Another week, another tech company decides that lawyers represent a market worth conquering. This time it’s Perplexity, the AI outfit that made its name with web search, delivering actually useful output that no longer requires scrolling down through six irrelevant “sponsored” results like some companies require. More recently, Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a sort of curated AI offering that takes the best tools of the AI world and purports to apply the right one to the right task, creating agents and sub-agents along the way.
Today, the company announced that it’s taking this vision to the legal market with Computer for Counsel. The new platform promises to wire into some of the same research databases, document repositories, and contract tools lawyers already use, offering to handle the administrative grunt work nobody went to law school to do.
When I first learned about Perplexity, its value proposition was auditable web search. No matter how mundane the query, Perplexity brought an answer and receipts. Back when the wild early days of AI, this product already put a premium on giving the user confidence that the algorithm hadn’t pulled the answer out of its shiny metal ass. Not that Perplexity hasn’t found itself on the wrong end of a hallucination allegation — without proper precautions, no algorithm can be perfect. But Perplexity takes pains to note that it rigorously trains for accuracy and even post-trains the models other companies produce to increase accuracy before including them inside a Perplexity offering. So for a profession that spent two years watching colleagues get sanctioned for filing briefs full of cases that don’t exist, Perplexity has a brand identity that should matter for lawyers.
Moreover, the announcement includes a partnership with Midpage — a research platform offering case law, statutes, and a citator, with every output hyperlinked back to the underlying authority — giving Perplexity the needed legal industry experience for its product. The company will also work with LegalZoom to take advantage of its array of templates.
Computer for Counsel will work directly from Microsoft 365 so it “can draft documents in Word, retrieve files from SharePoint, and reference context from Outlook or Microsoft Teams.” Which, regrettably, would require using Microsoft Teams.
But who will use this product? Biglaw has a number of AI suitors ranging from Harvey and Legora to Thomson Reuters and Lexis. Not that Perplexity doesn’t have experience in the space. Gunderson Dettmer notably rolled Perplexity Enterprise out firmwide and got 80% of its lawyers using it as a research layer that sits alongside the existing tools. But is there Biglaw appetite to hand over more power to a vendor curating a buffet of models?
And a vendor that doesn’t sit on a moat of proprietary data like century-plus mainstays like Thomas Reuters. Though maybe that doesn’t matter in a world of connectors. My suspicion when it comes to the biggest players in the industry is that they’re treating AI the same way they used to treat Westlaw and Lexis — offering both and letting the associate on the ground decide. So go ahead and draft up something in CoCounsel, run queries against Computer for Counsel, and let Claude’s legal product offer edits. Go crazy with all the offerings!
But for firms — and in-house teams — without that kind of budget, Computer for Counsel could provide just the right answer. And the announcement sort of signals that this is the intended audience. Global firms aren’t generally putting files in SharePoint and Box, but smaller teams thrive on those products.
An opportunity to use AI without letting ChatGPT run headlong into Rule 11. A layer of high tech capabilities that doesn’t require the small team lawyer to add the additional hat of having to spend every day figuring out which models produce the best results after the latest round of new announcements. In that way, the product provides a side effect as plugged-in consultant, with all the tech industry evaluation and decision making happening behind the scenes.
Not every vendor promises to be that open-minded with competing algorithms.
The post Perplexity Jumps Into Legal With ‘Computer For Counsel’ appeared first on Above the Law.
Another week, another tech company decides that lawyers represent a market worth conquering. This time it’s Perplexity, the AI outfit that made its name with web search, delivering actually useful output that no longer requires scrolling down through six irrelevant “sponsored” results like some companies require. More recently, Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a sort of curated AI offering that takes the best tools of the AI world and purports to apply the right one to the right task, creating agents and sub-agents along the way.
Today, the company announced that it’s taking this vision to the legal market with Computer for Counsel. The new platform promises to wire into some of the same research databases, document repositories, and contract tools lawyers already use, offering to handle the administrative grunt work nobody went to law school to do.
When I first learned about Perplexity, its value proposition was auditable web search. No matter how mundane the query, Perplexity brought an answer and receipts. Back when the wild early days of AI, this product already put a premium on giving the user confidence that the algorithm hadn’t pulled the answer out of its shiny metal ass. Not that Perplexity hasn’t found itself on the wrong end of a hallucination allegation — without proper precautions, no algorithm can be perfect. But Perplexity takes pains to note that it rigorously trains for accuracy and even post-trains the models other companies produce to increase accuracy before including them inside a Perplexity offering. So for a profession that spent two years watching colleagues get sanctioned for filing briefs full of cases that don’t exist, Perplexity has a brand identity that should matter for lawyers.
Moreover, the announcement includes a partnership with Midpage — a research platform offering case law, statutes, and a citator, with every output hyperlinked back to the underlying authority — giving Perplexity the needed legal industry experience for its product. The company will also work with LegalZoom to take advantage of its array of templates.
Computer for Counsel will work directly from Microsoft 365 so it “can draft documents in Word, retrieve files from SharePoint, and reference context from Outlook or Microsoft Teams.” Which, regrettably, would require using Microsoft Teams.
But who will use this product? Biglaw has a number of AI suitors ranging from Harvey and Legora to Thomson Reuters and Lexis. Not that Perplexity doesn’t have experience in the space. Gunderson Dettmer notably rolled Perplexity Enterprise out firmwide and got 80% of its lawyers using it as a research layer that sits alongside the existing tools. But is there Biglaw appetite to hand over more power to a vendor curating a buffet of models?
And a vendor that doesn’t sit on a moat of proprietary data like century-plus mainstays like Thomas Reuters. Though maybe that doesn’t matter in a world of connectors. My suspicion when it comes to the biggest players in the industry is that they’re treating AI the same way they used to treat Westlaw and Lexis — offering both and letting the associate on the ground decide. So go ahead and draft up something in CoCounsel, run queries against Computer for Counsel, and let Claude’s legal product offer edits. Go crazy with all the offerings!
But for firms — and in-house teams — without that kind of budget, Computer for Counsel could provide just the right answer. And the announcement sort of signals that this is the intended audience. Global firms aren’t generally putting files in SharePoint and Box, but smaller teams thrive on those products.
An opportunity to use AI without letting ChatGPT run headlong into Rule 11. A layer of high tech capabilities that doesn’t require the small team lawyer to add the additional hat of having to spend every day figuring out which models produce the best results after the latest round of new announcements. In that way, the product provides a side effect as plugged-in consultant, with all the tech industry evaluation and decision making happening behind the scenes.
Not every vendor promises to be that open-minded with competing algorithms.
