The New York Times’ Yiren Lu reports that A.I. has exploded in the eyes of company founders and venture capitalists alike.
Not referring to legal tech specifically, Lu shares,
“One appeal of generative A.I. is that it offers something for every would-be entrepreneur. For the technically minded, there is research to be done. For the business types, it’s easy to create applications on top of the OpenAI platforms. For the philosophically inclined, A.I. offers interesting avenues through which to explore what it means to be conscious and human. And unlike crypto, especially now, A.I. is a more credible field to be in for mainstream techies. Its products have already achieved significant traction among consumers — ChatGPT is believed to be the fastest app ever to hit 100 million users — and some of the figures at its forefront are familiar faces, now in their second acts, like Sam Altman, formerly the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, and Greg Brockman, formerly the chief technology officer at Stripe, the payments-processing company. In short, you can’t help thinking that, as one friend recently proclaimed to me, “Everyone in S.F. is either starting or running an A.I. company or starting or running an A.I. fund.”
Is everyone in legal tech running or starting an A.I. company or an A.I. fund, in the case of legal tech investors? Of course not.
But I’d guess a quarter of existing legal tech companies are working on product offerings using A.I.
Funders of legal tech tend to be diverse in the verticals in which they invest, but based upon the announcements I’ve seen and from my discussions with lawyers doing start-up and emerging growth work, investors are looking to invest in A.I. when it comes to legal tech.
Lu even cites one legal tech company as part of the A.I. explosion in San Francisco.
Fileread automates tedious business tasks like copywriting or spreadsheet wrangling.
“Its law-firm customers upload all the documents relevant to a particular case into an online portal; Fileread indexes those documents into a special database that enables users to search the documents not only for exact terms like “truck” or “James,” but also for broader questions like “who made the transaction?” or “what are the relevant cases?” Under the hood, Fileread first fetches the most relevant documents from its database, then adds those documents to a user’s question and sends the whole, long query to the OpenAI application programming interface, or A.P.I. Fileread then spits out an answer, powered by the same large language models behind ChatGPT“
We’re part of a wild world when A.I. entrepreneurs and their investors are moving as fast – or faster – than in the dot com era of twenty-five years ago.
Legal tech may not be moving near as fast as A.I. in other verticals, but the legal community can expect to see an A.I. explosion in legal tech – if they haven’t already.