Advocacy launched an agent that proposes litigation work and charges only for the parts a lawyer accepts, which is roughly how clients have always wished associates were billed. August let a client’s software agents put legal questions to their law firm’s agents, and Relativity took away the option to switch AI off in breach response. The billable hour has had quieter weeks. Read the issue →
The index of AI vendors in legal
The AI Legal Index is an independent index that tracks changes to AI vendors in legal. It grades the vendor and its product rather than the underlying model, the law firm, or the lawyer, which is what separates it from the other rankings in this territory. Legal is the one professional market where a confident wrong answer is a disciplinary matter, so every vendor is assessed on the same fifteen capability axes and twelve legal signals, built for the questions a general counsel, a firm risk committee and a practice group leader ask before they sign: what happens to privileged material, where the law in this product came from, what it does when it does not know, and whether the vendor can produce the record a judge might ask for. Everything is drawn from public sources, every record carries a verification date, and no vendor pays for inclusion, placement, or rating.
What changed at these vendors, this week
Every entry is dated, attributed to a named vendor and carries a live source. Product announcements that change nothing a buyer can verify are not logged, and neither are funding rounds, valuations or awards.
Full change log →Two axes nobody else in this territory grades
Thirteen of the fifteen axes are the standard the family applies to every vendor market it covers. Two exist only here, because they are the two questions that decide whether a legal AI product can be used at all rather than how well it performs.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Twelve things recorded on every vendor, not graded
Some questions do not have a grade, they have an answer. Whether a vendor trains on client data is not a B. Whether a court record exists is a fact about the public record. These are recorded with a source and a date, and the value set for each one is published so a reader can see exactly what the alternatives were.
Confidentiality and Privilege
What happens to client material once it enters the product, and what the vendor has committed to in writing.
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Client Data in TrainingCan material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
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Prompt and Output RetentionHow long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
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Ethical Walls and Matter SegregationDoes retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
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Third Party Request and Subpoena NoticeIf someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Accuracy and Authority
Where the law comes from, whether it is still good law, and what the product does when it does not know.
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Primary Law Corpus ProvenanceWhere does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
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Good Law VerificationDoes the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
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Refusal and Uncertainty BehaviorWhat does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
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Fabricated Citation RecordDoes a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
Professional Responsibility
The obligations that attach to a lawyer rather than to software, and whether the vendor has engaged with them in public.
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Bar Guidance AlignmentHas the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
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Billing and Fee PostureDoes the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
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Outside Counsel Guideline ReadinessCan a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
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Court Disclosure SupportIf a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Nine categories of legal AI
Categories are drawn by what the software does and who buys it, not by practice area. A vendor sits in one primary category and may carry secondary ones where the product genuinely spans.
General Legal Assistants
Contract Review & Drafting
Legal Research
Litigation & eDiscovery
Plaintiff & Claims AI
IP & Patents
Regulatory & Compliance Counsel
Legal Ops & Spend
Intake & Client Development
What a grade on this index means, and what it does not
A grade measures what a buyer can verify from public sources on the date shown. It is not a rating of how good the product is. A vendor can build an excellent system and grade low on an axis because it publishes nothing an outsider can check, and the index says so rather than crediting a claim it cannot test.
The reverse is also true and worth stating plainly. A vendor with no located court record is not thereby safe, and a vendor that publishes its accuracy figures is not thereby accurate. The index measures disclosure and evidence, which is the only thing an outside party can honestly measure, and it dates every judgment so a reader can see how old it is.
Every record carries one of five source bases, shown on the record itself.
- Vendor Published. The vendor’s own documentation, terms or trust materials.
- Third Party Estimated. An outside source the index could corroborate, marked as an estimate.
- Practitioner Interview. A named practitioner speaking to use in production.
- Bar Guidance or Court Record. An ethics opinion, a court order, or a disciplinary record, cited.
- Operator Verified. Checked directly in the product or against a live artifact.
9 categories, 15 axes and 12 signals on every published vendor.