by Sharri Wilner, Associate Director, Gravity Stack
I’ve been attending Legalweek for years, and I usually spend most of my time meeting with our existing technology partners — checking in, seeing what’s new on their roadmaps, and evaluating whether their updates justify another year of investment.
But this year was different.
At Legalweek 2025, almost every conversation our team had was with companies that didn’t exist just a few years ago. We spent our time talking to founders and builders from startups that launched in the last three years — companies born during or after the release of GPT-3.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s a signal of the proliferation of new technology leading to new approaches in tech legal.
What we’re seeing is the next wave of legal tech — not incremental improvements to legacy platforms, but fresh architecture built on top of large language models. These products don’t just plug into old workflows; they rethink them. They don’t try to add AI to what’s already there — they start from what’s now possible and work backward to what lawyers actually need.
For vendors who’ve been in this space a long time, this moment presents a real opportunity. Today, the depth and breadth of new capabilities requires buyers like Gravity Stack to look beyond surface features and evaluate the underlying architecture. We’re searching for platforms that don’t just layer AI on top of old workflows, but reimagine what’s possible from the ground up. It’s been exciting to see AI-native features challenge — and often discard — long-held assumptions about what legal tech can and can’t do.
This year, AI for legal isn’t about replacing lawyers — it’s about replacing legal tech. That’s certainly the takeaway from a recent Law360 survey showing that lawyers are adopting AI at record pace and, critically, do not see it as a threat to billable hours. AI replacing lawyers? Not so much. AI replacing legacy tech vendors? Definitely. This particularly applies to some of the workflow orchestration tools that were meant to streamline legal work but often ended up adding unintended friction instead of removing it.
The takeaway from Legalweek 2025? The players have entered the space. And we can’t help but pay attention.
Are you interested in hearing more about the current state of the AI for Legal market or hearing which young teams have our attention? Get in touch with Gravity Stack — we’re happy to share what we’ve been seeing.
