For years, startups have tried to disrupt the legal industry — and for the most part been met with apathy.
The tools weren't right. The problems were too complex. The liability was too great. And incumbents were content to bill by the hour while everyone else digitized.
But something fundamental has shifted: and the legal world is finally waking up to change. The question is…Why now?
One possible answer: language.
Most "disrupted" industries are built on numerical data or systems of record (think: banking, trading, logistics, healthcare, real estate, accounting, etc.). Law is built on language. Not just documents, but entire systems of meaning, precedent, and argument - encoded in words. And, until recently, software couldn't really work with that. It could store documents, extract fields, or manage workflows, but it couldn't really…read.
Generative AI has changed this.
LLMs aren't like traditional software. They don't need structure. They thrive in ambiguity. They interpret, they synthesize, they reason through text. That makes them the first kind of software that can operate in the same medium lawyers do: prose.
It's as if, for the first time, we built a compiler that can run legalese.
That one shift changes everything. Because once you have machines that can understand and generate legal language, you can start automating things that used to require expensive humans: redlining contracts, summarizing case law, drafting filings, translating between jurisdictions.
We used to think the hard part of law was the complexity. But it turns out a lot of the complexity in law is just...language. Now that software can handle this, legal work may increasingly become a matter of compute.
Of course this doesn't mean lawyers go away: it means the shape of lawyering changes. The same way spreadsheets changed what it meant to be an accountant, language models will reshape what it means to be a lawyer. The high-leverage work will move upstream: lawyers will become even more valuable as a source of judgement, not grunt work.
The legal industry didn't resist disruption because it was too complex. It resisted because it's built on subjective, ambiguous language - something software has always struggled with.
Now that's no longer true…And everything's up for grabs.