Source: Bloomberg
Clio’s billion-dollar acquisition of vLex late last year signalled what many suspected: legal tech consolidation has begun in earnest. Power players are now pitching end-to-end super-platforms – AI-enabled research, case management, document generation, workflows, and more – all in one place.
It’s a potent proposition. But Keith Porcaro, writing from Duke Law School, argues the industry should be deeply cautious about what it’s handing over.
“The data legal tech companies accrue will shape the future of legal practice,” Porcaro warns. “One day, the platforms may start competing with their customers, offering legal services without human lawyers.”
The Platform Playbook
The pitch sounds compelling: lawyers can serve more clients, get up to speed faster on emerging law, and stop wasting time on rote tasks like invoicing and intake.
But the more a platform offers, the more influence it gains over how lawyers deliver services.
Porcaro points to healthcare, where Epic dominates electronic health records. That dominance alone gives Epic enormous passive influence over how health systems use their data. If extracting or adding data is too difficult, promising research dies on the vine.
Epic has since leveraged that position – and customer data – to become more involved in care itself, from algorithmic risk assessment tools to patient-facing “agents.” Just by owning the data platform, Epic carves ever more value from the doctor-patient relationship.
“This is the playbook for market dominance in the internet age,” Porcaro writes. “Build a platform to intermediate a relationship or service, and capture as much value from that service as possible.”
The Slow Squeeze
The trajectory isn’t hard to imagine.
A super-platform might start by matching clients with lawyers, or helping firms access “a vast untapped client market.” For ordinary people with legal questions, it could offer document libraries or chatbots providing limited-scope help.
For an extra fee, a quick review from a lawyer on the platform. For in-house departments, an automated co-pilot with fractional human support as needed.
In the right regulatory environment, a company could launch its own law firm – powered by AI models trained on data extracted from thousands of expert users.
“What better way to build and fine-tune a model than with the help of thousands of expert users?”
The Moat Deepens
The problem isn’t ill intent. It’s structural.
Yesterday, legal vendors created vast proprietary research databases. Today, they’re absorbing decades of knowledge and specialised workflows as structured data to train custom AI models.
“Over time, a firm’s ability to launch a new service might depend on whether their software vendor supports it, not whether it’s possible,” Porcaro argues. “A firm might one day find itself competing with its one-time vendor, powered by the knowledge extracted from that firm and many others.”
Rather than democratise law, AI could fuel another wave of consolidation – benefits accruing to those with the most capital, data, or market share. High-quality legal services remain expensive and inaccessible, but dominant platforms absorb most of the value.
What Firms Can Do
Individual protections exist. Firms can negotiate agreements limiting vendors’ ability to retain and use customer data. Technical standards like confidential computing can help enforce those agreements.
There’s also time to build better portability standards into contracts – ensuring firms can move data and workflows between platforms.
Beyond individual relationships, Porcaro sees opportunity in jointly investing in common, open infrastructure for legal information, rather than scrambling to build proprietary systems.
“Ultimately, this is a collective problem,” he writes. “The technology platform economy and lax antitrust policy has helped concentrate market power rather than distribute it. Fail to solve it, and the future of legal services will be just another monopoly.”
Read more: Bloomberg
