TechLex blog

Legal industry news | January 2026

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Consolidation Continues: LawVu, Filevine, and the Platform Play

The legal tech market is moving decisively from fragmentation to integration. In December 2025, New Zealand-based LawVu acquired ClauseBase, the Belgian contract automation and drafting platform built by lawyers for Word-native workflows. ClauseBase is now "LawVu Draft," part of LawVu's unified legal workspace for in-house teams. The same month, Filevine closed its acquisition of Pincites, an AI-powered contract redlining tool used by enterprise clients including Redis, Glean, and Vercel. The all-cash, eight-figure deal brings Pincites' team into Filevine and expands Filevine's reach from litigation into corporate and transactional law.

These aren't isolated moves. Filevine raised €370 million across 2024–2025, bringing its total capital to over €580 million. LawVu is betting that in-house legal teams want one workspace for intake, matter management, contract drafting, and spend control—not a patchwork of disconnected apps. The CLOC 2025 State of the Industry report shows 30% of legal departments already use AI, and another 54% plan to adopt it within two years. But most are using single-function tools. Unified platforms promise to eliminate context switching, reduce admin overhead, and deliver workflow intelligence that isolated tools cannot.

The consolidation has practical implications. First, you will need to accept the risk of point-solution vendors you depend on to be acquired or shut down. If you are locked into a narrow tool with a small team, create a plan B for exit or integration. Second, platforms now compete on AI depth, not just AI features. Drafting, redlining, contract automation, and risk flagging are table stakes. Firms that don't offer this will lose work to those that do. Third, unified platforms create stronger leverage over your data. A single vendor now sees your entire workflow—cases, clients, billing, communications—which changes the relationship and the security model.

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On January 19, 2026, HSBC announced a strategic partnership with Harvey AI to deploy the legal AI platform across HSBC's Global Legal function in 57 countries, including all of Europe and the Middle East. This is not a pilot. HSBC's Chief Legal Officer Bob Hoyt described it as "reimagining how an in-house legal function can operate by combining the speed and efficiency of AI with the expertise and judgement of our legal professionals."

The significance is timing and scale. HSBC is one of the world's largest banks, operating in one of the most regulated industries. The legal team handles contract analysis, due diligence, compliance, and litigation across multiple jurisdictions. Deploying Harvey firmwide signals that legal AI has moved from experiment to core infrastructure. HSBC expects the platform to automate routine drafting and research, standardize playbook-driven processes, and free lawyers to focus on strategic work.

The HSBC move has two implications. First, your clients are already using AI internally. In-house legal departments now lead law firms in AI adoption, driven by cost pressure and standardized workflows. When a general counsel sees their own team using AI to handle routine work at a fraction of traditional costs, they will increasingly question why outside firms charging premium hourly rates are not delivering similar efficiencies. Second, enterprise legal teams are setting the bar for what "AI-enabled" means. If HSBC can deploy Harvey across 57 countries in a regulated environment, clients will expect their outside firms to demonstrate equivalent capabilities.

The same week, Thomson Reuters announced that over 120,000 law students across 200+ US law schools will receive access to CoCounsel Legal and Deep Research from Westlaw starting January 5, 2026. This is the largest academic rollout of professional-grade legal AI to date. Students will graduate with hands-on experience using the same AI tools now being adopted by law firms and in-house teams. Recruiting associates in 2027 and beyond, the expectation will be that AI fluency is a baseline skill, not a specialist competency.

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The DATEV Challenge: Why European Law Firms Face a Different Integration Problem

Germany-based law firms want their tech stack to be integrated with DATEV, the backbone of German legal and accounting infrastructure. DATEV eG, founded in 1966, is a cooperative serving over 820,000 customers—tax consultants, auditors, lawyers, and their clients—across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Over 40,000 professionals are DATEV members, and the platform processes over 11 million payslips and 2 million business assessments monthly.

For law firms, DATEV is not optional. DATEV Anwalt (DATEV Lawyer) is the leading practice management software for law firms, handling case management, time tracking, billing, accounting, and compliance. DATEV Unternehmen online connects firms to their clients and tax advisors via secure cloud collaboration.

The problem is that most modern legal tech platforms like Harvey, Casetext, or LawVu—do not natively integrate with DATEV. They are built for Anglo-American workflows, billing structures, and accounting systems. DATEV operates with German tax law logic, strict data residency requirements, and a cooperative governance model that prioritizes security and compliance over speed. The result is that European law firms often face a choice: adopt the modern AI-enabled platform and manually reconcile data with DATEV, or stick with DATEV-native tools that lack cutting-edge AI capabilities.

