Unicorn Legal Teams rolling out Generative AI at scale

Berlin, Germany - July 17th, 2023‍

Legal OS, a Berlin-based startup backed by Google, announces the public launch of its generative AI platform. The new platform, targeted at in-house legal teams, provides business teams, such as sales and marketing, with a legal assistant that lives wherever they work. In its six month closed beta, Legal OS has already automated tens of thousands of legal requests for established tech scale-ups such as TravelPerk, DeepL, CoachHub & DocPlanner.

It’s no secret that the legal sector is considered to be one of the industries most ripe for AI disruption. We have already seen the first vertical solutions emerging in this space (e.g. Harvey.ai, a company that remains in stealth mode but has already amassed a waitlist of over 80,000 legal practices, CaseText that has been acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million and the growing capabilities of MS Office to support users with simple contract queries, made available to their billion+ user base).

However the question remains if and when these tools will be broadly adopted by organizations and used in real life, key, business activities. Legal and compliance teams can’t afford the risks that “black box” generative AI solutions pose. These teams require tools that are designed specifically to provide a unique level of security, auditability and control. Today in fact, it's challenging to find concrete instances where generative AI is reshaping legal work at scale in organizations.

This is about to change. We are seeing one new category clearly emerge from the noise. Previously business teams could wait hours or days for a response from legal; now this is possible on-demand. Established legal teams from tech unicorns like TravelPerk, DeepL, CoachHub and others are rolling out on-demand legal support bots to their entire organizations of thousands of employees.

"When you actually launch this technology and see users using it, it is a joyful experience. We knew it was going to be impactful, we knew it was going to make change, but the time frame in which that change has come about has been fantastic.” Andy Cooke, GC TravelPerk

Legal OS is the first company to launch a product within this emerging category of legal on-demand. It enables in-house teams to offer on-demand expertise to their organisations via a chat interface embedded in communications tools, email, or the browser. For example, an account executive can receive immediate negotiation support after receiving pushback on a Terms of Service contract, or a marketer can get a rapid review on a third party influencer contract. Legal OS also connects business users to existing workflows in CLMs, CRMs, and further afield. In simple terms, with Legal OS business teams interface with legal as an on-demand product rather than a service.

“Legal tech—tech built for lawyers, for efficiency gains—is akin to software for bank tellers. You can feed an old paradigm but the impact will always only be marginal and incremental,” explains founder and CEO Lilian Breidenbach. “We’re now able to build legal products that optimise for what businesses care most about: operational efficiency, deal speed, and ultimately top line growth. Then the impact can be exponential.”