Build vs Buy — Legal Tech Providers

What this means for Legal Tech Providers

• Model accuracy on legal text is the binding constraint — generic LLMs hallucinate citations and misread contractual nuance, and the last 5% of accuracy is what determines whether the AmLaw firm renews or sues.
• Enterprise security posture (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, BAA-equivalent legal terms, on-prem or VPC deployment options) is table stakes — and most legal tech startups are still scrambling to ship it after the GC's first procurement review.
• Legal text training data is a thicket — models trained on internet-scraped legal text underperform on jurisdiction-specific, practice-area-specific work and high-quality fine-tuning data is expensive and contested to license.

Where it pays to act

• Legal-domain model fine-tuning and evaluation — practice-area-specific training data, jurisdiction-aware retrieval, and a published evaluation harness against partner-curated gold sets that turns accuracy from a vendor claim into a defensible benchmark.
• Citation verification and hallucination guardrails — mandatory verification workflows, source-grounded retrieval, and explicit refusal-to-answer logic that protects the customer from the Mata-v.-Avianca-style sanctions story.