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Welcome to this week's edition of The Legal Wire!
Legal AI had quite the week, both inside and outside the courtroom.
The Third Circuit handed Thomson Reuters a significant victory in its copyright dispute with ROSS Intelligence, while Cooley teamed up with Google Cloud to develop an AI agent for litigation and AT&T joined forces with OpenAI to rethink how in-house legal departments operate.
Investors kept busy, too. Teddy AI announced a rather mysterious $60 million seed round, while former Davis Polk lawyer Preeti Krishnan secured $4.6 million for her compliance startup, Leela. Meanwhile, Kirkland & Ellis decided it had shared enough financial information with the world.
And in this week's feature, we sit down with Turbo Law co-founder and CEO Jay Sarmaz to talk fact graphs, AI “minions”, and his ambition to build a single operating system for litigation.
This week’s highlights:
Industry news and updates
Inside Turbo Law: Jay Sarmaz on Fact Graphs, ‘Minions’, and Building One Platform for Litigation
AI regulation tracker
AI tools to supercharge your productivity
Legal prompt of the week
Latest AI incidents & legal tech map
Headlines from The Legal Industry You Shouldn't Miss
➡️ Third Circuit Backs Thomson Reuters In ROSS Intelligence Copyright Fight | The Third Circuit has affirmed Judge Bibas’s partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters against ROSS Intelligence, holding that 2,243 Westlaw headnotes are copyrightable and ROSS’s use to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use. The panel called it “no more than an ordinary copyright case” and distinguished the generative AI rulings in Bartz v. Anthropic and In re OpenAI. ROSS plans to seek en banc review and ultimately Supreme Court review.
Oct 12, 2026, Source: LawSites
➡️ Ex-Davis Polk Lawyer Launches Compliance Startup Leela With $4.6M Seed Round | Leela, a compliance startup founded by former Davis Polk & Wardwell associate Preeti Krishnan, has emerged from stealth with a $4.6 million seed round led by Array Ventures and Female Founders Fund. The agentic AI platform converts compliance policies into tasks, evaluates customer complaints, drafts reports, and flags potential money laundering and fraud for US-regulated financial firms. Leela runs a four-agent setup (investigator, proofer, monitor, and chair) that carries out compliance work while leaving judgment calls to humans.
Oct 12, 2026, Source: Law.com
➡️ Cooley and Google Cloud Build AI Agent For Court Filing Redactions | Cooley is working with Google Cloud to build a Gemini Enterprise AI agent that reviews court filings and recommends targeted redactions of personally identifiable information, technical details, and other confidential material. Attorneys make all final calls before filings are submitted. Cooley, Google’s long-standing litigation counsel, is the launch partner, providing product direction and litigator feedback. The tool is still in development and sits within Cooley’s wider push to build AI workflows across its litigation practice.
Oct 8, 2026, Source: Cooley
➡️ AT&T Teams Up With OpenAI To Build AI-Enabled In-House Legal Department | AT&T has signed on as a flagship in-house legal design partner with OpenAI to build what the companies describe as the AI-enabled in-house legal department of the future. The work builds on AT&T LegalEdge, the company’s AI-first in-house legal center launched in January 2026, which has handled nearly 100 matters in six months. The pair will design practical legal workflows, with lawyers deciding how AI agents are used and human oversight built into every step.
Oct 8, 2026, Source: AT&T
➡️ Kirkland & Ellis To Stop Sharing Revenue and Profit Figures Publicly | Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s wealthiest law firm, will stop reporting revenue and profits to the media after 2026, applying the moratorium to The American Lawyer, Bloomberg Law, and other legal outlets. The firm said public rankings do not provide “meaningful value” to clients and could incentivize quantitative metrics over qualitative strengths. Kirkland, which crossed $10 billion in revenue in 2025 with equity partner profits averaging $11 million, has over 4,000 lawyers globally.
Oct 7, 2026, Source: Bloomberg
➡️ Stealthy Legal Services Startup Teddy AI Closes $60M Seed Round | TeddyHoldings .AI has closed a $60 million seed round from undisclosed limited partners, with the legal services and compliance startup declining to name its leadership or focus. The company says it has passed $25 million in revenue. Teddy AI was incubated by Tucker's Farm Corp, a holding company that grew out of a Bermuda-based goat farm and dairy. Founder Kyle Tucker described Teddy as a compliance and client-oriented legal services platform rather than an AI company.
