In the first of three pieces Darrow's CEO Evyatar Ben Artzi contributed to SmartBrief's Practical AI series, he lays out the case for legal intelligence as a distinct category of technology — and explains why it addresses a gap that the legal tech industry, despite significant investment, has largely left untouched.
Ben Artzi opens with the market context. Gartner projects the global legal tech market will reach $50 billion by 2027. New entrants continue to raise significant capital. The range of solutions available to legal professionals — e-discovery, contract lifecycle management, litigation analytics, intake tools — has grown considerably. And yet, Ben Artzi argues, the vast majority of these solutions address only one part of the legal process: the Resolution stage, after attorneys are already engaged and cases are already taking shape. What is almost entirely missing are tools that support the Awareness and Assessment stages — the earliest moments in the legal cycle, when potential violations first surface and intervention is still possible.
This is where legal intelligence begins. Drawing on the meaning of intelligence as a discipline — the discovery of information to identify and address problems before they escalate, as applied in military, national security, and strategic contexts — Ben Artzi defines legal intelligence as the application of AI, analytics, and human expertise to detect signals of legal harm before it fully materializes. In the Awareness phase, legal intelligence surfaces emerging risk signals across areas like data privacy, environmental harm, and medical liability. In the Assessment phase, those signals are clustered, analyzed, and verified to determine whether a legal violation has actually occurred — enabling early, proactive intervention rather than reactive response.
He then identifies four core challenges that keep this kind of upstream practice out of reach for most firms today. Critical legal insights are hidden in plain sight, buried in publicly available databases that no one has connected. There are no tools to cluster and organize the data once it is found. Relevant signals are scattered across social media, legal filings, consumer complaints, databases, and news sources — siloed in ways that make cross-source analysis time-consuming and impractical. And even when risks are detected, most firms lack the tools to validate signals at scale and build the evidence base required to move a case forward.
AI addresses each of these gaps directly. Ben Artzi outlines four ways it is doing so: by detecting harmful violations as they emerge rather than after the fact; by turning overwhelming volumes of data into actionable intelligence through generative AI's ability to extract meaningful connections; by empowering lawyers to work proactively rather than reactively; and by expanding access to justice by uncovering violations that would otherwise remain hidden and unreported.
The piece closes with a reframing of what the legal profession can become. Rather than serving only as problem solvers who engage after harm has occurred, lawyers have an opportunity to help build the systems that allow individuals and organizations to understand and act on their rights from the start.
