Clio’s $500M milestone hits as Anthropic ups the ante

While AI is now being applied to everything from healthcare to customer support, no single use case has been as popular or lucrative as writing code.

Jack Newton, co-founder and CEO of Clio, a Canadian law firm management software company, is convinced that legal technology is poised to be the next big winner in the MBA era. That’s a self-interested claim — 18-year-old Clio is a legal technology company — but the numbers are hard to dismiss.

Clio saw its revenue growth accelerate sharply after incorporating AI into its offerings in 2023. The company surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in mid-2024, doubled that number by late last year, and just announced that its ARR had reached $500 million.

“The MBA is very good at programming because all the code in the world is a huge repository to train on,” Newton said. “The analogy with the law is really clear.”

Law firms have vast collections of contracts and agreements, providing a rich foundation of text-based data for AI models to learn from.

“Technology companies and lawyers alike are realizing the tremendous upside that can be achieved through law with an LLM,” Newton said.

Clio isn’t the only legal tech company seeing a huge increase in revenue driven by AI.

Four-year-old Harvey, which offers LLM AI to law firms, has achieved an annual revenue rate of $190 million by the end of 2025, co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg shared on LinkedIn. Legora, Harvey’s main competitor, announced last month that it had reached $100 million in ARR just 18 months after launching its platform.

Although The legal tech community’s definition of ARR has come under scrutiny recently, and the opportunity to apply AI to law makes sense. Because an MBA can automate the most time-consuming tasks in the field, such as document review and drafting.

Legal technology companies aren’t the only ones realizing how important AI is to lawyers. Earlier this week, Anthropic announced a host of new legal-specific features, expanding Claude for Legal — the law-focused add-on whose debut earlier this year sent legal tech stocks tumbling.

Both Harvey and Legora rely on Claude as a primary model among others, which makes the dynamic uncomfortable: the main supplier is now a competitor as well.

For Newton, these are all signs of the huge potential of the legal AI market. He has reason for optimism. Canada-based Clio was valued at $5 billion when it raised a $500 million Series G round last November. The company provides law firms with time tracking, billing and payment tools. The $1 billion acquisition of data intelligence platform vLex last year now allows lawyers to use Clio’s AI in research as well.