Relativity wires its case data to Claude in 2027; Harvey and Legora take a number
The ediscovery incumbent that hosts the case evidence says it will build to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google first, go cloud-only by 2028, and expose matters to Claude through an MCP connector in 2027, with a confidential IPO filing in the drawer. Harvey just closed at $15.5B and Legora is chasing $10B on the opposite bet: that firms pay for a workflow layer above the models.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
On the last day of Relativity Fest in Chicago, chief executive Phil Saunders gave the partners still selling legacy Server boxes a date and a threat: from 1 January 2028 no new matter goes anywhere but the cloud, and for holdouts, "Know we're going to run through you." Nearly 84% of Relativity's annual recurring revenue already sits in its cloud platform aiR, up from more than 75% when the deadline was set in January 2025. 1
The marks riding on the lawyer's desktop
The applications living above that evidence carry private prices most software never sees. Harvey closed $550M at a $15.5B valuation on 9 September, its third markup in nine months after $11B in March and $8B in December. 25 Legora closed $550M at $5.55B in March and is reportedly in talks above $10B, a round that could include secondaries. 23 Legal tech drew a record $5.85B of venture money last year; Harvey's round alone is 16% of this year's total so far. 4
Harvey closed at $15.5B; Legora is in talks at $10B, double its March mark
- Estimate
Data
| Value | Range | |
|---|---|---|
| Harvey | $15.5B | — |
| Legora (estimate) | $10B | $5.55–10.00B |
| Clio | $5B | — |
Three markups in nine months have nearly doubled Harvey's price
Data
| Harvey | |
|---|---|
| Dec 2025 | $8B |
| Mar 2026 | $11B |
| Sep 2026 | $15.5B |
A pipe that skips the apps
Here is the squeeze: the company holding the evidence is building past the layer priced at $25B. President Chris Brown said a 2027 MCP connector will let an authorized user query a matter from a tool such as Claude, never opening a legal application. 1 Saunders named Anthropic, OpenAI and Google as the priority; Harvey and Legora stay in the queue. 1 The labs hardly need the introduction: Anthropic shipped legal plug-ins for Claude this year, Google launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal this summer, and OpenAI is building legal software under Ironclad's founder. 34
The receipts under the snub
Harvey's recurring revenue has passed $400M across more than 3,000 customers, up from 1,300 in March, and it just released Tenet, an in-house model built on the open-weight Kimi K3 to cut frontier dependence. 56 Legora went from $3M to roughly $100M in recurring revenue, company-stated, serving more than 1,000 customers including Barclays, White & Case and Linklaters. 37 Relativity spends over $200M a year on R&D and concedes it earns "a lot less" on cloud than on Server. 1
The other side of the trade
Legora's chief executive answered the pocket-lawyer threat directly: "It's amazing that everybody can have their own pocket lawyer in Claude, but we're not solving for the same use case." 3 The switching costs sit in workflow, not in model quality. This week King's College London, the City Law School and BPP became the first UK law schools on Legora, after nine US schools, habit formation at the seat where careers start, under an SRA warning about hallucination and privilege. 8 Relativity, for its part, is no referee: IPO filing confidential, Silver Lake the largest holder, Andrew Sieja and ICONIQ near 25% each. 1
What decides it
The connector ships in 2027 and Server matters end on 1 January 2028; Legora's round closes above $10B or it does not; the filing prices when the market lets it. The landlord bets every firm keeps a frontier model on the desk. The $25B upstairs bets the firm still pays rent above it.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
