@willchen500 The value propositions are different. Open Evidence is a research tool where the Legal AI tools you mention are workflow. The closest to Open Evidence would be Midpage or one of the newer AI-native legal research companies.
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR
The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric
The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage.
The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M).
They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now.
The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract.
In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation.
On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins.
At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing.
And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
Extremely specific life advice: you can convert Fahrenheit to Celsius with the stops on the 6 train.
33 St =0°
42 St=5°
51 St=10°
59 St=15°
Works to 96th St!
It’s inevitable that contracts will be negotiated by agents within the next decade.
Business will speed up so much that humans won’t be able to keep up with day-to-day contracts between companies.
Lawyers will set the policies and audit— agents will be trusted to do the rest.
This sounds irresponsible, until you realize what the error rate is for human contract managers—fairly high.
I believe agents will be a safer way to negotiate rudimentary agreements within the decade, just like self-driving is now safer than human driving.
This chart will exist for basic business contracts:
@abhijitwt This is the 'platform risk' era of AI. If your startup is just a thin wrapper or basic workflow automation, you are essentially doing free product research for Anthropic and OpenAI. The only moats left are proprietary data and deep physical integrations.
“The problem isn't product-market fit.
The problem is that the switching costs in AI agents, at least in many cases, are much lower than what we've seen in SaaS before.”
@ZachAbramowitz The question is how will VCs recoup the investment if the $ is spent on FDEs and services (non-scalable), assuming no TAM expansion, no canibalization of law firm/client revenue or pure software development, when so much of the “legal product” depends on firm/infoprovider data?
I have zero rooting interest in this Broncos/Bills game but the fact that 2 VERY touchy pass interference calls pretty much decide the game in what other than that was an amazing game is a disservice to the sport
For the umpteenth thousandth time in football TV history, Tony Romo calls a play while the teams are waiting for the snap and then it is perfectly executed. This is his special talent as an analyst. 🐐
@martinvars Martin, there are many companies (1000+) applying some form of GenAI to legal use cases (see https://t.co/pA6UGdOwBF) - send me a DM or on linked in and I’d be happy to help you navigate the space. Saludos!
My Wife: “Why did the Yankees take the good pitcher (Max Fried) out?”
Me: “He was at 102 pitches.”
My Wife: “Well, he should’ve thrown more.”
Honestly, can’t argue with her.