Robert Ambrogi Blog
Clio today announced that it has acquired Learned Hand, a startup that builds AI exclusively for judges and courts, giving the legal tech company’s newly launched judiciary business an existing product already in use in a number of courthouses.
Clio did not disclose the terms of the deal.
The acquisition caps a rapid series of events as Clio has moved into the judiciary.
On Aug. 25, Clio hired Casetext cofounder Pablo Arredondo as senior vice president, judiciary, to lead product development for courts.
Listen: On LawNext: Why Legal AI Pioneer Pablo Arredondo Is Joining Clio to Build Technology for the Courts.
Three weeks later, it recruited Bridget Mary McCormack, former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and outgoing CEO of the American Arbitration Association, as general manager, judiciary, to lead market and commercial strategy.
Now, Learned Hand will become part of Clio’s judiciary business and form the foundation of its products for courts. Clio will continue to support Learned Hand’s existing deployments and pilots while investing in its technology and team, the company said, and it plans to announce more about its judiciary products in the coming months.
What Learned Hand Does
Learned Hand has built an AI workspace for judges and clerks that connects with court case management systems.
As I wrote when I interviewed Learned Hand’s founder Shlomo Klapper in April, he describes the platform as a “reasoning engine” for judges — AI tools designed to help them manage crushing caseloads by organizing case materials, flagging when lawyers bend the truth, and drafting bench memos and orders.
Listen: Learned Hand’s Shlomo Klapper on Why Courts Are the Next Frontier for Legal AI.
In March, Learned Hand announced a partnership with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the largest trial court in the country. At the time, the company said the Michigan Supreme Court and trial courts in 10 states also used its technology.
Klapper is a former clerk to Judge Steven J. Menashi of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who also litigated at Quinn Emanuel and worked at Palantir before founding Learned Hand.
In our April interview, he argued that Jevons Paradox — the idea that as legal services get cheaper, demand will explode — is reshaping the justice system.
In today’s announcement, Clio CEO Jack Newton echoed that argument.
“AI is changing the pace and volume of legal work across the entire system, but that progress only matters if the courts can keep up,” he said. “If lawyers and litigants can move dramatically faster while judges and court teams remain constrained by the same capacity, the bottleneck simply shifts to the courts.”
In the announcement, Klapper said that he started Learned Hand because judges and clerks needed technology built around the realities of judicial work.
“We’ve had the privilege of building alongside judges and learning what it takes for technology to earn a place in the courtroom,” he said. “With Clio, we can take everything we’ve learned and built for the judiciary at a scale this opportunity deserves.”
Built for Judges, Not Lawyers
The premise running through all Clio’s judiciary moves so far is that courts need their own tools, not lawyer tools repurposed. When I spoke with Arredondo in August, he told me that “judiciary grade” is its own system, and he stressed that the judiciary is not a monolith, with state courts operating under very different constraints than federal courts.
Clio’s announcement makes the same point about Learned Hand, saying Klapper and his team designed their technology around judicial workflows by building alongside judges and court systems.
Clio says that a key element in strengthening what Learned Hand has already built is its own collection of data. Thanks to its vLex acquisition last year, Clio has a collection that spans more than 1 billion legal documents across more than 110 jurisdictions, while Clio Docket, which traces back through vLex and Fastcase to Docket Alarm, draws on roughly 1 billion U.S. court records and filings.
“Learned Hand has already shown what becomes possible when you build alongside judges,” Arredondo said. “Now we can combine that experience with Clio’s legal information and court data to build a new generation of technology for the judiciary.”