The AI giants are coming for legal tech’s lunch

Since the generative AI boom began, legal technology companies have largely built products on top of large language models. Now, the AI giants building the models appear to want a larger share of the market themselves.

Another signal came this week when Jason Boehmig, the founder of contract management pioneer Ironclad, announced he had joined OpenAI to lead product for the company's legal vertical.

The move follows reports that OpenAI is preparing a dedicated legal offering of its own called Codex for Legal, according to Artificial Lawyer.

A notable hire

A former lawyer at Silicon Valley firm Fenwick & West, Boehmig spent years building one of the most influential legal software businesses of the cloud era, helping turn Ironclad into a fixture of in-house legal departments.

In a LinkedIn post, his message focused on collaboration. He wrote: “It’s a mistake to believe that any one player can do it alone, even a frontier lab,” adding: “I want to hear from you, the builders. I’ve always admired the creativity and civic mindedness that lawyers possess.”

The legal push

Only weeks earlier, Anthropic unveiled Claude for Legal, its most direct move into the sector to date. The launch included more than 20 integrations with third-party systems and a dozen legal-specific plugins.

The move built on Anthropic’s growing legal sector push. Earlier this year, the company launched a legal-focused AI plugin for its enterprise product, followed by a Word add-in.

This week, the company posted a new role offering up to $345,000 a year for “a legal scholar who has engaged seriously with AI, or a policy official who has worked on technology governance”.

It has also been building closer relationships with major law firms, including a recently announced partnership with Freshfields.

Going direct

For much of the past two years, foundation model companies largely positioned themselves as infrastructure providers. Legal technology vendors built the workflows, user interfaces and practice-specific tools that sat on top.

Microsoft has also been edging deeper into legal tech territory with the launch of a contract review “Legal Agent” in April, allowing lawyers to review, edit and negotiate contracts directly inside Word.

The move followed Microsoft’s hire of an 18-strong team of product managers and legal engineers from legal AI startup Robin earlier this year, including Kitty Boxall, formerly Robin’s director of legal engineering and now a principal product manager at Microsoft.

‍A changing market

The push may reflect how many lawyers are already using AI. A survey last year found that 66% of in-house legal teams are using tools like ChatGPT, compared with just 17% using dedicated legal AI tools.

For specialist legal tech companies, that presents a challenge with lawyers increasingly comfortable working directly inside products created by the model providers themselves.

Collectively, these moves hint at a very different future from one in which frontier AI companies simply supply the underlying models. Increasingly, the AI giants are packaging legal expertise, legal workflows and legal integrations themselves.