Legal tech · Industry brief

Harvey announced a $550m funding round at a $15.5bn valuation, co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the legal AI platform's valuation to more than triple in just over a year while hitting $400m ARR. COO Katie Burke emphasized that customer interest centers on three variables: quality, control over organizational data, and cost management. The company launched Harvey Tenet, its first post-trained open-weight model, which offers customers an alternative to reliance on frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic, providing greater control and cost management options. Burke explained that the funding targets critical needs in people and compute resources, with Harvey developing flexible pricing options including both seats-based and consumption-based models, while also building administrative controls allowing organizations to pre-select model choices per task to manage costs. The company is prioritizing global expansion and mid-market growth as key investment areas, having recently added South Korean firm Kim & Chang as a client.

OpenAI has launched Astra for Law with 26 partner-built plugins integrating major legal tech platforms including iManage, Intapp, DeepJudge, Thomson Reuters HighQ, and LegalZoom. The plugins enable lawyers to draft documents, manage time entries, compare prior deals, and access matter context directly within ChatGPT. Astra for Law includes a legal search index covering over 230 million URLs of US case law, statutes, regulations, and court rules, with partnership with Free Law Project's CourtListener providing access to 99.9% of published US precedential case law. Developers can build custom private plugins using the Apps SDK to connect proprietary data and tools to ChatGPT.

Iusful, an Italian legal tech start-up, closed a €2 million pre-seed funding round led by United Ventures and Italian Founders Fund, with backing from family offices including Moratti, Elkann, Mondini, and Berlusconi. The platform combines AI technology with a curated network of solicitors to provide accessible, ongoing legal support to SMEs, addressing the fragmented nature of traditional legal services in Italy. Since its soft launch in June 2026, Iusful has handled over 100 cases across commercial contracts, GDPR, employment law, and other areas, with plans to scale to 1,000 Italian businesses by 2028 and hire 30+ staff over the next year.