Law Firms are Emerging From a New Source - Tech Companies
Updated: 3 days ago
Since then, we've covered the launch of numerous AI Native Law Firms and there are now more than 60 firms operating in various parts of the market.
But there is a new source emerging. Technology companies - with a product, a customer base and revenue have now started launching law firms of their own.
This now means that there are three routes to tech enabled legal services:
The incumbent firm that adopts a tech operating model.
The AI-native firm, where the technology and the firm are built together from day one.
The technology company that establishes a regulated law firm.
This piece is about the third category.
Is it AI-native?
I've previously defined AI-native as the firm and the technology as being conceived together (amongst other criteria).
But what Lawhive, Orbital and Naya have done is something different.
They started off as technology companies. They found customers, learned a market properly, and then added a regulated law firm on top of it to be able to deliver an end to end service to the client of their own customers.
This path has three things an AI-native firm (and any start-up) would love to have. A working product. Distribution. Years of evidence that the technology holds up under real volume.
Who has actually done it
Lawhive. Founded in London in 2020 by Pierre Proner, Jaime Van Oers and Flinn Dolman. It started as a marketplace and a tech play aimed at lawyers. Lawhive Legal Ltd was authorised as an SRA licensed body in May 2023.
In 2025 it became the first legal tech platform to buy traditional law firms outright - Woodstock Legal Services in the UK, Singular Law in Arizona. It has since raised a $60m Series B, does north of $35m in revenue, has around 750 lawyers on the platform, and operates across 35 US states.
Orbital. Founded in 2018 by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle. AI built specifically for commercial real estate law, now touching around 200,000 transactions a year for more than 5,000 property professionals. In April 2026 Orbital launched Farringdon, a residential conveyancing firm which began taking instructions in May.
Six lawyers. Three of them carry the title "conveyancing engineer", which tells you plenty on its own. Ed Boulle runs it as MD, with Sue Bence as COO and Sarah Debney - a licensed conveyancer of nearly forty years - as Head of Legal Practice. Distribution comes through an agency model, with JLL and Streets Ahead referring work in.
Given Ed's background working closely with the conveyancing industry in Orbital, he's clearly gained insight on the conveyancing market and where technology currently has its limitations, what it costs to run, what good looks like and where a human is still required.
His framing is: "Farringdon is how we will prove what's possible in the age of AI. Orbital is how we help everyone else get there too." Since, there are always two firms in a residential conveyancing transaction, and with Farringdon taking an AI native approach, one would hope that it will encourage others to follow in their footsteps for the better of all homeowners.
Naya. Matt Basile founded Naya Software in Tampa in 2019, whilst still a partner at Kelley Drye in New York. More than 45 law firms now use the platform. In late 2025 he launched Naya Law, and filed for an Arizona ABS licence so that the software and the firm could eventually sit under one roof.
I interviewed Matt for Releveraged, and we covered the time when he was trying to sell his software into a law firm. The firm's CFO asked him why they would pay him to remove ten billable hours from an associate's week. Matt's answer at the time was: "I can't solve your model." So he stopped trying to.
Why the tech company is better placed to succeed than a law firm trying to get to the same destination
It boils down some of the fundamentals of the operating model and culture.
Partner politics. A firm building software has to persuade its partners to fund something that reduces the billable inventory they are paid on, with a longer horizon on payback. And it's typically the most senior stakeholders with the decision making capability that also happen to be closest to retirement.
A technology company has none of this. One P&L. One board. Capital raised on the explicit understanding that it gets spent ahead of revenue.
They already understand what it takes to apply technology. How to look at a market and envision how technology could improve the service offering. How to look at a workflow and codify or productise it. And then having the necessary skillset already in place to implement the vision.
It's a service extension, not a new business. Adding the firm means adding a delivery layer to something the organisation already does. For a law firm, building software is a new product, a new function, a new hiring profile, and business model.
And then there's the hard bit. The ICP and distribution is different.
If you have spent five years selling to law firms, then your buyer, your sales cycle, your pricing, your acquisition cost and your brand were all built for law firms. Now you're selling to the end client instead.
Will their customers care?
If you sell software to law firms and then go and compete with them - what happens? I don't know the answer.
But I don't think the incumbents have an clear alternative, yet.
From selling picks to owning the mine
Here's the commercial case, and it really isn't complicated.
The global legal technology market in 2026 is a fraction of the global legal services market. Sell software into law firms and you're competing for a slice of a technology budget which, for most firms, is a rounding error next to the fee. Launch the firm and you are addressing the fee itself. Your existing market, plus the services market it was always pointed at.
And underneath that sits the work that never got done at all, because delivering it by the hour cost more than anyone was ever willing to pay. Lawhive puts unmet US consumer legal need at around $1 trillion. That's demand that is not being served, not that you take from somebody else.
Then there's the loop, which only the operator gets to run. Operate the firm. Find the bottleneck. Automate it. Ship it to the customers who are still firms. Less licence revenue for more service revenue. Less of a firm's technology budget for all of a client's legal spend.
So - will Harvey become a law firm?
I asked this last year and I still don't have an answer. But the numbers have moved a long way since, and they've only moved in one direction.
On 9 September, Harvey raised $550m at a $15.5bn valuation. Even if if the entire global legal software market was worth $100bn, it feels difficult to underwrite $15.5bn inside that. Not at any multiple anyone would defend once growth normalises.
You can underwrite it inside $1.1 trillion.
Which raises the possibility that the valuation has already made the decision. On the flip side, Harvey's has an incredible customer base of more than 1,400 customers. 100,000+ lawyers. The constraint is maybe in what you'd have to burn on the way out.
The question I'd leave you with
None of this makes the original question wrong. Some firms are delivering parts of their service offering as a tech company. This new path simply means there's more than one way in and it's going to be really interesting to see how these models evolve and who is most successful.
The new question isn't whether technology companies can run law firms.
Three of them already do.
It's who's next?
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