Legal AI - Foundation Models, Growth Drivers and Startup Funding

Opportunities, Challenges and Startups in the Legal AI Market

The ability of Large Language Models to analyze, summarize and work with long and complex unstructured text data is a natural fit for the legal profession, as attorneys’ work deals heavily with the reading, analysis and production of documents.

The benefits that AI legal assistants can deliver are multiple, from speeding up document review, to helping create legal strategies and narratives, to generating nuanced agreement clauses and drafting entire documents. They can take the form of General Purpose helpers across all legal processes or specialized assistants in one area of law, jurisdiction or skillset.

Therefore, the AI legal services market is a segment with a lot of potential and it has experienced significant growth in the past year across multiple sub-segments, from General Purpose tools, to contracts and litigation assistants, to specialized helpers, in areas such as European data protection, international and personal injury law.

This is a market with unique characteristics. It requires domain specific understanding of specialized syntax and terminology in each language. The space is quite fragmented, as legal traditions, regulations and procedures vary based not only on national, but also on local jurisdictions. And each type of legal practice comes with its own jurisprudence and particularities, from criminal, to trial, to commercial and corporate law.

Therefore, in order to deliver performant AI legal assistance, application developers need to build their tools on top of specially trained foundation models and test them against specialized benchmarks.

This article is a look at the Legal AI market, focusing on open foundation models, benchmarks and start-up funding. Read below about the SaulLM foundation model series, an open family released this year by Equall, voyage-law-2 for legal embeddings, the LegalBench testing dataset and startup funding rounds for:

• General Purpose legal tools

• Contract Assistants

• Litigation & Discovery tools

• Legal Research Helpers

• Other attorney assistants, including in international law, personal injury and EU data protection law

The stage we are in is only the beginning of the growth in the Legal AI market, because the opportunity is large. To capture its full potential, we need to provide assistants that can reliably cover the entire spectrum of natural languages, types of laws and activities across the operations of legal teams in attorney offices and corporations. The collection of tools in this article is a representative view of the benefits and value that AI can provide for the legal practice, which will grow in size and variety as the market evolves and matures.