This gap has created a new category of integration vendors. Companies like Chift, Maesn, and Onventis now offer unified APIs that bridge modern SaaS platforms with DATEV's XML and CSV data formats. These integration layers handle authentication (DATEV uses OAuth2 with strict token requirements), data mapping (invoices, receipts, client data, analytics accounts), and compliance (GDPR, German tax law, audit trails). For SaaS legal tech vendors targeting the German market, DATEV integration is no longer optional—it is a market entry requirement.

DATEV itself is responding. In April 2024, DATEV became a member of the German Legal Tech Hub, signaling its intention to foster innovation and collaboration with legal tech startups. DATEV has also opened its Developer Portal, enabling third-party vendors to build integrations via official APIs for document exchange (DATEV Unternehmen online) and accounting (DATEV Rechnungswesen). The cooperative is investing in AI-native features, but the pace of innovation is constrained by its governance model—decisions require member consensus, and security and compliance take precedence over speed.

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Workflow Automation: The Real Competitive Edge

Beyond platforms and integration, the deeper shift is workflow automation. Analysis shows that 20–40% of work in legal departments will be automated in the future. Legal departments are overtaking law firms in AI adoption, driven by cost pressure, standardized workflows, and less resistance to innovation.

The trend for 2026 is clear: matter-level workflows are replacing isolated AI tools. Intake and conflicts are becoming the most critical control points for speed, risk, and revenue. Knowledge retrieval is now a performance issue, not a support function. Document intelligence is evolving from review to workflow coordination. Firms that treat AI as a series of disconnected features—research here, drafting there, redlining somewhere else—will lose to firms that embed AI into end-to-end workflows.

In January 2026, LexisNexis launched "Protégé workflows," a global AI work automation platform with prebuilt and configurable workflows for disputes, motions, discovery, and case strategy. Examples include drafting motions to dismiss, redlining agreements, and generating templates. The system integrates with existing processes, automating tasks and delivering high-quality results. This is the future: not AI tools you add to your stack, but AI workflows that replace your stack.

Legal AI expert predictions for 2026 converge on one theme: clients will demand the adoption of AI for contract drafting and review. "Time kills deals, and in a world where AI can meaningfully accelerate the deal cycle, in-house teams will be far less willing to accept the pace at which law firms have traditionally operated," said James Ding, CEO of Draftwise. Corporate legal departments will stop treating legal AI as an experiment and will begin requiring outside counsel to show measurable efficiency gains. Firms that cannot do so will increasingly watch those capabilities move in-house.

Cecilia Ziniti, CEO of GC AI, notes that legal AI has already moved to production in in-house legal departments, with 86% of in-house legal team members using AI for legal work at least once a week. "2026 will bring deeper use cases, agents, and legal teams bringing legal AI to the rest of the company for first pass reviews and standing in for legal for simpler questions. Further, every major in-house team will have at least one workflow—typically NDA review, contract intake, or outside counsel invoice review—where AI is deeply embedded in daily operations."

As you might have expected, workflow automation challenge is structural. Most firms still operate with 8–15 disconnected tools. Context switching between systems kills productivity and complicates compliance. A firm using separate tools for case management, billing, document review, and research has to manually reconcile data and risks missing conflict checks or audit trails. Unified platforms eliminate that friction, but adopting a unified platform requires rethinking your entire operating model, not just swapping vendors.

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What to Watch Next Month

CLOC Europe Summit (February 5, London): The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium brings its one-day European summit back to London. Focused on practical outcomes and modern operating models, the event brings together legal ops professionals, innovative lawyers, legal service providers, and technologists across Europe. If you are evaluating AI platforms, this is where you will hear how in-house teams are making vendor decisions and measuring ROI.

4th AI Legal Conference (February 18–19, Brussels): Future Bridge Events hosts this two-day conference focused on practical implementation, scalability, and governance of AI solutions in legal work. Topics include streamlining legal research, contract lifecycle management, E-discovery, AI governance frameworks, and driving cost-efficiency with intelligent legal technologies. With global spending on legal technology projected to exceed €32 billion in 2026, this is a critical event for EU law firms evaluating AI strategy.

British Legal Technology Forum (March 10, London): Europe's largest legal technology conference and exhibition returns to Old Billingsgate with six presentation stages and over 500 square meters of exhibition space. As Europe's leading legal tech event for CXOs and senior legal IT executives, the Forum brings together 90+ of Europe's best-known technology and IT security suppliers. This is where you will see product roadmaps, meet vendor leadership, and evaluate integration capabilities for DATEV and other European systems.