Heading into The Legal Tech Fund Summit, I’ve been thinking about how quickly legal tech is evolving and how the buyers have finally caught up to the technology. After years of promise, we’re seeing real adoption, bigger budgets, and a new wave of founders tackling some of the hardest, least-automated corners of law. 

These are a few themes I’ll be watching this week. Also, TLTF still has the best swag, and I need to re-up my next airport outfit.  

IP: Still a uniquely rich category 

IP is its own animal. The work isn’t just paper-based; it’s deeply technical. Patent clerks and lawyers in this space usually have both legal and engineering backgrounds, which makes it one of the last remaining areas of law where the work has to be done by someone who understands the product. 

I think about the lifecycle in five lanes: 

1. Innovation capture: IDFs and prior-art searches to identify something unique and defensible. 
2. Prosecution: Drafting, filing, and the inevitable back-and-forth with the patent office. 
3. Maintenance: Docketing, pruning, portfolio hygiene. 
4. Commercialization: Cross-licensing, valuation, and product strategy. 
5. Litigation: Where all the above gets tested. 

In a past life, I invested in IPMS and never lost the thread on how much a modern platform could do, especially in a world that sees trillions in licensing revenue. But I also know how hard it is to unseat Anaqua. So, I’m looking for teams using AI to help in-house counsel hit IDF quotas, surface engineering ideas worth defending, and make collaboration between internal innovators and outside counsel less painful.

The macro environment complicates filings across jurisdictions, but the conversation is bigger than patents. It’s about defensive and offensive product positioning, which increasingly has board-level visibility. Litigation tech sits adjacent to that same thesis. Claim-charting, demand-response, anything that helps companies move faster in a more aggressive enforcement landscape is all interesting.

And as AI platforms scale, trademark and copyright infringement scale with them. The next Zefr-like platform that identifies and monetizes those assets will have my attention. 

GC Suite: Tech that speeds business, not just legal 

A lot has changed since we invested in LinkSquares in 2019. Tool sprawl is real. I am excited about a new wave that takes on the hard, unglamorous problems like entity management and other workflows that slow the business.

The goal has never been to make GC lives easier for its own sake. The goal is to remove legal friction that holds up revenue. I like tech that modernizes inter-company collaboration, speeds case management, and connects legal work to commercial outcomes that the board recognizes.

For more context on how the role is evolving and why legal ops is a real buyer, see my earlier piece on legal operations. The short version: the CLO is ascendant, budgets follow, and the mandate is broader. That creates room for software that makes legal an accelerant for the business, not a blocker. 

Legal research: The foundation layer still matters 

Outside of some transactional categories, most legal copilots need real research assets to be useful. Since our last post, the vLex acquisition and Harvey’s Lexis partnership have been good reminders of why this layer is essential. I am still curious about teams that can build their own secondary sources and indexing with AI, especially for specific areas of law or multi-jurisdiction coverage. Think EU. Think state by state in the U.S. 

Legal tech is at an inflection point again. The buyers have budgets, the pain points are clearer, and AI is finally usable enough to matter. I’m less interested in shiny copilots and more in teams solving the gritty, high-stakes problems that define how legal work actually gets done. If you’re building in any of these areas or rethinking what legal infrastructure looks like in an AI world, I’d like to meet at TLTF. 

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Views expressed represent the opinions of Jump Capital. Jump Capital may have investments in or pursue investments in the security technology sectors and companies discussed. References to specific companies do not constitute investment recommendations.