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AI Legal Tech Players Compared
A field guide to the companies teaching machines to read contracts, run legal research and draft memos. From Sweden's $5.6B Legora to Thomson Reuters' $650M CoCounsel bet, the AI legal tech race pits enterprise platforms, research incumbents and word-processor plug-ins against each other for the same prize: the billable hour. Here is who leads, who they serve and the numbers that separate hype from traction.
How My Company Built an AI App So Good We Sold It for $650 Million
In this Y Combinator Startup School talk, Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, explains how his team stopped everything at $20M in revenue to build CoCounsel, the first AI assistant for lawyers, on early access to GPT-4 — a bet that led to a $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. He lays out a practical playbook across three areas: how to pick an idea (target jobs people already pay for, in categories of assist, replace, or do the previously unthinkable), how to actually build reliable AI (map exactly what a professional does, turn each step into prompts or plain code, and grind on evaluations until you pass 97-99% of tests), and how to market and sell it (build a genuinely great product first, price to value, build trust with head-to-head comparisons, and watch out for pilots that never convert to real revenue).