Law Firms, Legal Tech Providers Embrace Agentic AI At Record Pace

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The Shift: Law Firms, Legal Tech Providers Embrace Agentic AI At Record Pace

While gen AI entered the legal mainstream in record time, agentic AI seems to have broken all records. Since the beginning of the year, a host of agentic AI legal tech tools have come to market, while a growing number of law firms are fast developing proprietary agentic AI platforms for their attorneys and clients alike.

To be sure, agentic AI isn’t a new type of AI modeI, just a more capable and extended version of the technology—if one thinks of gen AI as an electric engine, the entire electric bike is agentic AI.

Agentic AI uses gen AI to autonomously plan and execute multi-step projects, from opening, reviewing or drafting documents to scheduling meetings and more. The technology can be used to automate everything from rote processes to complex digital tasks.

Many in the legal industry see vast potential for this technology, including law firms that are developing their own AI agents. Some firms and lawyers are also collaborating with legal tech startups to build bespoke AI agents, or investing in agentic AI startups looking to transform the way legal professionals work.

Of course, it’s early days for the technology, and the full impact of agentic AI on the legal industry is still an open question. But trailblazers using agentic AI now are showing just what the technology can achieve in the legal industry—and where it may have the biggest disruptions.

The Conversation

While many legal tech providers are steadily releasing agentic AI tools, law firms are hardly sitting on the sidelines.

In May 2024, Wilson Sonsini became one of the first to develop an AI agent, launching an agentic AI commercial contracting tool for their self-service software platform Neuron.

It didn’t take too long for other firms to follow suit. Earlier this year, A&O Shearman collaborated with legal AI startup Harvey to develop agentic AI tools that automate specific tasks for multiple firm practices, from analyzing leveraged loan and M&A documents to streamlining cybersecurity notifications and fund management.

In March 2025, Vorys Sater Seymour & Pease also released its agentic AI tool AIV Labor, which answers questions from attorneys and HR professionals on labor and employment laws.

Scott Powell, a Vorys partner who chairs the firm's strategic planning committee told The American Lawyer that the agentic AI used in the tool “really is kind of a multi-layered approach to responding to queries.”

The same month, Linklaters announced that it added agentic AI features to its AI platform Laila, including “chat with HR,” which can respond to queries about the firm’s internal HR policy.

Meanwhile, Troutman Pepper Locke also updated its proprietary gen AI chatbot Athena—which it originally developed back in 2023—with agentic AI capabilities that allowed it to take on more complex tasks.

Just this April, Freshfields also announced that it is building AI agents as part of a collaboration with Google Cloud that will see the firm leverage Google gen AI model Gemini as well as other AI offerings from the Silicon Valley company.

And a few months later, Simmons & Simmons disclosed its partnership with Berlin-based legal tech startup Flank, which is helping the firm build AI agents for its attorneys and clients. Simmons & Simmons partner Lucy Shurwood told Legaltech News that the firm will use the agents to “take whole tasks away from lawyers altogether” such as drafting NDAs for clients.

While firms are partnering with legal tech providers, some lawyers are looking to support legal tech startups that are bringing new agentic AI solutions to the market. Goodwin partner Lawrence Chu, co-chair of its global M&A group, participated in a $3.5 million funding round, disclosed in May, for legal tech startup Maveri, which uses agentic AI to help streamline corporate due diligence.

The legal tech market is undeniably going all in on agentic AI, bolstered by the expertise and comfortability they fostered with gen AI over the past few years.

Major legal research companies including Thomson Reuters, vLex (since acquired by Clio) and LexisNexis, popular legal AI startups Legora and Harvey, contract lifecycle management (CLM) providers ContractPodAi, Summize, Malbek, and contract review and drafting startups Definely and Draftwise, among others, all announced agentic AI offerings this year.

And let’s not forget about the Big 4—in April, KPMG said it partnered with Google Cloud to build AI agents as a way to expand its delivery of legal services.

The Significance

It’s one thing to offer a new technology—it’s another to change an industry.While agentic AI tools seem to be everywhere, it’s still early days for the technology. But many in the industry are diving in, offering clues about how agentic AI can be leveraged—and how it can potentially change legal work.

