By Yasmin Lambert, RSGI
Last Thursday (7th May) at the Royal Opera House, Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of legal AI company Legora, stood on stage and proclaimed, “legal AI is dead.”
There may not have been audible gasps, but if you listened carefully, you may have been able to hear the sound of eyebrows rising across the room.
The Legora Precedent event in London was a memorable occasion on several counts. Set beneath the grand glass and iron barrel-vaulted roof of Paul Hamlyn Hall, a string quartet played an orchestral arrangement of a Swedish House Mafia track, while Richard Susskind and Rory Stewart served as opening acts. And while the crowd milled before it all started, there was more than one slightly tongue-in-cheek question of whether Jude Law might make a cameo. Yes, including from me.
The moment everyone had really come to see was the product announcement. “Legal AI is dead,” began Max, followed by: “We’ve entered the age of agentic law.”
What Legora unveiled was Legora aOS: an agentic operating system for legal work. Legora describes its aOS as a single, connected system that facilitates the flow of information, communication and execution of legal work.
In a room of law firm and in-house legal department tech and innovation leaders, working with agentic AI isn’t new. Many have experimented with, and built, agents of varying complexity on legal AI products or more general platforms such as Gemini or Claude over the past year. But aOS caught the crowd’s attention. It was easy to see how lawyers, at scale, might start working with agentic AI in a much more regular and seamless way.
The live demo showed several of the system’s capabilities.
Monitors can be created to scan global regulation and surface relevant developments. In one sequence, a single command produced a series of diagrams mapping corporate entity relationships, extracted from a stack of documents. The demo also featured task-list generation and a large-scale document review for a corporate due diligence exercise.
Following Max’s presentation, legal technology and innovation professionals of different descriptions and job titles crowded the terrace bar to sip cocktails and speculate. Any interest in meeting Jude Law had quickly been displaced by wide-eyed predictions about what agentic law means for the legal industry.
A few thoughts were running through my head.
RSGI is the research partner to the FT Innovative Lawyers programme, which the team founded over 20 years ago. Over the past three years, the first and most common generative AI solutions from law firms have been regulatory trackers. They are not the most innovative or impactful, but they are certainly the most numerous. They serve as client relationship sweeteners – value-added services that firms typically do not charge for.
Lawyers could now use Legora aOS’s Monitor feature to build a customised regulatory tracker for specific jurisdictions, industries, and regulations for clients in 60 seconds or so. While that does not directly threaten law firm revenues, it does mean these trackers are no longer a differentiator. They are a low-cost, broadly standardisable service that all firms, and company legal teams, can build and customise for themselves.
During a client panel discussion, Isabel Parker, chief innovation officer at White & Case, was asked what might look different in 12 months’ time.
By Precedent 2027, she predicted, we will have seen a law firm partner complete a full M&A due diligence exercise on their own. No team, no associates, just one senior lawyer and highly capable agentic AI. While not much of the trillion-dollar global legal services industry is built on regulatory trackers, transactional due diligence accounts for billions in legal spend annually. Managing a job with a single partner would genuinely shake up the industry.
However, the most immediate shock to the legal services industry may be to the legal technology sector. Legora, and its main competitor, Harvey, are pulling further ahead in what looks increasingly like a two-horse race to become the legal AI – or agentic law – platforms for the industry.
Almost weekly, each shares new product announcements, acquisitions and client wins. Legora, for example, acquired regulatory intelligence platform Graceview the day before the Precedent event.
Legal technology point solutions with narrow uses, however, look increasingly to be under pressure. Some will become valuable acquisition targets for the larger players. For others, the outlook is less certain than it was last week.
