Legal tech · Industry brief

Elevate announced the acquisition of Lupl, an AI-native legal project management and workflow automation platform, in August 2026. Lupl integrates agentic AI with task management, collaboration, and workflow automation, with native support for Claude, Harvey, and Copilot. The platform helps legal teams manage complex matters including cross-border M&A transactions and multi-jurisdictional regulatory projects through intake, planning, budgeting, task tracking, and reporting. Elevate, which already owns ELM and ELMA software products, plans to extend Lupl's reach across its global customer base of law departments and law firms.

Smokeball, a law practice management software company, unveiled a new global brand centered on "powering people-law" aimed at solo, small, and mid-sized law firms serving individuals rather than corporations. The rebrand includes a new flag logo replacing its former orb design, a refreshed orange color scheme called "Power Orange," and new vision and mission statements developed through conversations with over 50 customers across the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. According to COO and cofounder Jane Oxley, the refresh reflects Smokeball's accelerating growth and repositioning its market image to better communicate its value proposition, particularly for practice areas like family law, personal injury, real estate, criminal defense, and employment law.

Clarra, a cloud-based case management platform, announced expanded AI capabilities through integration with Claude Cowork, featuring over 120 tools in its Model Context Protocol server—described as the most comprehensive in the industry. The integration enables law firms and legal departments to securely connect Claude and other large language models to litigation data, documents, and workflows for tasks including generating litigation briefs, analyzing case materials, preparing strategies, and automating operational workflows. The MCP server provides token-efficient access to over 250 REST API endpoints while maintaining permission-based security controls, and Clarra also supports connections to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, and Lovable for building AI-powered applications on the platform.