While many legal tech companies were exploring LLMs, in Berlin Jake Jones’ Flank (see AL Interview below) was already well into building AI agents. Now the company has gained $10m in a new funding round led by Insight Partners, which has also invested in Clio.
(Also, see below re. the news that Simmons & Simmons has struck a deal with Flank to build agents – see end of article for more.)
As part of the investment, Sophie Beshar, Vice President at Insight Partners, will join Flank’s board of directors. Meanwhile, Gradient Ventures, 10x Founders and HV Capital all also invested in this round – which as Jones, the Founder of the company, explained is a really big deal for him and his team.
‘It’s enormous. This round is not just about scaling our go-to-market efforts and pushing our existing product into the market at greater scale. It’s about investing in a new paradigm. More concretely, we’re investing heavily into product and engineering, especially into a new agentic operating system for legal, and we’re investing heavily in building a company that has AI in its DNA, that is truly AI-native,’ he told Artificial Lawyer.
There’s more detail about what Flank does – and will do – in the interview below, but here’s the formal description from the company:
‘Autonomous and proactive agents that interact with the business directly to solve their requests at the point of need.
Embedded & eventually invisible intelligence that seamlessly and proactively unblocks the business. No new interfaces. No additional tools.
Proprietary Engine that kills off vector retrieval frameworks, delivers context aware responses, and can be customised in seconds with natural language.
Enterprise-grade Supervision engine combines proprietary AI oversight with human expert augmentation, preventing misuse and ensuring performance.’
‘Flank seamlessly integrates into a company’s workflows, becoming the first line of defence for legal teams. Its AI agent reviews, drafts, and red-lines key legal documents and autonomously answers company-wide legal and compliance questions in minutes, not days. Unlike chatbots or copilots, Flank’s autonomous agents resolve requests directly at the point of need — operating inside the tools already in use, like email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. There are no new interfaces, no extra software, and no employee retraining required,’ they explained.
Lili Breidenbach, CEO of Flank, commented: ‘Legal teams are overloaded with repetitive, high-volume tasks that drain time and resources. Flank lets them focus on high-value work while our agent handles the rest – invisibly, autonomously, and embedded within the business.’
Beshar at Insight Partners, added: ‘Flank is helping define a new category of enterprise software – autonomous agents that are embedded, invisible, and capable of real work at scale. Legal teams are among the most stretched in modern organisations, and Flank’s approach unlocks speed, accuracy, and massive leverage without disrupting workflows.’
And now the AL In-depth Interview with Founder, Jake Jones
How important is this investment for you? What does it mean in terms of validating your view of agents?
It’s enormous. This round is not just about scaling our go-to-market efforts and pushing our existing product into the market at greater scale. It’s about investing in a new paradigm. More concretely, we’re investing heavily into product and engineering, especially into a new agentic operating system for legal, and we’re investing heavily in building a company that has AI in its DNA, that is truly AI-native. We chose to partner with Insight in this round because the Insight team uniquely shared our thesis on the future of legal AI: this isn’t about making lawyers more efficient, it’s about fully autonomous expert systems that entirely redefine how legal services are delivered. There is a wave coming here. And I’m damn excited that we are at the vanguard of it.
You have worked a lot with agents – now everyone is doing it – what made the market catch up and where are we going?
Legal work has always been tightly coupled with human expertise. If you want to scale the amount of legal work you can do, you need to scale the headcount of your legal team. This has always been the case. And this is why the golden problem to solve within the legal domain is to decouple legal expertise from humans. Suddenly, one lawyer can do the work of ten lawyers. As a legal tech vendor, you’d have to be crazy not to want to solve this problem. We have been trying to decouple legal expertise from humans for coming on eight years. Others are gradually realising this is the golden problem. But still, few believe it is solvable any time soon.
