Hi and welcome to the July/August Orange Rag, where we bring you all the latest wins, deals, acquisitions and investments of the past month and a half in one place, so you can reflect on some of the key trends we’re seeing in this still over hyped market.
GenAI partnerships continue to dominate the news, and while Charles Russell Speechlys did a great job of setting out the hugely in-depth process by which it selected Harvey, the majority of other recently-announced wins have been for Legora – Mishcon de Reya, Dentons and BCLP feature in this issue.
There have been acquisitions by Epiq and Afriwise, while Elite was acquired by Francisco Partners – regarded by most as a great move, given that Francisco specialises in tech and has an in-depth knowledge of the legal tech market. And we’ve seen substantial raises for LegalOn, Callidus, August and BlueJ.
August (the month) saw the release of GPT-5 and a rush among vendors to be the first to implement it within their product. I’d encourage everyone out there to keep your head and always put the user first – if their needs are best served by rushing to include the latest large language model, so be it. But let’s not be first for the sake of it, at the expense of being thoughtful and considerate of the overload on and continued investment of time from end users.
Last but not least, our top stories include a look at the US AI Action Plan out in July, which is designed to secure U.S. global leadership in AI. The plan contains many positive ideas for AI research and development as well as managing national security risks. It also includes provisions to strip states that stand in the way of deregulation of their AI funding, in a giant swing at the guardrails.
Until September, have a great end of the summer.
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