Oct 7, 2026, Source: Law.com
Will this be the Next Big Thing in A.I?
Legal Technology
Inside Turbo Law: Jay Sarmaz on Fact Graphs, ‘Minions’, and Building One Platform for Litigation
Turbo Law is a San Mateo, California-based AI platform built for litigation. I recently spoke with co-founder and CEO Jay Sarmaz, who, together with Ozgur Bora Gevrek, started the company in 2025. Before Turbo Law, Jay and Bora already had something in common: both are PhD dropouts (Georgia Tech and UCLA respectively). Jay mentions this early on, and it quickly becomes evident during our discussion that leaving academia in no way stifled either career trajectory. On the contrary, Jay’s affinity for execution over theory forms the basis of his founder story.
In June 2026, Turbo Law closed a $3.8 million seed round led by Turkish investment firm Revo Capital, and is now managing more than 3,000 active matters and twenty million pages of legal documents across a handful of US law firms. The company reports a 60% reduction in non-billable hours per matter and a 10% drop in written-off fees among the firms using it.
Fact Graph (Illustrative example. Names, dates and records are fictional.)
Turbo Law is not another horizontal legal AI product. It’s a litigation platform, built one vertical at a time, starting with tort and insurance work, then expanded across six practice areas, and soon to support all practice areas. My conversation with Jay, shortly after the funding announcement, covered how he got here, why he thinks the era of point solutions is ending, and what he means when he calls the agents running underneath the platform “minions”.
State of Product reveals what AI still hasn’t solved
80% of product professionals say AI helps them ship faster, but customers aren’t seeing value any sooner. Atlassian’s State of Product 2027 explores the gains AI is delivering and the challenges that remain, from decision-making that hasn’t kept pace to gut instinct overriding customer evidence.
The AI Regulation Tracker offers a searchable overview that gives you instant snapshots of how each country is handling AI laws.
AI Tools that will supercharge your productivity
🆕 SmartEsq - Future of funds. Supercharge your workflow with AI. Skip the busywork, focus on what matters, and outperform your competition.
🆕 Teddy AI - Teddy is a compliance and client-oriented legal support platform with the sole mission of providing its partners and constituents with the best possible service and infrastructure.
🆕 Pilot5 - Pilot5 is a Strategic AI for the calls you cannot afford to get wrong.
Want more Legal AI Tools? Check out our
Top AI Tools for Legal Professionals
The weekly ChatGPT prompt that will boost your productivity
Why it helps: Gives lawyers a fast pressure test before sending advice, filing arguments, or negotiating language.
I want to test the strength of this legal position, draft, clause, argument, or advice.
Input: [paste text or describe the position]
Context: [brief background]
Jurisdiction: [if relevant]
Audience: [client / partner / court / counterparty / internal team]
Goal: [what I want this to achieve]
Act as a sharp but fair devil’s advocate. Identify:
(i) The strongest point in my position.
(ii) The weakest or most vulnerable point.
(iii) What the other side would likely argue.
(iv) What facts, evidence, wording, or authority would make it stronger.
(v) A revised version or next step that reduces the risk.
Keep it practical, concise, and legally precise. Do not invent facts or authorities.
Collecting Data to make Artificial Intelligence Safer
The Responsible AI Collaborative is a not‑for‑profit organization working to present real‑world AI harms through its Artificial Intelligence Incident Database.
View the latest reported incidents below:
⚠️ 2026-10-02 | Nebraska Supreme Court Reportedly Struck Self-Represented Divorce Litigant's Appellate Brief Containing Purportedly AI-Generated Fictitious Citations | View Incident
⚠️ 2026-09-22 | Law Firm Shapiro Arato Bach Reportedly Filed Fictitious Case Citation and Misattributed Quotations Using Harvey's Legal AI Platform in New York Federal Court | View Incident
⚠️ 2025-11-19 | Oklahoma Judge Reportedly Used ChatGPT-Generated Fictitious Case Citations in Family-Law Order | View Incident
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