Want to get this daily news briefing by email? Here's the sign-up.

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

WHALE CATCH - After a months-long drought, funding started trickling back again to the legal technology industry earlier this year, in part due to the appeal of generative AI. Sweet! Unfortunately, there is a catch: industry experts told Law.com's Cassandre Coyer that some of the recent investments have led to significant price increases across the industry—in some cases doubling existing fees—in an effort from vendors to narrow in on bigger clients as they approach end-of-year goals. This hunt for "whales" among firms and legal departments is not only starting to price out some of the smaller and midsized clients, but also to shrink the already small pool of customers that VC and PE-backed providers traditionally go after.

CUT IT OUT - As in-house readers will no doubt be shocked to hear, the overarching finding of a new Thomson Reuters survey of 108 legal ops professionals in the U.S. is that workloads are increasing but budgets aren't, forcing these departments to, you guessed it, "do more with less." However, Mary O'Carroll, Google's former head of legal ops and current chief community officer of Ironclad, told Law.com's Trudy Knockless that a better approach is to "'do less with less'" by leveraging tech to bypass certain tasks altogether. "We've entered an era where AI agents can essentially serve as 'robot interns,' allowing us to get some extra help and to focus on the higher-level strategic initiatives that will drive real, tangible impact for the broader business."

ON THE RADAR - Payroll software-maker ADP was hit with an employment class action Sept. 22 in Arizona Superior Court for Pima County. The suit was filed by Lubin & Enoch and Awerkamp Bonilla & Giles on behalf of a class of district managers at the defendant's office in Tucson who allege they were pressured to work off the clock and on weekends with no compensation in order to meet demanding sales quotas. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendant. The case is C20234421, Kiani et al. v. Automatic Data Processing Inc. Stay up on the latest state and federal litigation, as well as the latest corporate deals, with Law.com Radar.