Where We Invest: Theses Driving Legaltech

The $2 trillion legal services market presents massive opportunities but not all opportunities are equal. After investing in 75+ legaltech companies, our team has identified four distinct theses that capture where value is being created and where founders can build category-defining companies.

Thesis #1: Law Firm as Channel

Law firms sit at critical moments in their clients' lives: transactions, disputes, transitions. This makes them powerful distribution channels for adjacent products and services.

Technology that positions law firms as partners for delivering new value beyond traditional legal advice. Rather than competing with law firms, these legaltech companies make firms more valuable to their clients.

Thesis #2: Workflow Improvement

There is a disconnect between how lawyers spend their days and where the industry spends its money. Lawyers spend the majority of their time on operational friction—document management, signature verification, file organization. Yet most legaltech investment flows toward research tools, contract AI, and e-discovery. The industry is automating the legal puzzle while the operational backbone remains largely manual.

The firms that scale aren't buying more point solutions, they're connecting the pipes. Practice management, intake, recruiting, closings. Founders building here are turning operational bottlenecks into seamless workflows, so lawyers can spend time on legal work instead of paperwork.

Thesis #3: Legal AI

The technology is mature enough to handle tasks that seemed impossible five years ago, but we're still in the early innings of what's possible. Contract analysis that once took days happens in minutes. Legal research that required teams now runs autonomously.

AI platforms that don't just improve productivity but transform how legal work gets done. The winners will be those who move from tools that assist lawyers to systems that deliver outcomes.

Thesis #4: Law Firm 2.0

Regulatory changes in Arizona, Utah, and emerging sandboxes across the U.S. are dismantling traditional barriers to legal innovation. Non-lawyer ownership, alternative business structures, and automated legal services are now realities.

Technology-native companies modernize legal service delivery, enabled by new regulatory frameworks. These companies can access outside capital, build scalable tech-enabled models, and deliver legal services in ways traditional firms cannot.

We've written extensively about this thesis:

The Convergence

These four theses are interconnected layers of a transforming industry:

• Law Firm as Channel creates new revenue streams that fund technology adoption

• Workflow Improvement builds the operational foundation for scale

• Legal AI provides the intelligence layer that makes automation possible

• Law Firm 2.0 offers the regulatory freedom to deploy these innovations fully

The founders who understand how these theses interact and build at the intersections will create the most valuable companies.

Join Us

The LegalTech Lab provides the capital, expertise, and network to help founders capture this transformation. Whether you're building AI tools, workflow solutions, new distribution channels, or entirely new models of legal service delivery, we want to hear from you.

Apply now to join The LegalTech Lab.

Continue reading: Overview of the LegalTech Lab; The Five Forces Reshaping Legal Services