Posts by Monica Zent

As America celebrated its 250th birthday, headlines reported on an investment “boom” in startups focusing on national security. 🎆 Ahead of the July 4th holiday weekend, Fortune reported on the “defense tech boom,” noting that VCs had deployed a record $19.8 billion into the sector across 262 deals in the first quarter of 2026, according…

Influencers, celebrities, pro sports, film premieres, parties and cash to burn. A reality TV series? No (although I’ve been tempted to write one inspired by this sector). It’s LegalTech! Having been a first-gen LegalTech founder, developing early innovations such as AI chatbots and collaboration and clause repositories back in the 2010s, I vividly recall the…

With AI usage for legal approaching “near-universal” adoption, the sector continues to evolve at an astounding pace. Directly on the heels of the debut of Anthropic’s “Claude for Legal,” which it debuted just shortly before filing for IPO this week, The Information reported last week on a “fresh assault” on LegalTech’s major players: “Some law…

With potential IPOs on the horizon, the LLM race keeps heating up, and legal is directly in the mix. “Anthropic Was Behind. Now It’s the AI Boom’s Front-Runner,” read the Wall Street Journal’s headline last week, citing a big reason for the company’s surge in the AI race: focusing on enterprise users. While the “AI…

We are at a moment in which “innovation creates new industries and businesses and at the same time destroys, or at least destabilizes, jobs and companies,” wrote Axios last week in a story on the AI transition. The article notes that the PC industry did it to mainframe computers, then the mobile industry did it…

Is Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) a Sleepy Category of Legal Tech or waking back up? When Ironclad announced that it had crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in February, Business Insider heralded the moment with a headline that stated the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) sector “is showing new signs of life.” BI noted that…

This week, one of the year’s biggest cybersecurity conferences, RSAC, kicks off herein my backyard. With a packed agenda covering some of the most pressing issues in cybersecurity today, the conference takes place as the sector, along with others under the RegTech umbrella, are experiencing high levels of VC investment, as some of enterprise’s most…

According to the newly released 2026 Data Threat Report, conducted by S&P Global’s 451 Research and commissioned by Thales, there’s a “troubling disconnect between rapid AI adoption and foundational data control.” Reporting on the findings, Fortune wrote, “For businesses to innovate securely…, they must fundamentally rethink identity, encryption, and data visibility as the core foundation…

“AI promises to make work more productive for lawyers, but there’s a problem: Their clients are using it, too,” Axios wrote last week. All eyes last week were on the impact that Anthropic’s legal-specific tool would have on enterprise LegalTech. Meanwhile, consumers are also looking to foundation model AI to address legal questions and needs.…

For venture capital, 2025 was remarkable for highs and lows. Among the highs: Two of the three biggest quarters ever for venture funding took place last year. And, the lows: Overall, firms closed a record-low number of funds. This dichotomy inspires this edition of Venture Legal, exploring some of the ways in which the VC…