September Orange Rag: What Law Firms Are Actually Doing with Legal Tech

# What the September Orange Rag reports

This month's Orange Rag compiles survey results, vendor moves and operational realities that should shape legal-technology planning for general counsel and firm leaders.

Adoption priorities and the reality inside firms

An ILTA survey asked 500 law firms which technological area they concentrated on over the past year. The headline numbers:

• 40% prioritized generative AI.
• 25% prioritized cloud applications and SaaS.
• 52% still keep their accounting systems on-premises.

Those percentages show where attention and budgets went, but they also reveal a gap between interest and broad rollout. Usage metrics for many tools remain concentrated among early adopters rather than across most staff.

Which tools are installed, and how widely?

Market penetration numbers cited in the report:

• Microsoft Copilot: 76% of firms using it.
• Anthropic Claude: 44%.
• Thomson Reuters CoCounsel: 44%.
• Harvey: 43%.

Vendor moves and in-house model work

Frontier AI providers intensified focus on the legal market:

• OpenAI launched Astra for Law.
• Google released Gemini Enterprise for Legal.
• Anthropic hired Robert Mahari to lead its legal vertical.

At the same time, established legal-data vendors and firms are investing in model development and capacity:

• Thomson Reuters invested $40m to train its own legal LLM, called "Thomson."
• Harvey and Thomson Reuters are building open-weight or open-source model capabilities.
• Latham & Watkins purchased Nvidia GPU servers to fine-tune open-weight models in-house.

These developments reflect a shift in thinking: firms and vendors are weighing which stack to depend on and whether to retain control by building or tuning models internally.

Cost and security pressures to plan for now

Two operational pressures are driving behavior.

The Orange Rag collects several snapshot numbers relevant to strategy discussions:

• $15.5bn: Harvey's valuation after a $550m round (ARR $400m).
• $40m: Thomson Reuters' investment to train its legal LLM.
• $1bn: Morgan & Morgan's committed tech and AI spend over the next decade.
• 63%: Share of firms still pricing matters with traditional methods (BigHand).
• 14x: Reported rise in token usage at Harvey over six months.
• 5,700: Attendees at ILTACON 2026 in Nashville over four days.

What to do next

For legal leaders: treat GenAI projects as business-change efforts, not point tool installs. Clarify cost models, test security for any agent or integration, and plan the work required to move pilots into broader adoption if outcomes justify it.