Lots of vendors are now claiming to be building “agents”. The reality is that the agentic tooling available is improving dramatically month by month. Now we have operator, MCP, arcade.dev, LangGraph, etc. These tools are making basic agents—that do relatively simple tasks—a commodity. In no way does this mean that lots of vendors are building highly capable, autonomous legal systems that can meaningfully scale the output of a legal team. Instead, “agent” has become a kind of marketing meme to symbolise any system that “does something” in another system or any multi-step LLM-orchestration. This isn’t a criticism of the platforms most legal vendors are building. Many of them are powerful, impactful systems that enable lawyers to complete tasks more quickly (in some cases, much, much more quickly). Instead, I’m just highlighting a distinction: Flank is empowering lawyers to take themselves out of the loop entirely. Flank agents are not another tool for lawyers to use.
Why will agents change the world of legal work…..and what do we need to do to make that future happen?
If you decouple legal expertise from humans, the cost of legal services will plummet. There’s no billable hour anymore. Many—perhaps most—legal services will become commodity. The business model of incumbent big law will be disrupted. It will be dramatic. New law firms built from the ground up with AI in their DNA will deliver the same or better service at a lower price. Big law will be forced to respond to protect their margins… you can see where this is going. Downstream, the primary consumers—in-house teams— will benefit and the secondary consumers—the business teams in-house legal serves—will benefit. Legal departments will no longer be a bottleneck for the business. We’ll stop negotiating pointless terms in agreements that are anyway impossible to litigate. We’ll stop debating fiddly linguistic particulars.
To get there, we need vendors with wild enough imaginations. We need lawyers with entrepreneurial instinct to build new kinds of law firm. We need the law and regulation to shift to empower these new kinds of law firm. Obviously we need powerful enough models too, but this is inevitable in the very near future.
Congrats Jake and team! Look forward to seeing Flank grow and grow.
You can find more about Flank here.
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P.S. More Flank news….this time with Simmons & Simmons
International law firm Simmons & Simmons has today announced a partnership with Flank. It involves the development of several agentic AI projects with Simmons, many of which are live and already supporting the firm’s teams and its clients, they said.
Flank’s autonomous legal agents are able to review, draft, and red-line key legal documents, and provide responses to legal and compliance questions in minutes.
Simmons has already begun to develop and integrate the agents to deliver enhanced legal services for clients, with one key application being an agent capable of processing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
Operating as a ‘digital co-worker’, the firm’s sophisticated NDA agent can efficiently manage requests, mark-up documents and escalate more complex matters when necessary. Accessible through email, the agent offers a seamless integration into Simmons’ existing workflows, the firm said.
Other Simmons’ agents in development with Flank include those specialising in Data Processing Agreements (DPAs), service agreements, and Investment Management Agreements (IMAs).
Lucy Shurwood, partner at Simmons & Simmons, commented: ‘Autonomous agents aren’t the future… they’re already here, and they’re transforming how we work. Through our partnership with Flank, we’ve embedded agents that deliver legal outcomes end-to-end. We’re launching agents that handle the drafting, review, and negotiation of NDAs, DPAs, service agreements, IMAs, and more. These agents are live, in production, and already delivering real impact for our teams and our clients.’
Peter Lee, partner at Simmons & Simmons, added: ‘Our AI agents are having a significant impact on how we deliver for our clients, augmenting the work of our legal and compliance teams. As fully-fledged, integrated digital co-workers, they’re already handling large volumes of routine requests, freeing up our lawyers to focus on more complex, high-value work.’
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Legal Innovators California conference, San Francisco, June 11 + 12
If you’re interested in the cutting edge of legal AI and innovation – and where we are all heading – then come along to Legal Innovators California, in San Francisco, June 11 and 12, where speakers from the leading law firms, inhouse teams, and tech companies will be sharing their insights and experiences as to what is really happening.
We already have an incredible roster of companies to hear from. This includes: &AI, Legora, Harvey, StructureFlow, Ivo, Flatiron Law Group, PointOne, Centari, LexisNexis, eBrevia, Legatics, Knowable, Draftwise, newcode.AI, Riskaway, Aracor, SimpleClosure and more.
Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, Baker McKenzie, Gunderson, Ropes & Grey, A&O Shearman and many other leading law firms will also be taking part.
See you all there!
More information and tickets here.
P.S. there will also be a Legal Innovators New York conference this November 19 + 20 ! See here.
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