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 —

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.…

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