legal AI

Clio, which sells AI to litigators, now owns the AI that judges in LA County, Michigan and 10 states use to draft bench memos and orders. Its only customer pledge is continued support, so courts should get data segregation, model disclosure and exit rights in writing.

Legal AI models change every quarter; the content library and citator behind them don't. CoCounsel wins research on Westlaw, Legora wins contract work for most legal departments, and Harvey loses on buyer terms despite the best benchmark results.

OpenAI scored Astra for Law at 54% on Vals AI's private validation set, against its own GPT-6 Astra. On Vals' public leaderboard, three general frontier models already sit at 55.29% and Astra for Law is not listed.

Harvey sold flat seats on top of a metered model bill, and agent usage drove its gross margin to -50% by June. The margin recovered after it launched its own Kimi K3-based model, with no reported price change, so renewals of agentic AI seats need model-change and usage terms.

Thomson Reuters' new in-house legal model is a Qwen derivative two hops down, and Harvey's Tenet is post-trained from Kimi K3. Neither lineage appears in a DPA or a subprocessor list — because an open-weight base model provider processes nothing.