"You wanna lose small. I wanna win big."
Harvey Specter, Suits
Harvey AI apparently agrees. Harvey (the startup, not the character) is raising at an $11B valuation. It's rival Legora is targeting $6B. Both are building legal AI platforms, and both are accelerating.
...all in the face of Anthropic just launching a competing legal tool.
----- Why the Money Keeps Coming -----
Legal services are a $1 trillion market. And AI is already eating the bottom of it.
Lease abstracts. Due diligence review. First drafts. Discovery. Case research.
The firms writing $11B checks clearly agree.
----- The Paradox -----
Senior attorneys have never been more valuable.
Master curators. Trusted advisors. Negotiators. The judgment that comes from 20 years of reps is genuinely irreplaceable.
But here's the tension nobody is resolving cleanly: how do you build a 20-year attorney without the first five? You abstract leases. You draft documents. You grind through discovery.
That foundational work doesn't just produce output. It produces the pattern recognition that eventually becomes judgment.
AI is absorbing those reps. The pipeline is narrowing before anyone has figured out what replaces it.
----- Why This Matters for CRE -----
Swap "attorneys" for "analysts" and the sentence still holds.
Junior brokers. Associates. Modelers. The CRE career ladder was built on entry-level reps too. Legal is just the canary.
We're 150 respondents into the first AI benchmarking study across commercial real estate's 4 million workers. Legal is skewing as the highest disruption function in our early data.
Above modeling. Above research. Above everything.
This insight (along with the anecdotal color that comes from follow ups with our research team) is exactly the kind of signal a broad network produces.
Fast, firsthand, specific.
PS -- Takes 5 minutes to take our survey. All respondents get detailed results before the public release. Link in comments.
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