Welcome to Attorney Intelligence, where we break down the biggest advancements in AI for legal professionals every week.

This past week, two interesting partnerships were announced: Harvey x iManage and LegalZoom x Perplexity. Both of these are early signs of how legal AI players are starting to team up with legacy infrastructure and high-intent user platforms.

If you zoom out, we’re seeing the early formation of frameworks - three distinct types of partnerships that will define the legal AI market going forward:

• Data partnerships

• Marketing partnerships

• Firm partnerships

Some are about unlocking access. Some are about distribution. And some are about co-building from the ground up.

The lines are still blurry, but these partnership models are starting to shape the rails that innovation will run on.

In this week’s Attorney Intelligence, we’ll explore:

• What data partnerships like iManage x Harvey tell us about access, infrastructure, and UX

• How LegalZoom x Perplexity signals the arrival of “AI SEO” in consumer-facing legal tech

• Why law firm collaborations like Allen & Overy x Harvey are becoming co-development engines

• What these three models reveal about the future of go-to-market in legal AI

Let’s jump in.

Data Partnerships

The most valuable kind of partnership is also the hardest to get done. Data partnerships are about infrastructure: integrations between AI models and the systems where firms keep their most important knowledge.

Case in point, Harvey just announced an integration with iManage, the dominant platform for document and knowledge management in the legal world.

The idea is simple - if you’re a lawyer using both tools, you should be able to ask Harvey a question and have it automatically pull answers from your firm's DMS, instead of toggling back and forth between platforms.

It’s the kind of partnership that sounds obvious until you realize how tightly guarded legal data is.

For Harvey, this improves UX and makes their product way stickier. For iManage, it’s about staying essential as AI-native tools creep closer to the core workflow. And for lawyers, it means fewer clicks and smarter context, assuming the privacy and permissions are properly handled.

As more of these integrations roll out, expect data partnerships to be a huge wedge for adoption.

Marketing Partnerships

Within marketing partnerships, legaltech companies want to show up exactly where people are looking for legal help.

Take LegalZoom’s partnership with Perplexity. The logic is clear: small business owners are already using Perplexity and other AI search tools to get answers to legal questions - sometimes taking the first answer they get as fact.

LegalZoom wants to insert itself into that moment, before the user acts on bad info. Perplexity Pro users will now start to see LegalZoom offers and product placements baked into the search experience.

This is like the AI version of the roadside PI billboard. Same strategy, new surface area.

For B2C players like LegalZoom, this kind of positioning is critical. They’re meeting customers at the moment of intent, right when they’re about to make a legal decision.

For firms, especially those in consumer law, this may be a preview of the next frontier in digital visibility - not Google SEO, but AI SEO.

Firm Partnerships

The tightest and most bespoke partnership is that with a firm.

These are the deals where law firms and AI companies team up directly to co-build features, integrations, and entire workflows.

Allen & Overy was the first big-name firm to partner with Harvey AI, working closely with them to integrate AI tools across contract review, due diligence, and litigation support.

Since then, Harvey has signed similar partnerships with firms like Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas.

At PointOne, we treat these types of partnerships as co-development exercises. The firm provides data, feedback, and real-world use cases, PointOne builds solutions that solve those problems and in return, both sides benefit.

The vendor gets a committed customer who’s invested in the product roadmap. The firm gets innovation they can actually use.

It’s not just “we’re trying out their tool.” It’s “we’re building the tool together.”

Where This All Goes

Beyond PR headlines, these early-stage partnerships are setting the norms for how AI companies go to market in legal and how law firms adapt.

Whether you’re a vendor, a firm, or a solo operator, understanding the difference between data, marketing, and firm partnerships gives you a better map of what’s coming next.

Because soon enough, every legaltech startup is going to need to answer the question:

Who are we partnering with and why?

Are you operating within one of these partnership models or looking for one of them? Are these the future of how the legal industry operates?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Legal Bytes

• Flank raised $10M to build AI legal agents focused on enterprise use cases. The company aims to create autonomous tools that can handle repetitive legal workflows like contract review and compliance tasks part of a growing movement to move from co-pilots to fully operational agents inside legal departments.

• A new study found that ChatGPT now scores on par with, and in some cases better than A+ law students on standardized legal exams. While not ready to replace real lawyers, these results highlight how much legal reasoning capability foundation models have developed, and raise new questions about how legal education and bar admissions may need to evolve.

• Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using its content to train AI models without permission. This lawsuit is the latest in a string of copyright and data licensing battles as platforms start to push back on AI companies training on user-generated content. For legal AI companies, it’s a reminder that training data access is still an unsettled frontier and lawsuits like this could reshape what’s possible.

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Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week,

Adrian