Overview
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
2025 will be our 8th year of LegalTech programming, beginning with our upcoming March 18 Salon!
This will be another in our series of intimate LegalTech Salons, with attendance limited to about 40 attendees, all of them serious participants in the legaltech industry.
We are very fortunate that despite the recent downturn in venture generally, legaltech appears to be doing well because of how suitable AI is for legaltech. And PE money is now very active in LegalTech too. As more legaltech companies mature, they are attracting PE investors in later stage funding rounds and for M&A rollups. So we have entitled our event "The Maturing of LegalTech", and we expect to be showcasing more later stage legaltech success stories. Our friend Scott Mozarsky of JEGI Clarity will lead a panel on the surge in M&A deals in LegalTech.
However, the world of AI is in dynamic turmoil, with a firehose of important new models and features launching almost every week and lots of uncertainty about who the real winners will be. Will the massive ongoing investments in large foundational models pay off or will these investments ultimately end in a pricing war to the bottom? Will very competitive open source and smaller bespoke models be a better fit for legaltech companies? How will this new thing -- real incremental costs to deliver software services -- remake the industry? Will the very competitive, open source and low priced Chinese competitors scramble the competitive landscape and the underlying assumptions for cost and business models in the sector? And most importantly, how will the economic pie be shared among this complicated ecosystem, especially by legal customers? This is an opportune time to discuss all of this.
We will also be digging into the rapid rise of Agentic AI and how it represents a more capable next wave of AI disruption. Some predict that Agentic AI businesses will displace traditional SaaS companies, including in Legal. How far and fast will it go? Our friend Dan Katz will be leading a panel on "Will Agents take over LegalTech?"
We are also planning to organize a Senior Practitioner Panel so we can get reactions at the end of the day from leadership about the day's proceedings, and how law firms will respond to this disruptive time. Our friend Ralph Baxter will be moderating this panel and we are still recruiting speakers for this panel.
Please visit the "Program" section below to see the current state of the agenda.
Our Salons are very interactive and substantive events, with everyone seated around a single table, everyone with microphones. They are highly interactive events characterized by honest discussions in a very relaxed social setting. We gather together leading law firms, corporate legal departments, investors, large legaltech vendors, and startups to discuss consequential topics of the day. Because we follow Chatham House rules, attendees at our events tend to be remarkably open and talkative. We ask speakers to emphasize substantive discussions over marketing of products or companies, on the theory that the best marketing is the display of expertise.
We expect our 40 seats will sell out very quickly -- 30 people have already registered -- so if you are interested we recommend you register soon.
We look forward to seeing you in Bonny Doon!
Warm Regards,
Howard Chao
Doon Insights
