Change is never easy, whether it’s transitioning your firm to generative artificial intelligence tools or acclimating to a new location for one of your favorite legal technology conferences. I was faced with the latter challenge earlier this month, when Legalweek, long hosted at the Midtown Hilton in New York City, moved to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the western edge of Manhattan.
The new venue took some getting used to—certain aspects were better; others were worse. For starters, without a central hotel, there was no home base and no default gathering spot. Javits was at least a 10-minute walk for most attendees, and the conference’s food options were limited and expensive.
However, the weather was cooperative, with unseasonably warm temperatures hovering around the 70s. The exhibit hall was bright and spacious, and the sessions were received favorably by conferencegoers. Unfortunately, the facilities were a mixed bag for meetings, but with a little creativity and flexibility, necessary connections were made.
Despite the meeting space constraints, I managed to fit in briefings with representatives from nine companies and caught up on their latest news and announcements. One recurring theme that emerged during the discussions was agentic AI and how companies were incorporating it into their platforms.
Another was the strategic divide between broad-spectrum AI ecosystems and legal-specific applications: Which one would ultimately win the battle and become the AI home base for law firms? Not surprisingly, most of the legal technology providers I spoke with were vying to become the AI operating platform of choice by selectively integrating with key platforms, both general-use and legal-specific.
The platform play: Connectivity vs. customization
The race to own the “AI desktop” was evident in several key updates. For example, NetDocuments emphasized its role as an active intelligence layer, launching Smart Answers and expanding its model context protocol connectivity. By utilizing MCP, an open standard that enables secure, standardized communication between AI models and data sources, NetDocuments allows its platform to act as a secure gateway, whether a lawyer is working within a legal-specific tool or a general-purpose model like Anthropic’s Claude. By focusing on robust audit trails and ethical walls, they are positioning the document management system not just as a filing cabinet but as a governed bridge to the broader AI ecosystem.
Similarly, LexisNexis showcased Lexis+ with Protégé, which introduces a new user interface featuring both prebuilt workflows and custom workflow builders. By integrating the Anthropic Claude Cowork legal plug-in into Protégé, the goal is to leverage the extensive proprietary content database, enabling the platform to serve as the primary connection for all content sources and business tools used within a law firm.
Thomson Reuters’ approach to this agentic shift included its beta release of the rearchitected CoCounsel Legal. By incorporating the Claude Agent SDK directly at the model layer, the company has moved toward a “one conversation” workflow. The goal is to eliminate the friction of hopping between research and drafting tools, allowing the AI to autonomously plan multistep research tasks grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law.
The specialists: Deep dives and human skills
While some companies are building all-encompassing ecosystems, other providers are carving out specialized niches that complement these broader platforms.
For example, Everlaw continues to double down on the high-stakes compliance needs of the public sector. With its Everlaw AI Assistant, now FedRAMP authorized and available on AWS GovCloud, the company is addressing the “IT stack” anxieties of government agencies and investigative teams who require a cloud-native platform that meets the most stringent federal security standards.
In comparison, Wexler is carving out a role as the “litigator’s fact-checker.” The platform focuses on extracting and structuring data from complex files to identify inconsistencies in real time. It doesn’t try to be a general-use LLM or e-discovery platform; instead, it plays a complementary role by providing auditable, source-traced chronologies that other tools can sometimes struggle to produce.
Relativity announced that its RelativityOne offering now includes new agentic features, specifically aiR for Review. These features, along with LLM integrations running with Microsoft Azure, support supervised and auditable document review. By utilizing delegated workflows, the platform aims to preserve security and accountability while mitigating reliability and accuracy risks.
Additionally, other specialized providers are focusing on how their unique data can live within the tools lawyers are already using. Midpage, for example, is positioning itself as a critical layer of expertise for general-purpose AI. It offers a plug-in integration that makes Midpage’s U..S primary law dataset directly accessible within Claude Cowork or ChatGPT. This allows users to leverage the conversational power of general-purpose LLMs to run complex legal research queries and retrieve summaries of legal principles and caselaw while ensuring the model draws from a specialized, relevant legal source.
Similarly, AltaClaro has focused on the skills that general-purpose models currently cannot replicate. Its latest offering, launched in partnership with Verbit, provides simulation-based training that combines deposition roleplay with real-time AI-powered feedback, targeting the essential human-to-human nuances of practice.
The future of the firm: Unbundling the legal mind
The tension between the “all-in-one” platform and the “best-of-breed” specialist reflects a broader market shift, described by Eric Dodson Greenberg, general counsel of the Cox Media Group, during our discussion. He suggested we are witnessing a fundamental unbundling of the legal profession, in which AI automates commoditized tasks like due diligence and document review, enabling GCs to bring more work in-house.
According to Greenberg, this shift creates a paradox: AI now handles the high-volume, high-leverage analysis that once required small armies of associates, leaving humans to focus on the final, bespoke and harder-to-scale strategic judgment.
This structural shift mirrors the physical reality of the conference itself. Just as Legalweek attendees had to adjust to the sprawling, decentralized layout of the Javits center, the legal profession is currently finding its footing in an increasingly unbundled landscape. We are moving away from the “home base” of traditional workflows and into a bright, spacious, but often overwhelming hall of agentic possibilities.
Whether a firm chooses to anchor itself in a single, all-encompassing platform or a curated stack of specialized tools, the goal remains the same: making the right connections. Transitioning to this new era of AI—much like walking those 10 minutes from the hotel to the convention floor—might feel like a challenge at first, but with a bit of flexibility and the right strategy, the destination may just be well worth the trek.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York-based attorney, author and journalist. She is the principal legal insight strategist at 8am, parent company of LawPay, MyCase, CasePeer and DocketWise. She is the nationally recognized author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers and is a co-author of Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, both published by the American Bar Association. She writes regular columns for ABAJournal.com and Above the Law, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and she regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. Follow her on LinkedIn, or she can be reached at [email protected].
