Trellis opens 2.5 billion court records to Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude
Trellis's state trial-court data, which covers the 98% of US cases that never reach appeal, is now reachable inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude. In the legal AI land-grab, the Los Angeles firm licenses the same proprietary dataset into every rival camp.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
A trial-court archive lands inside Word
Trellis, a Los Angeles legal-research company co-founded by chief executive Nicole Clark and chief operating officer Alon Shwartz, switched on a connector to Microsoft 365 Copilot on October 15, 2026 1. A lawyer drafting a motion in Word can now pull briefs that won before the same judge, against the same opposing counsel, without leaving the document 1. Trellis also sells that litigation intelligence directly, as judge analytics and daily filings reports 2.
The 98% of cases legal research never covered
The asset underneath is scale. Trellis says it holds more than 2.5 billion state trial-court records across 45 states, 3,000 courts and 30,000 judges 1. The National Center for State Courts counts 70 million cases filed in state courts each year, and puts the share of US cases handled there, never reaching appeal, at 98% 3. Traditional legal research was built on published appellate opinions, the 2% remainder that gets appealed 1.
Microsoft raises the bar; Trellis rents to every camp
Microsoft's+3.42% — Microsoft, up 3.42 percent today Copilot for Legal initiative ships more than 20 purpose-built legal skills, plugins from Harvey$15.5B — Harvey, private, latest valuation $15.5B, Legora$5.55B — Legora, private, latest valuation $5.55B and DeepJudge, and a research partner list that seats Trellis beside Bloomberg Law 4. Distribution is Microsoft's edge: the International Legal Technology Association's 2026 survey puts generative AI use or exploration at 94% of responding firms, up from 80%, with Copilot the most widely used tool at 76% 1.
Copilot already runs in 76% of law firms
Data
| Share of responding law firms | |
|---|---|
| Gen AI use or exploration, 2025 | 80% |
| Gen AI use or exploration, 2026 | 94% |
| Copilot in use, 2026 | 76% |
Clyde & Co director Stephen Allen framed the squeeze on specialists: "what can we do that Microsoft can't" 4. Trellis's answer is to license the same data into every camp: a Claude connector on May 12, a ChatGPT plugin on July 28, Microsoft 365 Copilot on October 15, 2026 6. Microsoft lists Trellis as a federated connector, fetched live over the Model Context Protocol under the user's own permissions and kept out of Microsoft's index 3.
The record is the moat
The platforms are paying for reach. Legora raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation on October 21, 2026, with annual revenue above $200 million, six weeks after Harvey raised $550 million at $15.5 billion 7; OpenAI$500B — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $500B, Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B and Google all shipped legal AI offerings this year 4.
On September 29, 2026, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Thomson Reuters' copyright win over Ross Intelligence, which had copied Westlaw headnotes to train a rival engine, the first such ruling by a federal appeals court: legal-research data is ownable property, and incumbents will litigate to keep it 8. Thomson Reuters plays both sides, shipping its HighQ software as a Copilot partner while defending its corpus in court 4.
The limits are real: Microsoft warns Copilot for Legal answers are advisory and can carry inaccurate citations, so a lawyer still signs the work, and Trellis discloses no revenue, valuation or usage figures 3. Watch the next connector deal and the first takeover bid for a court-record archive: Microsoft owns where lawyers work; Trellis owns the record of what the courts did.
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