This month, the legal market crossed a threshold. Anthropic formally launched Claude for Legal. Days later, OpenAI announced plans for “Codex for Legal.” Meanwhile, Revolut’s CLO publicly tore up the traditional panel model in favour of performance metrics and competitive rates. And an open-source project called Lavern shipped 67 specialist AI agents that run an entire legal workflow autonomously.
AI in legal is no longer about efficiency. It’s about who controls the infrastructure, who owns the client relationship, and who captures the value.
Here’s what matters this month.
Industry Moves
Claude for Legal launches. It may reshape the legal tech world.
Anthropic formally launched Claude for Legal, a comprehensive suite of legal-specific tools, plugins, and MCP connectors. Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Harvey, Legora, and Descrybe are all participants. The offering has expanded to 12 plugins and a host of connectors to existing legal tech software.
For firms and in-house teams, this changes the calculus: do you buy from a legal tech vendor, or go directly to the model provider?
Zaven take: When the foundational model companies start building for legal directly, the entire value chain shifts. The question is no longer “which AI tool?” but “which layers of the stack do I buy from?”
OpenAI plans “Codex for Legal”
Days after Anthropic’s launch, OpenAI confirmed plans for its own legal vertical offering. Sources indicate the product will be branded “Codex for Legal,” part of a broader set of industry-specific tools. OpenAI is hiring from the legal tech world and building a deployment team to help organisations adopt AI at scale.
For GCs and heads of legal operations, this means the buy-or-build calculus just changed again. In-house teams now face a choice between legal tech vendors, Big Tech platforms (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft), and their own internal AI capability. The tools that were exclusive to law firms six months ago are now available directly to the teams that buy legal services.
Zaven take: The window for law firms to differentiate on technology alone is closing fast. For in-house teams, the leverage has never been greater. What you should be asking your firms: how are you using these tools, and are you passing the savings on to us?
Revolut CLO tears up the traditional legal panel in favour of performance metrics
Tom Hambrett, CLO at Revolut, is replacing the bank’s static legal panel with “Revolut Partners,” a dynamic, performance-based ecosystem. Firms will be assessed on metrics that actually matter: competitive rates, responsiveness, and engagement with Revolut’s products. The team is also building in-house AI tools to run RFPs, pre-select firms for specific instructions, and scrutinise advice and invoices.
The response on LinkedIn was split. Critics argued that quarterly reviews and performance metrics would erode the trust that good counsel relationships depend on. But panels haven’t been static because relationships are sacred. They’ve been static because GCs lacked the infrastructure to evaluate firms on anything beyond familiarity. Performance-based panels and deep collaboration are not opposites. They’re what becomes possible once sourcing has real data behind it.
Zaven take: What Hambrett is describing isn’t the death of the law firm relationship. It’s the first version of panel management where sourcing decisions have evidence underneath them. That’s exactly what Zaven enables.
“Clients increasingly expect to share in the AI productivity dividend, and they have the leverage to ask for it.”
Eric Friedman, former Chairman and CEO, Skadden Arps
Voices from the Market
85% of law firms say clients are now driving AI investment decisions
LawSites · Litera State of Legal AI: Spring 2026
Litera’s Spring 2026 Market Sentiment Report found that 85% of law firms say client expectations are the primary driver of their AI investment decisions. Yet firms are struggling to demonstrate AI value, and ROI is ranked as the least important factor driving decisions.
For GCs, this is a window of opportunity. If your firms are investing in AI because of client pressure, now is the time to demand transparency on how those investments translate into better outcomes and lower costs for you.
Lavern: 67 AI agents. Open source. The agentic “law firm” is here.
Finnish legal tech expert Antti Innanen released Lavern as open source under Apache 2.0. The system runs 67 specialist AI agents that review documents through evidence-backed debate, with mandatory human gates and a 10-pass verification loop. It runs locally on a Mac Mini. Processing cost: near-zero.
For in-house teams watching the cost of routine legal work, this is a glimpse of where things are heading. The “real law firm” of the future may just be the judgment layer, with agents handling everything underneath. According to Antti, “It is not meant to be a product. It is a source of inspiration.” Access the agents by clicking on the GitHub link above.
Inside an in-house team’s push to cut law firm bills with AI
The legal department at Park Square Capital, a European private debt firm, slashed review times and cut outside counsel spending for certain documents in early 2026 by deploying an AI tool internally. Rather than waiting for their law firms to pass on efficiency gains, the in-house team took matters into its own hands.
It’s a pattern more GCs are following: if your firms won’t share the AI dividend, build the capability yourself and reduce your dependency on them. The question for every in-house leader: are you still outsourcing work that AI could handle internally, and are your firms sharing the savings on work that should stay external?
May Data Snapshot
85% Of law firms say clients drive AI investment decisions (Litera, Spring 2026)
67 Specialist AI agents in Lavern, the open-source agentic legal system
12 Plugins in Anthropic’s Claude for Legal at launch
3 Big Tech companies now building legal-specific AI products (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft)
Sources: LawSites · Artificial Lawyer · Law360 Pulse
From Zaven
Metrics that matter, conversations that move the needle
It was a busy month on the road. At the Interstella Summit in Lisbon (6-7 May), I moderated a panel on how legal functions can shift from a cost narrative to a value narrative. The question we kept coming back to: if you can’t measure the value your legal function delivers, how do you expect it to get funded?
Straight from Lisbon to Barcelona for the Mont Blanc Circle Legal Retreat, where I led a 90-minute session on rewiring the relationship between GCs, their law firms, and the C-suite in a data-driven world.
The in-house teams and law firms that win the next decade will be the ones that can show, in data, what they delivered and at what cost. Additionally, in-house teams need the tools to measure, compare, and hold accountable outsourced services, including law firms. And yes, chemistry and other soft skills still matter but don’t suffice.
That’s Zaven. Predictable pricing, healthy competition, measurable outcomes.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
Albert Einstein
