Ed. note: Please welcome Joe Borstein, partner at Baretz+Brunelle and co-founder of LexFusion, back to the pages of Above the Law. In this new series, he and his colleagues at B+B will share their thoughts on trends they’re seeing across the legal industry. Check out prior editions here.

Miss me?

It has been a minute since I’ve appeared on this site. Nearly 10 years, actually, since I wrote the column in which I made a bold prediction that I’ve come back to revisit. A few things have happened in that time. Half the country started on GLP-1s, and the other half is asking ChatGPT if they should. Nvidia sold enough GPUs to surpass Canada’s entire economy, and GPS is still a thing. It has been a massive decade for the capital letters “G” and “P.”

But before all that — back in January 2017, when I had the glorious complexion you see in my author photo (sigh) — I made the prediction of which I speak. I said:

“By 2027 the legal industry will produce many billionaires, but few, if any, will be practicing attorneys — they will be alt.legal entrepreneurs solving huge problems at scale.”

That was a big swing to take at the time. Would I be back here if I had whiffed? Absolutely not. But it’s still 2026 and we can already call this a home run. Legal tech now has minted 16 unicorns (including decacorns). I like my odds here, a LOT.

I could see this coming because of MY one asset which appreciated significantly: an almost comic enthusiasm for legal tech. When I made my prediction, I was a Biglaw exile at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, running a legal outsourcing business and co-writing this column with my Penn Law classmate Ed Sohn. Later, I co-founded the legal tech accelerator LexFusion, which in 2025 was acquired by Baretz+Brunelle. I am now a partner there, doing exactly what my column said someone should do: helping legal tech companies grow up, and helping firms and legal departments figure out which ones to buy.

Rereading my 2017 column, it’s clear that I was desperate for someone — anyone — to see the possibilities that I did for legal tech, and to join me in that world. My evangelism rested on three foundations, which I’ll quote directly: “the market for legal innovation is huge,” “the alt.legal community is tiny,” and “your skills will translate.”

Let’s see how each of those statements has aged over the last decade.

THE MARKET FOR LEGAL INNOVATION IS HUGE

This is truer than ever. In 2017, I bragged that legal outsourcing generated over $1 billion a year. Big business, I said. Adorable.

The LPO market was pegged at $27.8 billion in 2025 by some people who I assume know what they’re talking about. Meanwhile, I’ve had a front row seat to even more explosive growth in legal tech. A few examples from my career: Casetext, an early LexFusion member, sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in 2023. Agiloft, another LexFusion member, took a majority investment from KKR in 2024. DISCO (LexFusion member) went public, and Litera (LexFusion member) bought Kira (also a LexFusion member), which was like watching two friends getting married.

It’s not just my portfolio. Legal tech funding hit a record $4.6 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase, and startups pulled in more than $2.2 billion this year by late August. Tracxn counts roughly 12,800 legal tech companies worldwide.

Spending and use are up just as much as investment. Law firms grew their technology spend 9.7% in 2025, likely the fastest real growth the industry has ever seen. Among general counsel, generative AI adoption jumped from 44% to 87% in a single year. Seemingly every firm now has a chief innovation officer, a chief transformation officer and at least one person whose entire job is to attend ILTACON. (I applied to a few of the latter, but they weren’t feeling me.)

Have law firms become technology savants? Only 18% say they measure AI ROI, which means 82% are doing what lawyers have always done with tech budgets: spending them vigorously and crossing their fingers. But in 2017 the fight was getting firms to admit innovation was a thing.

That fight is over; we won.

THE ALT.LEGAL COMMUNITY IS TINY

How times have changed. In my 2017 column, I all but begged readers to join me at Stanford’s CodeX conference, where you’d see the same few people year after year. Not anymore. Now, crowds of 5,700 people are coming to tentpole events like this year’s ILTACON, where Sheryl Crow performed a private concert at a Legora event. As Stephen Embry observed here, the gathering felt downright CES-like, filling all 700,000 square feet of Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland.

But this is one change that shouldn’t scare anyone from jumping into legal tech. That’s because the white space is still staggering. Companies spend about 2% of their legal budgets on technology. Most legal problems on earth never meet a lawyer, let alone a model.

The legal tech community can also still feel small in the best ways. Evan Shenkman, the Fisher Phillips innovation chief who was the design partner behind Casetext’s CoCounsel, joined Baretz+Brunelle as a partner last month. He now sits about 11 feet from me. He’s (Ron Burgundy voice) kind of a big deal, but if you’ve spent any time in legal tech there’s a good chance you know him.

YOUR SKILLS WILL TRANSLATE

If you have any inclination to get into legal tech, this is the most important of my three points — and in 2026, it remains true. My basic point was this: hard work, great writing, and strong persuasive and organizational skills can make you a great operator, not just a great associate. I have now witnessed this point proven roughly a thousand times. Casetext founder Jake Heller was a litigator. More broadly, according to Firm Prospects, 46 lawyers left Am Law 200 firms for AI companies in the first half of 2026 alone, so I think my secret is out.

Law schools have noticed, and are encouraging cross pollination between legal techs and young lawyers. Northwestern’s Pritzker Entrepreneurship Law Center has represented hundreds of founders and startups. Starting this fall, BU Law is weaving AI training into all three years of its J.D. curriculum. Now Penn Carey Law has the Institute for the Future of the Legal Profession, where they let me onto the founding advisory board, and Evan sits on WashU Law School’s AI Advisory Board. In short, the skills of good lawyers and good legal tech entrepreneurs are harder to separate than ever.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

On the whole, one global pandemic and an AI revolution later, my old column holds up remarkably well. But my prediction isn’t the only thing to look back on.

Back in the days of alt.legal (that term may be the most archaic thing about this whole exercise), I profiled a bunch of legal tech entrepreneurs, many of whom were scraping together seed money and explaining to skeptical partners what “the cloud” was. I’m planning to track a few down to see where they are a decade later. Some went on to great success, including a billion-dollar exit; another runs legal for OpenAI. For the others, I’m not sure, but at least one probably became a sommelier. It should be fun either way to find out.

Stay tuned.

Joe Borstein is a partner at Baretz+Brunelle and co-founder of LexFusion, B+B’s innovation portfolio.

The post Where Am I Now? A Legal Tech Evangelist Checks In appeared first on Above the Law.