Blog
Notes on applied AI for legal work.
· IQdoc
The State of Legal AI, August 2026
A month of counting: $6.2 billion across 95 companies, 269 products, 50 agents, and the arrival of the model labs. The findings in summary, with the full report to follow.
· IQdoc
We scored 95 legal AI companies on what a buyer can actually verify
Six observable signals, applied mechanically to every company in our funding survey. The average score is 1.99 out of 10. Not one of the 95 has independent research published about its product.
· IQdoc
What the model labs built for legal
Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and xAI have taken five completely different positions on the legal industry — from twelve practice-area plugins to nothing at all.
· IQdoc
Legal AI benchmarks, and who is marking the exam
We went through every legal AI benchmark we could find. Four vendors built their own and all four won. The most useful number in the field is the gap between two ways of scoring the same answer.
· IQdoc
Everyone has an agent now
Fifty of the 264 legal AI products we catalogued are agents. The word covers at least four different things, and the most interesting development this month came from outside legal tech entirely.
· IQdoc
Everybody's transcription is 97% accurate
We benchmarked seven transcription methods against certified Supreme Court transcripts. They all landed within a point of each other. The gap that matters for legal work is somewhere else entirely.
· IQdoc
What the legal AI boom built for solo lawyers
Thirty-eight of 264 products are sold to independent lawyers. Exactly one was built only for them, and it is not for sale. The rest are firm software that accepts a smaller credit card.
· IQdoc
Every legal AI product built for people without a lawyer
Out of 264 products from 95 funded legal AI companies, fourteen are sold to someone without a lawyer. Then we found a fifteenth that our own method had filtered out, which turned out to be the most interesting one.
· Sam Sperling, Founder
Legal tech is not the market
Legal services is a $1.2 trillion market. Legal tech will be $70 billion in 2033. AI is collapsing the wall between them, and the companies we catalogued are already walking through it.
· IQdoc
One in five legal AI companies now sells legal work
We catalogued 264 products from 95 legal AI companies. Nineteen of them do not sell software at all, and almost nothing reaching people without a lawyer is software either.
· IQdoc
Where the legal AI money went
We tracked $6.2 billion across 95 AI-native legal tech companies, then counted what they built with it. Almost none of it is aimed at people without a lawyer.
· IQdoc
Introducing IQdoc
What IQdoc is, why it exists, and where the two doors on the home page lead.
· Sam Sperling, Founder
Why IQdoc exists
Five years inside one of the hardest divorces imaginable, a $20,000 transcript that put my words in someone else's mouth, and the tools I wished existed.