Vodafone pushes into legal tech market to co-develop AI platform
Vodafone has partnered with an AI startup to co-develop a legal tech tool, challenging market heavyweights Harvey and Legora.
The telecoms giant has teamed up with Aavalynx to co-develop an AI-driven litigation platform that helps manage and track legal disputes and forecast financial costs tied to these.
The AI company told City PM the joint venture “gives enterprise legal and business leaders a real-time, unified view of their disputes portfolio, turning litigation from an unmanaged legal cost into a proactively managed financial risk asset.”
This comes as Aavalynx announced a £1.5m round of pre-seed funding on Tuesday for its legal tech platform.
Aavalynx was founded in 2023 by chief executive Hanna Roos, a disputes lawyer with over two decades of experience in working on high-stakes legal disputes across sectors including the pharmaceutical industry, aerospace, and luxury art.
Roos started her legal career at Freshfields, later moving to Latham & Watkins and then to Quinn Emanuel, before founding her own disputes-focused boutique law firm, Aavagard, in 2021.
“Vodafone helped shape the platform, not just use it. As a co-development partner, Vodafone has given us their vision of innovative Aavalynx product features that serve in-house dispute teams well,” Roos said.
Harvey and Legora leading the market
The legal tech market is currently dominated by Harvey and Legora, and there are a host of startups across the space challenging the pair, such as Clio.
Both Harvey and Legora have used advertising campaigns featuring well-known celebrities to drive interest. Jude Law fronts Legora’s campaign, whilst Harvey recruited the actor who plays Harvey Spectre in the TV show Suits, after which the tool is named.
However, Roos said that the current AI tools in the legal tech market, including the likes of Harvey and Legora, “by and large improve lawyer efficiency”, but “efficiency is not good enough.”
“Generic LLM models cannot address the unique complexities of a sector like dispute resolution. The fact is that good tools make disputes efficient, but great ones make them disappear,” Roos said.
Vodafone was contacted for comment.