This article is actually dated 25 June but I fear i may have missed it first time round so if you haven’t seen it here it is
Perplexity, the AI search engine known for delivering sourced answers to user queries, is making an explicit move into the legal market, rolling out legal-specific features within its agentic platform, Perplexity Computer, and positioning the product as what it calls “Computer for Counsel.”
The company highlighted the legal push yesterday at an invitation-only event in New York aimed at in-house counsel, lawyers at small and midsized firms, and legal tech founders. The event marked Perplexity’s most conspicuous effort yet to target legal as a specific vertical for product development, partnerships and go-to-market strategy.
Notably, Perplexity is expressly not attempting to build a full-fledged legal research database in the mold of Westlaw, LexisNexis or Bloomberg Law. Rather, it describes its platform as a research, drafting and workflow layer that can sit on top of the web, connected enterprise systems and specialized legal data sources, giving lawyers cited answers they can verify and use as the basis for further work.
“Connect research databases, document repositories, contract tools, and matter-management systems lawyers use every day so the admin work gets handled,” the website says.
A key part of that strategy is a new integration with Midpage, the legal research startup that has been building connectors to bring U.S. case law, statutes and regulations into general-purpose AI tools. (For an example of one, see this 15-minute demo I recorded with Midpage founder Otto Zastrow of its ChatGPT plugin.)
Through the Midpage connector in Perplexity, users can access authoritative legal research sources from within Midpage and Perplexity can then assemble them into a brief or memo.
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