Microsoft Copilot for Legal: What Will Be the Fallout?

Microsoft has fully launched itself into the legal vertical with Copilot for Legal, an AI-powered venture with over 20 skills that overlap with plenty of legal tech companies – and this will be right where most lawyers already work: Word. (See today’s news in the AL article here.) If you want to really take a centrality strategy to its max, then this is it.

While it had the Legal Agent before, this is a much broader offering and looks set to expand further in the future. And while many legal tech companies have agreed to operate as plugins to this competitor to Astra for Law, Gemini Enterprise for Law, and Claude for Legal, it could potentially cause a headache for some. Although, maybe not all.

— Legal Innovators New York Conference – Nov 17 + 18 — 

Will It Be Good?

Much rests on one key question: will Copilot for Legal and its many skills – often focused on contract needs – be good enough to keep lawyers in the Microsoft context and therefore not needing to go back to spend time with other tools?

Will some lawyers just say: ‘Look, it’s all we need for what we do, and hey….it’s all part of Word! What’s not to like?’  

Or will the venture, as some veterans of the legal tech sector expect, not really rock the world, based on the view that in the past, Microsoft’s steps into legal-specific tools haven’t been that successful.

And, there is another take, that even if it is OK, and does win customers across legal, that the demand for legal AI tools is growing massively across a $1 trillion sector – not to mention all that unmet need, and then factoring in future growth and Jevons’ Paradox. I.e. even if this eats some market share, the pie is getting much larger. Room for everyone at the inn, is the message.

But……it seems to AL that it is inevitable that if the skills and overall UI/UX is good enough for those lawyers who are not heavy users yet of legal AI tools, then Copilot for Legal – which will be part and parcel of what they already use every waking moment of their professional lives, i.e. Word…..just has to have some impact.

Where that impact lands the most is yet to be seen, but AL’s guess is: where those lawyers are not really that engaged with AI to start with and just want an ‘easy fix’ this is probably where it will be felt the most.

Conclusion

For many years the legal tech world wondered why Big Tech didn’t go after this sector. And then it did. One company after another.

And then people wondered why Microsoft had only dabbled with legal and not gone fully into it. And then they did go fully-in and dropped the centrality Word + AI bomb on legal tech.

The most incredible thing here is that just a year or two ago, no major tech giant was seriously involved in legal AI. Now we have: Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, with a number of others making smaller, but notable inroads.

Interesting times…!

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— Legal Innovators New York Conference – Nov 17 + 18 —