Happy Friday!

Two interesting moves this week, and both were people bets rather than product bets:

• Anthropic named Robert Mahari its first Head of Claude for Legal, a Stanford CodeX fellow with an MIT doctorate in legal AI

• Harvey hired Steve Zad as Chief Revenue Officer, from Rubrik, where he scaled revenue from $50M to $1.5B and took the company public

One is buying legal depth. The other is buying the machinery to sell at scale.

What neither tells you is what's actually changing inside legal teams. So we're going to ask.

Over the next few weeks we're launching our Spotlight series with GCs, legal ops leaders, and senior in-house counsel.

Someone you'd want to hear from? Reply and tell us who.

We'll go ask them for you.

— Pieter Gunst

CEO & Co-Founder, Legal.io

📊 Data-Driven Legal

C

The grade law firms give their own tech rollouts, per new BARBRI research.

$14M

Wordsmith's Series B extension, led by new investor Intact Private Capital, taking the June round to $84 million.

78%

US plaintiff firms that have built AI into daily work, per a Supio survey of 207 personal injury attorneys. Nearly 8 in 10 have tried it.

📰 Industry Snapshot

EU AI Act transparency obligations took effect August 2

Providers and deployers must now disclose AI interactions, machine-mark synthetic content, and label deepfakes, with penalties up to €15M or 3% of global turnover.

BigHand acquires legal pricing specialist Ayora

The four-year-old London startup uses AI to monitor matter costs and price new business, giving BigHand pricing intelligence to sit alongside its resource management stack.

California bill adding attorney AI guardrails moves toward a vote

SB 574 would require lawyers to verify AI-generated filings and disclose AI use to the court, and bar arbitrators from delegating any part of a decision to AI, with State Bar sanctions for violations.

Mass tort lawyer Mikal Watts aims an AI tool at personal injury firms

Watts spent seven figures building AI to handle document analysis, drafting, and case qualification. His technology partner says it cuts case development time by 70%.

Is this the great legal tech consolidation?

Artificial Lawyer tallies up the year's acquisition spree and asks what buyers are really paying for, and whether legal tech's fragmentation is ending or just pausing.

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