote session at ILTACON this year opened with a sobering and moving 25th anniversary tribute to 9/11. ILTA showed a 30-minute film it produced with interviews of ILTA members and friends who were in Manhattan that day, followed by an extended moment of silence as the names of everyone who lost their lives…

The legal AI company Harvey said today that it has raised another $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed.

By my calculations, that puts the total amount Harvey has raised since its 2022 launch at north of $1.5 billion.

Other investors participating in this round were Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, a16z,…

Bridget M. McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court who joined the American Arbitration Association in 2023 as its president and CEO, helping to spearhead the AAA’s innovation efforts, particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI, has announced she is stepping down from that role.

Steve Errick, the AAA’s…