A legal AI startup has a plan to take on Lexis Nexis and Westlaw

Legora helped sell lawyers on artificial intelligence. Now it wants to keep bad law out of their files.

In legal terms, a case is "good law" when a lawyer can still safely rely on it. It has not been overturned, superseded by a new statute, or undercut by a court decision. Getting that wrong can mean citing a rule that no longer applies: an embarrassing mistake at best, and one that could damage a client's case.

To help it get there, Legora, one of the highest-valued and best-funded startups building tech for law firms and legal teams inside large companies, is growing its corpus of case law and other legal data.

The company has quietly hired a team of former attorneys to collect the law in the jurisdictions it covers, then map how cases and statutes rank and relate to one another.

Its push into legal research is chasing two goals. If Legora can link its software to a rich source of verified material, it could reduce the risk of "hallucinations," or wrong information slipping into its system's outputs, said Melanie Brown, Legora's senior director of legal data.

The second reason: Legora is fighting for a larger share of a market that has been controlled by a duopoly for decades.

For most large firms, access to LexisNexis and Westlaw isn't a nice-to-have. Lawyers turn to these databases to look up cases or statutes, and to make sure the authorities they plan to cite are still good law. In recent years, both conglomerates have invested heavily in technology that can handle the drafting and analysis that follow that research.

The quality of those tools is openly debated online — and in Legora's conversations with prospective customers. Brown, who worked at Rlex, which owns LexisNexis, before joining Legora earlier this year, said the frustration she hears most often is that firms feel forced to choose: access to the best legal data, or better technology.

Legora's push into legal research aims to turn the Big Two into the Big Three.

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The Swedish company has already struck licensing deals with "tens" of publishers around the world, including Wolters Kluwer, Brown said, and has another dozen in the pipeline. Legora does not license content from LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters, Westlaw's owner.

That process is extremely tedious. In the United States, court rulings are public records, but the versions that attorneys can actually cite remain trapped inside physical volumes owned by LexisNexis and Westlaw. To get citable case law into Legora, employees cut the spines off those books, strip out the publishers' headnotes and summaries, scan the pages, and check that the digital copies are accurate.