AI Assisted Drafting

Harvey and Legora each launched an AI product called Intake within about a day of each other, both aimed at corporate legal departments. Harvey's version adds intake and triage to its contract tools. It captures requests from everyday business apps, routes them to an agent or lawyer, and runs a first-pass review. Legora's version runs inside Slack. An employee @mentions the Legora Agent, which asks for missing details, creates a tracked task and drafts work from the team's playbooks. Both products use the same "front door" framing, which is why the timing drew attention.

GM announced the OnStar AI Assistant on October 21, 2026, at its GM Forward event in New York. The assistant debuts in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV in the coming months, with more GM vehicles to follow, including the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500. Drivers can use voice commands to control vehicle functions, check tire pressure and charging status, ask about model features, and connect to a live OnStar advisor. GM also plans a unified OnStar app for 2027 that would replace the Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC apps, along with OnStar Guardian. Sterling Anderson, GM's chief product officer, described the change as a platform shift: "OnStar is now transitioning to be a connected intelligence platform, not just the call center that it's historically been known as." Google Gemini powers the assistant, extending a partnership that dates to 2019, though GM says it also built its own large language model.

Legora and Sirion have announced a partnership that connects Legora's legal research platform with Sirion's contract lifecycle management system. Lawyers working in Sirion can pull contracts, precedents and negotiated terms into Legora, and run Legora research from inside Sirion. Users drafting, reviewing or negotiating a contract can check it against current case law, legislation and regulations, and receive cited answers with suggested amendments. Sirion's existing access controls carry through to Legora automatically. The integration rolls out in phases, starting with selected beta customers. The announcement was issued October 14, 2026, from Lehi, Utah, and Law360 covered it the next day.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which hears appeals from Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming, released a proposed rule on September 18, 2026. Under proposed Rule 46.5(B)(4), a filer would certify that a person reviewed any AI-assisted document before submission, and that reviewer would have to confirm that cited authorities exist and that quotations, citations, and legal analysis are accurate. Filing the document would serve as the certification, with no separate AI disclosure form. Commentary reports that dismissal of the appeal is among the possible sanctions. The public comment period closed October 18. If adopted, the rule takes effect January 1, 2027, and the court plans to publish final rules by December 1, 2026.

Womble Bond Dickinson announced on October 20, 2026, the launch of Womble AI Labs, an in-house initiative to build AI tools for the firm's attorneys and clients. The lab is led by Chief AI and Technology Officer Chad Ergun and sits within the firm's IT function. It will work with practice groups and client teams on internal tools that improve operations and legal service delivery, along with bespoke practice applications. Initial work targets regulatory monitoring, document generation and packaging, contract review and lifecycle management, and early-stage legal analyses and case assessments. Law.com reports the lab's team hopes to build its own AI model in the near future. Merrick Benn, Chair and CEO of Womble Bond Dickinson (US), tied the launch to the firm's commitment to new technology and to its 150th anniversary.

AI.Law is opposing a motion by Eve Legal to dismiss its patent infringement suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, according to Law360 reporting dated October 20, 2026. AI.Law sued Butler Labs, which operates as Eve Legal, on June 17, 2026. The complaint asserts U.S. Patent No. 12,461,932 B1, which covers methods for using AI to turn unstructured material into long-form formatted documents. AI.Law says it notified Eve of the patent and the alleged infringement in May and June, and that Eve kept operating its platform. The case is No. 3:26-cv-05930 and is assigned to Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse. Eve moved to dismiss on August 31, arguing the patent is invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because it claims conventional AI use to collect, organize and present information. AI.Law's opposition argues its claims go beyond the abstract idea of using AI to draft legal documents and should be treated as patent-eligible.

Above the Law published an opinion column by Joe Patrice on October 16, 2026, arguing that AI reorganizes legal work rather than shortening it. Patrice writes from experience: AI does not always get the work done faster, it gets it done differently. The column cites a Latitude announcement about Alex Su's promotion as early evidence that AI is currently increasing the hours lawyers work. Patrice attributes some of that added time to lawyers heavily editing AI output to avoid the next hallucination scandal, along with research tangents that AI surfaces. The core claim is that a competent first draft is becoming cheap while the skill to refine it is becoming scarce. The piece names no legislation, agency, or product launch. The page also carries sponsored LexisNexis content, so it mixes editorial and vendor material.

Microsoft has launched Copilot for Legal, a set of legal-industry plugins that bring specialized sources into its Copilot assistant. The partner-built plugins cover legal research, document and matter management, agreements and e-signature, legal AI, and e-discovery. Named partners include Docusign, Juro and Adobe Acrobat Sign for agreements; Harvey, Legora and DeepJudge for legal AI; and Everlaw and Relativity for e-discovery. The plugins begin rolling out today through the Microsoft plugin registry, with more becoming available over time. Microsoft describes the launch as the fourth move by a major AI company to build out a legal vertical in five months.

Stephen Embry, a litigation commentator, argues in an Above the Law column published October 13, 2026, that AI's most valuable use in litigation is front-end work: early case assessment and outcome analysis. The column responds to a TRI guide on AI in litigation and treats early work as the most consequential stage of a case. Embry says AI can shrink the time and cost of tasks such as building an initial chronology, spotting key legal issues, matching claims to evidence, identifying critical witnesses, drafting a litigation plan, assessing expert needs, evaluating potential motions, analyzing damages, and finding key documents. He ties that early work to later decisions about depositions, motion strategy, and expert retention. The column does not name the specific tool it describes.

Law360 Pulse reported on October 21, 2026, that law firm leaders say knowledge management (KM) is becoming more important as AI turns into a baseline expectation for the legal industry. The story, by Steven Lerner, claims firms are reshaping KM roles around AI. The same week, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader announced on October 16 that it had adopted Harvey across three practice groups. Lawyers at the firm built custom agents for KM, Capital Markets, and International Arbitration, and the firm unveiled a firmwide AI strategy and a new AI governance structure. Harvey and Legora are named as vendors under signed agreements.

Harvey has launched a connector that brings Midpage's U.S. legal research library into Harvey Assistant. Users can run Midpage searches from inside drafting threads and receive cited sources in the final output. The library covers case law, statutes, regulations, and agency materials. Access requires both a Harvey account and a Midpage subscription, so only firms using both products can use it. Announced workflows include research memos, briefs and motions, citation review, and statutory and regulatory questions. The connector also lets Harvey's assistant check whether cited authorities exist and support the propositions they are cited for. Midpage, founded in 2022 and headquartered in New York, built its case law database in-house rather than licensing it from providers such as Fastcase. Its CEO, Otto Zastrow, said the connector keeps research and drafting in one place.

Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal referred divorce attorney Jaclyn Soroka to the Florida Bar on October 21, 2026. The court rejected her response to a possible sanctions order and said her filings read like those of a vexatious pro se litigant. Law360 reported that the filings included AI-hallucinated quotations, and Soroka acknowledged one false quote, which she blamed on human error and time pressure. The referral follows a months-long dispute. On September 16, the court denied her petition for a writ of prohibition, then ordered her to show cause why sanctions should not be imposed and criticized the length and focus of her filings.