While Harvey and Legora fight for Big Law’s business, Clio, an older legal tech company, is making a quieter bet on a corner of the market those upstarts have barely touched: the courts.
Clio, last valued at $5 billion, has acquired Learned Hand, a startup that builds artificial intelligence tools for judges, Business Insider has learned. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Its founder, Shlomo Klapper, had raised about $5 million for Learned Hand. Before starting the company, he worked at Palantir in a role similar to a forward-deployed engineer, then went to law school and joined Quinn Emanuel, the litigation powerhouse, as an associate.
The deal deepens Clio’s push into the judiciary and expands its ambitions beyond the small and midsize law firms and corporate legal teams that have made up its core customer base.
The bet is that judges are about to need more help. State trial court judges are already buried under heavy caseloads, said Jack Newton, Clio’s founder and chief executive. He expects artificial intelligence to add to the pressure.
More people are using chatbots to research the law and represent themselves without lawyers. The number of pro se cases in federal court rose from a long-term average of 11% to 16.8% in 2025, according to a recent paper from two doctoral students at the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At the same time, tech’s boosters argue that artificial intelligence will create more business and economic growth, setting off more contracts, more disputes, and more legwork for the courts.
Learned Hand was designed to help judges get up to speed more quickly on the facts of a case. Users could upload court filings and other documents, extract the key facts, and see how each side’s legal arguments connected to the record. The software could also draft memos, orders, and opinions, with citations linked back to their sources.
Klapper had been in talks to raise another funding round, including with Clio’s corporate venture arm. Newton said he had just received a memo from his team recommending an investment when Pablo Arredondo, a recent Clio hire, asked whether he had met the Learned Hand team — and whether the two companies should think bigger.
Earlier this month, Clio also hired Bridget Mary McCormack, a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and, most recently, CEO of the American Arbitration Association, to help lead the company’s expansion.
The acquisition is part of Clio’s push to become a one-stop shop for legal work. The company started with software for solo practitioners and small firms to manage the back office, but it has been moving into more parts of the legal system.
Last year, Clio bought vLex, a challenger to LexisNexis and Westlaw, for $1 billion, adding a large legal corpus to its platform. It has also moved into workflows like document review and drafting. Learned Hand brings Clio closer to another set of users who shape how legal work gets done.
The judiciary could also become Clio’s ticket to large law firms. If judges use Clio’s tools and data, Newton said, the company would sit inside the infrastructure lawyers interact with every day. That could give it an edge in a market where Harvey and Legora are raising gobs of money to expand quickly.
“We are building judiciary-grade AI,” he said. “There’s no higher bar than the bar judges demand.”
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