The legal tech narrative is one of perpetual, imminent disruption. The dust from the “AI revolution” was supposed to have settled by now, leaving a landscape of agile startups and dethroned legacy players. And yet, if you walk the halls of any Am Law 100 firm, a strange and inconvenient reality emerges. The screens are not filled with a dozen novel AI interfaces. They are glowing with the familiar interfaces of Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law.
Ask an associate what they use for a high-stakes research assignment, and the answer is almost universally one of the big three. The new AI-native brief analyzers and deposition summary tools are sometimes relegated to the periphery – interesting novelties, perhaps, but not the bedrock of their daily workflow. This isn’t a Luddite rejection of progress. It is a market signal of profound importance.
But a closer look reveals a more sophisticated story unfolding. The simple binary of “disruptor vs. legacy” is dissolving. The smartest startups are no longer trying to kill the kings; they are vying for a seat at their court. The new strategy is not competition, but integration.
We are entering the era of the strategic alliance, where the incumbents act as kingmakers. They possess the two assets a startup cannot replicate: a comprehensive, judicially-validated data moat and an embedded distribution channel into every significant law firm on the planet. For an AI startup, building a better algorithm is hard; cracking the enterprise sales cycle and building trust from scratch is nearly impossible.
This creates a powerful symbiosis. The incumbent, rather than spending years on internal R&D to replicate a niche feature, can simply partner with or acquire the startup that perfected it. A nimble company specializing in AI-driven contract analysis or M&A due diligence doesn’t have to fight for market share. Instead, it can find its technology embedded as a new tab within the Lexis+ interface, instantly legitimized and delivered to hundreds of thousands of lawyers.
The acquisition of Casetext by Thomson Reuters for $650 million is the quintessential example of this phenomenon. Casetext built a formidable AI assistant, CoCounsel. But its ultimate path to ubiquity was not by replacing Westlaw, but by being absorbed into it. Thomson Reuters didn’t just buy a product; it bought a feature set, a team, and a shortcut to the front lines of the generative AI war, which it could then deploy across its own data fortress.
What this tells us is that the legal industry has fundamentally misunderstood the product. The AI startups believe they are selling a better tool – a faster engine for search, synthesis, and summarization. But the incumbents were never just selling a tool. They were selling a closed, curated, and judicially-validated universe of information.
This shifts the entire dynamic of legal tech innovation. The goal is no longer to build a standalone “Lexis-killer.” The goal is to build a feature so compelling that Lexis has no choice but to license or acquire it. The incumbents become curators of a broader ecosystem, hand-picking the best-in-breed tools and integrating them into their core offering. They mitigate the risk of being out-innovated by simply buying the innovation.
What does this mean for the future of law? The core platforms are not being dismantled; they are becoming more powerful, acting as central hubs in a vast spoke-and-wheel model of innovation. The “AI revolution” isn’t a decentralized movement of insurgents. It is a highly centralized consolidation, where the old guard is not just defending its territory but actively choosing which new technologies are allowed to succeed within it. The path to disrupting the legal market, it turns out, runs directly through the incumbents’ front door. The core platforms of legal research are not being dismantled; they are being reinforced.
It will be fascinating to watch as the market matures. Will a new player manage to build a data asset compelling enough to break this oligopoly? Or will the “AI revolution” in law simply be a new product suite offered by Thomson Reuters, RELX, and Bloomberg? The current evidence suggests the infrastructure of the future is still owned by the old guard.