While AI is now being applied to everything from healthcare to customer support, no single use case has yet been nearly as popular or lucrative as code writing.
Jack Newton, co-founder and CEO of Clio, a Canadian law firm management software company, is convinced that legal tech is poised to be the next big winner of the LLMs era. That’s a self-interested claim — 18-year-old Clio is a legal tech company — but the numbers are hard to dismiss.
Clio saw its revenue growth accelerate sharply after integrating AI into its offering in 2023. The company surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in mid-2024, doubled that figure by late last year, and just announced that its ARR reached $500 million.
“LLMs are so excellent for coding because all the existing code in the world is a huge repository to train on,” Newton said. “The analogy to legal is really clear.”
Law firms hold massive corpuses of contracts and agreements, providing a rich basis of text-based data for AI models to learn from.
“Tech companies and lawyers alike are recognizing what a huge amount of upside there is for legal with LLMs,” Newton said.
Clio isn’t the only legal tech company seeing a massive revenue surge driven by AI.
Four-year-old Harvey, which offers LLM AI for law firms, hit ARR of $190 million by the end of 2025, co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg shared on LinkedIn. Harvey’s main rival, Legora, announced last month that it reached $100 million in ARR a mere 18 months after launching its platform.
Although the legal tech community’s definition of ARR has been under scrutiny recently, the opportunity to apply AI to law makes clear sense, given that LLMs can automate the field’s most time-consuming tasks, such as document review and drafting.
Legal tech companies aren’t the only ones recognizing how valuable AI could be for lawyers. Earlier this week, Anthropic announced a suite of new legal-specific features, expanding Claude for Legal — the law-focused plug-in whose debut earlier this year sent legal tech stocks tumbling.
Both Harvey and Legora rely on Claude as a core model among others, which makes the dynamic an uncomfortable one: a key supplier is now also a competitor.
For Newton, these are all signs of the vast potential of the legal AI market. He has reason to be optimistic. The Canadian-based Clio was valued at $5 billion when it raised a $500 million Series G last November. The company provides law firms with time-tracking, invoicing, and payment tools. It $1 billion acquisition of data intelligence platform vLex last year now allows lawyers to use Clio’s AI for research, as well.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
