EvenUp Passes $150 Million in Recurring Revenue as Legal AI Bubble Talk Grows

EvenUp has surpassed $150 million in recurring revenue under contract and now serves more than 2,000 personal injury law firms — a number that lands just as investors ask whether legal AI is the next bubble to pop.

Tech stocks got hammered last week as AI doomsayers declared a bubble burst. Legal tech, a corner of the market now soaking up venture money at a furious pace, has its own version of that question to answer. Valuations are soaring, and what the industry calls "AI-native law firms" keep sprouting up, each pitching itself as different from Crosby, one of the category's best-known names.

Rami Karabibar, CEO of EvenUp, has a theory about which legal-tech startups survive when the tide goes out. He shared it in an interview last week.

How deeply do winners embed with customers?

Karabibar's answer: durability comes down to how deeply a legal-tech startup embeds itself in its customers' business.

EvenUp started as something of a one-trick pony, helping plaintiff-side lawyers draft demand letters. Over the past 18 months, the company has broadened into software that helps lawyers manage cases from start to finish. The product line expanded. The target market didn't.

That's the contrast Karabibar draws with rivals. Harvey and Legora build applications that serve everyone from Big Law to multinational corporations. EvenUp has never strayed from personal injury — a niche market, but a lucrative one.

And Karabibar thinks that focus keeps his company bubble-proof.

The takeaway in plain words: EvenUp is wagering that owning one narrow market beats serving them all.

What else is moving in legal AI?

Three developments stand out from the past week:

• Harvey held early talks with lawyers at Latham & Watkins about a possible IPO.
• Lerer Hippeau is backing Blackletter, a new law firm started by former executives at Cohere and Blue J, in a $6 million raise.
• Two college students in Singapore are helping law firms figure out their technology, according to a profile by Aditi Bharade.

Each item signals the same thing: money and talent keep flowing into legal AI even as broader market jitters spread.

Why did a Big Law firm decamp to Stanford?

Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer went back to school to find out how to teach an old law firm new tricks.

The firm ran a three-day retreat at Stanford before the start of the school year, said Ilona Logvinova, HSF Kramer's chief AI officer. Her goal: get the firm's top brass out of their offices and push them to think less like lawyers and more like founders.

Thirty-one firm members traveled to Palo Alto, stayed together, and took a bus to campus each morning. Logvinova encouraged them to pack hoodies. Only a few obliged.

Day one was a crash course in the state of AI. Executives heard from legal-tech founders, OpenAI representatives, Stanford researchers, and general counsels about where the technology is heading and what clients increasingly expect from outside counsel.

On day two, the executives got hands-on with AI tools developed at Stanford. One tool helped them turn the expertise rattling around in their heads into instructions that autonomous agents could potentially follow. The exercises were designed to close what Logvinova calls the "imagination gap" — the distance between knowing what the tech can do and actually applying it.

The lawyers weren't the only ones learning. For Stanford, the program doubled as a dry run for its new bootcamp, the Legal Engineering Academy, which launches next summer.

What does Stanford get out of it?

Adam Sterling, an associate dean at Stanford Law, said the university wanted to see how the lawyers engaged with the technology in practice, not just in theory.

Just as importantly, Sterling said, working with practitioners helps the faculty better understand the profession its students are entering — and how to prepare them for it.

The experiment suggests that preparing the next generation of lawyers may start with retraining the current one.

Where does the industry gather next?

The LegalTech Fund Summit, now entering its fifth year, kicks off next week in Scottsdale, Arizona. It brings together the industry's founders, funders, and power brokers for a few days of dealmaking and networking — legal tech's own Davos, with better weather.

With EvenUp's $150 million milestone, Harvey's early IPO conversations, and venture firms bankrolling new-firm experiments like Blackletter, the sector's momentum isn't slowing. The open question — the one Karabibar and every founder in Scottsdale will field — is which of these businesses are built to last.