Legal AI is in a race against time

Hey, happy Sunday.

This week:

→ Why legal AI companies are in a race to buy time through acquisitions

→ Legora acquires Wexler AI and opens a new office in Seoul

→ The latest legal engineering and AI job opportunities

Acquisitions are accelerating, as the dominant players seek to rapidly expand their own product offerings, teams, and credibility as the default ecosystem for lawyers of the future.

This year, Harvey has acquired multiple businesses. Including Hexus, Lume and Benchmark. Meanwhile, Legora has acquired Walter, Qura, Graceview, Cadastral, and now Wexler.ai. This is a significant amount of activity for a nascent market, and highlights that leading legal AI companies are no longer relying on first principles innovation to grow.

While many attribute this to simple consolidation – as markets mature bigger players tend to acquire their smaller competitors and complementors – I think this could also be down to that legal AI companies are in a race to buy time.

Developing new functionality in-house can be a slow and iterative process. Not only does it require the time to design and release new products, but it also requires time to assemble and train teams, and to convince customers that a new offering is valuable and worth using.

Acquiring another company can be great to gain access to their technology, team, customer base, and reputation in the market. But critically, you also obtain the time that the acquired company has spent developing its product, understanding the market, and learning what works and what doesn’t.

While first principles development will continue to be critical, it will become much more challenging for any single company to develop all core competencies in-house. The most successful companies will employ a mixture of internal development, partnerships, and acquisitions to build a comprehensive legal tech stack.

Legora has acquired Wexler AI, the AI litigation platform, further expanding its capabilities in the legal AI market.

Legora has also opened a new office in Seoul as it continues to expand its presence internationally.

RELX’s Legal division reported 10% underlying revenue growth and 13% growth in adjusted operating profit during the first half of 2026. The company attributed the acceleration to growing adoption of Lexis+ with Protégé and the continued expansion of its AI-enabled legal research, analytics and agentic capabilities.

Flank has launched Record, an agentic contract system designed to keep agreements and their underlying data continuously organised and up to date.

Meanwhile, Crosby has announced plans to provide insurance coverage for the work carried out by its AI agents.

Legal Engineer, Innovation and AI at White and Case

Legal Engineer at Lexis Nexis

Embedded Legal Engineer at Palantir

Lead Legal Engineer at Legora

Wildfires are everywhere right now. From Spain to here in the UK, they are becoming more wide-spread as we see hotter summers.

It turns out, AI is increasingly being used to predict where wildfires are most likely to start and how quickly they could spread. Companies such as Pinepeak are combining machine learning with physics-based modelling to assess wildfire risk at the level of individual properties, while Improving Aviation has developed WindTL to predict ignition risk, fire spread and ember movement using data from satellites, sensors and weather feeds.

Once a wildfire starts, AI can also help detect it earlier and model its likely path in real time. Pano AI uses cameras, satellite data and analytics to identify smoke and alert emergency responders, while Satellites on Fire uses proprietary algorithms to detect and monitor fires from space and is developing fire-spread prediction tools. These systems cannot eliminate the uncertainty caused by shifting winds and weather, but they can give emergency services more time to deploy crews, issue evacuation warnings and protect critical infrastructure.

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See you next week,

George, Editor of Best Practice

PS. I’ll be speaking alongside some top other people in the Legal AI space from 5:00 - 6:00pm BST next Thursday on the skills required to become a future-proof junior. Sign up for free here and show me some support!