Happy Friday!

Revolut, the $45B fintech company, scrapped its law firm panel and replaced it with a performance-based system that uses AI to rate firms on hard metrics instead of relationships and reputation.

For decades, the panel has been the default way large companies organize outside counsel.

Revolut's bet: skip the curated list and measure cost, responsiveness and outcomes in real time, then let the data decide who gets the next matter.

Revolut isn't an outlier. Kirkland just partnered with Palantir. Milbank's new pay scale keeps compensation high at the top of the market. And legal tech funding is hitting record numbers. All of this is part of an unprecedented reallocation of legal work.

My take? In-house teams don't need to rip out the panel but they do need to make it measurable to stay competitive.

That's exactly what we built Legal.io's panel management solution to do. It organizes your outside counsel relationships in a single, searchable hub and shows where law firms benchmark against your panel and the market.

The result is renewal and budget decisions guided by data instead of habit.

• Learn more about our panel management solution
• Try our panel management tools

— Pieter Gunst

CEO & Co-Founder, Legal.io

📊 Data-Driven Legal

52

Sidley Austin's partnership promotions this year, a record class driven by the firm's brand-new nonequity tier.

12-to-1

The pay gap between the highest- and lowest-paid equity partners in the Am Law 100 in 2025.

$500M

What Kirkland & Ellis will invest over three to four years to build its own in-house AI system.

📰 Industry Snapshot

Revolut scraps its law firm panel as AI rates firm performance

The $45B fintech replaced its curated panel with a performance-based system that uses AI to score firms on cost, responsiveness, and outcomes.

Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig joins OpenAI to lead its legal vertical

The CLM pioneer is now "building AGI for law" at OpenAI, which is preparing a legal-specific offering to rival Anthropic.

Tech job cuts surge to a nearly two-year high

Big Tech announced more than 38,000 cuts in May, with AI now the leading reason companies give for eliminating roles.

Wordsmith raises $70M Series B

The AI startup built for in-house legal teams lands a fresh round to expand its outside-counsel tooling.

Senators introduce bill to increase access to federal court records

The bipartisan Open Courts Act would overhaul PACER and make federal court records free to search and access.

Stanford study finds AI beats law professors 75% of the time

New research shows AI outperforming legal academics on a majority of tasks tested, raising fresh questions for legal education.

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