@computational
Pinned post
@crosbylegal has secured a $5m malpractice insurance policy for our agents. As far as we know, this is the first of its kind.View quoted post on X
9 months ago we began to notice our agents were getting extremely capable. In some cases, they did better work than our lawyers.
We are a law firm. We needed to invent a safe way for our agents to do client-facing work without human oversight. It took a lot of work, but this is it.
As soon as the policy went into effect on Nov 3, we removed lawyer oversight from any task that doesn't legally require licensed attorney oversight - what we call "paralegal tasks."
This is ~20% of our work. It frees up our lawyers to focus on what they're best at: thinking, exercising judgment, advising our clients.
This is just the beginning. Once regulations change, we see no reason why our agents can't do excellent legal work too.
Read more in the NYT: nytimes.com/2026/11/07/bus…
Outside of Harvey and Legora, VC money in legal is down 39% year over year, and median round sizes dropped 25%. Harvey and Legora took 62% of the pie.View quoted post on X
A few random thoughts:
1) I've talked to a lot of old colleagues at top Silicon Valley firms. The collective frustration with Harvey and Legora's product among BigLaw lawyers makes it feel like bad product is winning the category. That's hard for builders to swallow, because Harvey and Legora's distribution has always felt impossible to match, and that's exactly why they're winning. The general groan is "they can't keep getting away with this."
2) But are they actually winning the category? Unfortunately (or fortunately), the market is maturing. I've talked to a handful of Chief AI Officer types at BigLaw firms, and they all know Harvey and Legora were hype marketing for their firm. They HAD to buy in 2024-2025, because buying was social proof for clients: "look, I'm doing AI too!" That facade is long gone. Now the leaders and the users want to go full frontier lab and build in-house.
3) The godfathers are tightening their stranglehold. Token economics are burying Harvey and Legora, and every lab is tuning its frontier models to solve legal the way they solved coding. Even non-AI-pilled lawyers are using Claude or ChatGPT at work as their daily driver, or moonlighting on personal accounts. That S-1 is going to have to gaslight a lot of people to match the latest private valuations.
4) Harvey and Legora have to solve tokenomics by building their own models. That has been the narrative driving their last raise. The question is, why can't firms do it themselves, and why can't firms also just go straight to OpenAI and Anthropic for better deals? The answer is they can and they will, so the veneer feels thin.
5) I've advised quite a few VC-backed legal entrants, and the dissonance is deafening.
- The ones who raised are learning the hard way that their product edge over Harvey and Legora doesn't matter one iota. They can't break into BigLaw at this stage, not because Harvey and Legora won but BigLaw is getting smart too. They'll listen but the bar for buying is incredibly high. So they move down market, into a fractured field of pre-AI incumbents and frontier-lab-pilled users.
- Or they try the AI-native firm play, and run head-on into traditional firm economics. They can't afford big partners and top talent, and even if they could, those partners can leave with their clients in a split second (see Weil). They don't have enough equity % to meet the salary gap, and everyone is quietly whispering about their exit economics. So they get the BigLaw dropouts who never wanted to work hard anyway, and the brand suffers because the work quality sucks.
6) VC itself is struggling for a story. The Harvey and Legora flip already happened, so those winners are set, but the next one is impossible to predict. Do you bet on Sandstone, OneGC and GCAI, and that in-house churns BigLaw altogether? Is that the venture story? Do you bet on AI-native firms and wonder, in the back of your head, whether reaching the AmLaw 100 is even a venture-worthy exit? Do you bet on practice management and hope someone can disrupt Clio? What does any of that look like if the market keeps slowing?
7) Venture and the traditional partnership are both badly positioned for the headwinds AND tailwinds of AI-powered legal. I think a new category is brewing, and my bet is private equity, or something PE-shaped. The side story: PE investment in legal is definitely going up, so on net, VC plus PE investment in legal may still be growing. PE can stomach non-venture exits, and the cash flow from personal injury and plaintiff-side plays is already making kings. You just don't hear about it on X with the same fervor.
Probably the absolute best time to build.
View quoted post on X
Got fable to hand-write weights of a 100k param model to recognize real versus fake legal citations.
Basically one-shotted a full NN that’s better than training itView quoted post on X
