The market for legal technology is booming, fuelled by artificial intelligence, which is automating tasks from drafting contracts to providing initial legal opinions.
By 2030, the global legal technology market will be worth about $47bn, up from about $27bn in 2024, Grand View Research has forecast.
Here we highlight six legal tech companies that are making a mark as they explore the potential of artificial intelligence to enhance legal services.
They were chosen from a longer list of 20 contenders compiled by the FT’s research partner RSGI, based on funding, acquisitions, growth and commentary from law firms and in-house legal teams. The final selection was decided by a panel of legal tech experts: Sandeep Agarwal, partner, PwC; Connie Brenton, founder, LegalOps.com; Caroline Hill, editor-in-chief, Legal IT Insider; Joy Heath Rush, president, International Legal Technology Association; Kerry Westland, partner, Addleshaw Goddard; and RSGI.
Clio
industry veteran expands capabilities
Canada’s Clio, whose software is used by more than 150,000 legal professionals, is among legal AI start-up Harvey’s closer competitors, based on financials. The company was valued at $3bn in a July 2024 funding round.
In June, Clio announced it had agreed to acquire vLex, a Spanish legal tech and AI supplier, for $1bn. The deal, when finalised, will add legal research and AI functionality to Clio’s software, which manages clients, billing and documents.
The vLex software includes an archive of more than 1bn legal documents drawn from court decisions, governments and publishers in more than 100 countries. Clients use it for legal research and litigation.
“There will be a flight to quality in legal AI and, ultimately, quality is going to be determined by the quality of the data that your AI models are built on top of,” predicts Jack Newton, Clio chief executive and founder.
Eudia
Platform-plus-services upstart
Despite the automation trend, some legal tech start-ups are choosing to bundle human intelligence — and gut instinct — into their products.
In July, early-stage US start-up Eudia recruited a large team of legal experts to act as quality control for its agentic AI software, when it acquired Johnson Hana, an Dublin-based legal services provider that employs more than 300 legal professionals.
“Johnson Hana already had legal professionals that were acting as an extension of the in-house teams [including at] OpenAI and Stripe,” says Omar Haroun, Eudia co-founder and chief executive.
As AI improves — and becomes less prone to “hallucinations” in which it fabricates information — Eudia’s new team of human lawyers may become less necessary, adds Haroun. But he is keen to use their “institutional knowledge” to support clients as part of an annual software fee.
Haroun believes that Eudia’s software — used by companies including battery business Duracell and agricultural group Cargill — will augment lawyers’ output, rather than replace it.
A chief legal officer is often responsible for areas such as procurement compliance and HR, says Haroun. “And in domains where you have . . . humans doing things manually, the accuracy needs to be 100 per cent — and therefore AI out of the box will never actually work [without human involvement],” he argues.
Harvey
Biggest and best known
Harvey is the biggest and best-known of the legal tech start-ups included here. The San Francisco-headquartered company was valued at $5bn in a funding round in June, and has annual recurring revenue — expected income from subscriptions commonly used by start-ups — of $100mn.
Backed by investors that include venture capital firm Sequoia and AI company OpenAI, Harvey supplies more than 500 law firms and company legal departments in 50-plus countries. It speeds up completion of legal tasks, including research, drafting contracts and document analysis.
“[Law] firms are really starting to figure out how [to] mould this technology to . . . specific practice areas,” says Gabe Pereyra, co-founder of Harvey and a former research scientist at DeepMind, Google’s AI arm.
There is also growing interest in a subset of artificial intelligence, so-called AI agents. In theory this software will perform tasks on its own — make decisions, take action or solve problems — with less human guidance than generative AI. However, use of agentic AI in the legal sector so far has been minimal.
“The big question that a lot of these law firms and [corporate legal departments] are having is, how do we balance the [concerns about] data, privacy, security . . . with the benefits of AI being able to learn from our data?” Pereyra says.
LegalOn
expansion out of japan
LegalOn is among the lower-profile legal tech companies but also one of the most established. The Tokyo-headquartered company has a large customer base in Japan and is expanding in the US and the UK.
Founded in 2017 by a former company lawyer who spotted the potential for machine learning, a type of AI, to undertake some of the most tedious legal tasks, LegalOn makes contract review software for more than 7,000 companies and law firms. So far, it has raised $200mn from investors, including Goldman Sachs.
Chief executive Daniel Lewis, who joined LegalOn in 2022, is leading the global expansion. “As we dug into it [we] came away with a really strong conviction that the pain points that in-house, legal teams and businesses were having in Japan were very similar to the . . . pains that companies around the world were having,” he says. “And that the solution that LegalOn had built in Japan was viable and scalable to the rest of the world.”
LegalOn is investing further in AI, including soon-to-launch agentic AI product features. Yet, despite rapid advances in AI assistants generally, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Lewis insists the technology will not make specialist legal technology redundant.
“[Conversational AI] tools are . . . very accessible for lawyers, but people want them grounded in trustworthy content, tuned to legal practice [and] connected to other parts of their workflow,” he says.
Legora
Fast-growing European challenger
Other recent entrants to legal tech, such as Sweden’s Legora, are growing through investment. In May, the company was valued at $675mn in an investment funding round, less than two years after it was founded.
Legora’s technology incorporates AI to handle routine legal work, including research and drafting and reviewing contracts at more than 400 law firms and company in-house legal departments.
“This [AI] technology is ever evolving,” says Legora’s co-founder and chief executive, Max Junestrand. “Every three six to months, the chessboard of what you can build sort of gets reshuffled, and that means . . . [legal tech providers] need to be extremely agile, flexible.”
Legora, which this year opened its first US office, wants its tech to interface with agentic AI technologies. “We need to build [Legora] for a human user and we need to build it for an [AI] agent,” says Junestrand.
Workday (Evisort)
integration with enterprise IT
An expanding legal tech market is attracting the attention of large enterprise software companies looking to expand their offerings.
Workday, US supplier of finance and human resources software to businesses, late last year acquired Evisort, which makes AI-powered document and contract software, used by legal teams and other business departments, for an undisclosed amount. In early October 2025, Workday’s market capitalisation was $62bn.
“People were kind of really surprised that . . . Evisort [was] being acquired by a company of Workday’s size,” says Aine Lyons, Workday senior vice-president and deputy general counsel.
One reason Workday wanted the deal was to be able to offer its customers software to help manage thousands of contracts and order forms. “There’s contracts sitting everywhere across the enterprise, but it’s really difficult in many companies to see . . . where’s the single source of truth for all of our contracts and who owns all those contracts,” says Lyons.
Workday, which itself had been using Evisort software for years before the acquisition, estimates it has saved 180,000 hours of staff time annually by not having to manually review more than 100,000 customer contracts and order forms.
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