How Clio’s big moves in AI could affect legal practice
It remains to be seen whether its purchase of vLex will have wide-ranging effects on the legal market, but observers say it could be a much-needed disruption
Clio, Canada’s legal tech giant, made this summer memorable when it announced it bought global legal research and AI company vLex.
The US$1 billion deal represents the biggest acquisition in Clio’s history. As a result, Canada now has two of the world’s leading legal tech companies, Clio and Thomson Reuters. Both are working to gain an advantage in using AI for practice management.
“Our goal is to change the legal experience for all,” says Joshua Lenon, Clio’s lawyer in residence.
“We’re not just interested in practicing lawyers, but also clients. This acquisition helps us increase our capacity to affect change.”
The deal represents a shift in legal tech towards more comprehensive services, combining legal research, AI and practice management tools. Other major legal tech companies are rushing to integrate AI services into existing legal databases. Earlier this year, LexisNexus announced a strategic partnership with legal tech platform Harvey AI, which will integrate case law and other primary sources.
Earlier this month, Thomson Reuters launched CoCounsel Legal, an AI assistant that uses Westlaw content to manage workflows, such as automatically creating file research plans.
Legal tech has been marketed as a way to reduce access to justice, make legal databases more accessible to the public, and make legal practice easier for lawyers. The question is whether these major deals will impact the future of legal services.
In 2023, vLex bought Fastcase, a leading U.S. case law database and research tool. That merger made vLex a global legal database with over 1 billion legal documents from 180 countries. This enabled vLex to build Vincent, its legal assistant tool that analyzes contracts and answers legal research questions in plain language.
Most of the chatter amongst legal tech enthusiasts has been about the possibility of the merger helping to increase access to justice. Clio and vLex have supported access to justice by providing their software for free to law schools, U.S. bar associations, a few Canadian law societies and legal clinics.
Lenon says Canada is in a unique position because CanLii offers case law databases to the public for free. In the U.S., Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project is attempting to do the same with state and federal case law. The Free Law Project in the U.S. does similar work, collecting cases, oral arguments, judgments, and other court documents.
However, having legal databases open to the public isn’t the same as having legal representation or useful legal information. It just isn’t enough, says Lachlan Deyong, a legal consultant who works with organizations on access to justice initiatives.
“CanLii is not the solution to the legal data deficit,” he says.
“CanLii has a tiny amount of legal data compared to vLex, Westlaw and LexisNexis. Cases are seldom actually comprehensible to non-lawyers.”
Deyong suggests companies like vLex make their data accessible to the public through access to justice tools. He also points out that bulk legal data is needed to create tools, which has been an ongoing issue in Canada.
“To use AI in the law, in particular access to justice, you need access to data,” he says.
“This means court judgements, and lots of them. There’s no way to do this in Canada.”
The real impact of the vLex acquisition may be in legal practice. As a law librarian and director of data curation at Legal Technology Hub, Sarah Glassmeyer has followed legal tech trends for 20 years. She isn’t surprised by the recent market moves and believes the best way to support access to justice is through small and medium-sized law firms, which are the bulk of Clio’s clients.
“I’m excited for small to medium-sized firms to have world-class tools so they can serve more people,” she says.
“They don’t need access to things like Portuguese law, but they get access to workflows from vLex. The workflows are even more valuable than the AI search tools because they can be more efficient and serve more clients.”
Glassmeyer says the big advantage for users is the combination of Clio’s data about practice management and vLex data on case law. vLex uses agentic AI, a type of artificial intelligence where autonomous machines are able to complete tasks and make decisions without humans. It’s the same type of tech used for CoCounsel Legal.
“You can take your notes from an intake form, and agentic AI can build the file for you,” she says.
Glassmeyer predicts other companies may want to purchase Bloomberg Law, which has valuable data on U.S. mergers and acquisitions. She sees the Clio acquisition as part of the company’s long-term goal to become more global, as Clio has been expanding operations outside of North America for a while now. As for vLex, it has a strong collection and presence in Europe and Latin America.
“Their content will help make Clio more attractive to customers in those areas,” she says.
Glassmeyer and Deyong are both skeptical about whether the vLex acquisition will have wide-ranging effects on the legal market. It’s more likely that the competition created by Clio through this merger could cause the industry to change overall.
“Thomson Reuters and LexisNexus are lucrative and successful companies, and they don’t have many reasons to change,” says Deyong.
“But this Clio-vLex deal might be the disruption we need.”