Troutman Pepper, for instance, leveraged the agentic AI capabilities of its chatbot Athena to streamline some of the more laborious administrative tasks it needed to complete following its merger with Locke Lord in 2024. The firm used Athena, for instance, to automate re-writing attorney biographies for the newly combined firm.

“They built an agentic workflow, and it allowed us to automate about 80% of that conversion for the more than 500 more bios to the format that we use on troutman.com,” Dan Pulka, Troutman Pepper Locke’s chief business development and marketing officer, told Legaltech News. “It didn't eliminate the need for review, but it significantly cut down the work time compared to the 2020 merger.”

To be sure, agentic AI isn’t just bringing more automation to rote administrative tasks—it’s also streamlining more complex legal workflows as well.

A&O Shearman is using the agentic AI tools it developed in collaboration with Harvey to automate a number of legal tasks across four different practice areas. One tool, for instance, performs deeper, multi-step reviews of leveraged loan documents to assist attorneys and financial professionals, while another analyzes company information for merger control filings reviewed by local regulators.

It also built an agentic AI tool to help fund managers analyze fund documents to identify risks, and a cybersecurity agentic AI tool that reviews and drafts cybersecurity notifications in the event of a cyber incident.

The agentic AI tools are used by firm attorneys, but A&O Shearman also licenses them to other firms as well as its own clients.

Karen Contoudis Buzard, U.S. head of A&O Shearman's markets innovation group, noted that “clients are constantly pushing the envelope. And they may want to also conduct some of the analysis themselves … sometimes these are high time intensive projects that they may not want to pay for. We need to be ahead of the curve here. We're always pushing forward. If AI is going to get there, we want to partner with the client to help them get there.”

In fact, despite law firms diving head first into agentic AI, it may be in-house legal departments that are more open to leveraging the technology. A recent survey of 800 U.S. legal professionals, split evenly between law firms and legal operations professionals, found that in-house attorneys were twice as comfortable with agentic AI than their law firm colleagues.

Jasmine Singh, general counsel at Ironclad, which published the survey, noted that such a discrepancy could come down to in-house attorneys being more open to automation given that they use outside counsel for reviews. “I think [outside counsel] are just differently incentivized to make sure that they have dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, and where an in-house lawyer is not using outside counsel we certainly have those obligations and incentives ourselves.”

Agentic AI may end up being as—or even more—prominent in legal departments as it is in law firms. The legal department at BNY, for instance, helped the bank develop an enterprise-wide AI platform named Eliza, which provides the department itself with a number of AI-powered tools, including those for vendor contract review and negotiation. It also includes the ability to build AI agents to perform tasks such as querying documents and datasets, among others.

The Information

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The Forecast

While agentic AI can handle tasks independent of human review, don’t expect the legal tech tools that use this technology to be fully autonomous.

At Legal Geek North America 2025 in Chicago Nicole Bradick, global head of innovation at Factor, said agentic AI’s autonomy represents “both benefit and burden” because of the risks of trusting AI.

The pitfalls of this trust are more than evident in the industry: a number of attorneys are still outsourcing legal research to gen AI—and not checking if their work product is laden with fake case citations.

But some are learning from those mistakes. Many agentic AI legal tech tools on the market are building guardrails to ensure humans oversee the tools’ output at every turn.

When Thomson Reuters announced it added agentic AI to its gen AI assistant CoCounsel in June, it stressed the importance of human review for accuracy.

“What agentic offers is that surfacing those folks and asking for the human in the loop to provide more clarification, feedback, so the research can be more relevant,” said Thomson Reuters president of legal professionals Raghu Ramanathan.

Similarly, contract drafting and review platform DraftWise built in guardrails for its AI drafting agent launched the same month. “They are not autonomous in the sense that I just want you to do this and I never want to check on it again,” DraftWise chief customer officer Will Seaton told Legaltech News.

Expect more agentic AI tools to take this approach in the future. But as agentic AI becomes more integrated in AI tools—including the ones consumers use in their daily lives—there’s growing risks that legal professionals will misuse the technology.

Rhys Dipshan is the legal technology editor-in-chief. Contact him at rdipshan@alm.com.