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Legal Tech Firm Robin AI Raises $26 Million 

AI regulation

Robin AI raised $26 million amid the legal profession’s continued embrace of artificial intelligence.

The London and New York-based company announced the Series B funding on its LinkedIn page Wednesday (Jan. 3), noting the round was led by Temasek with participation from Quantum Light, Plural Platform and AFG Partners.

“This is a big milestone for the whole Robin AI team, and we’re excited to enter this next phase of growth and global expansion,” the announcement said. “As most of you know, our unique model that combines Anthropic’s LLM with our own proprietary contract data and machine learning models to read and understand contracts has seen huge traction in the last year.”

Several companies introduced AI-powered tools to the legal profession last year. Rocket Lawyer, for example, introduced an AI-driven name-generation tool for businesses last month.

But as AI becomes more integrated into the legal world, many people in the space have called for caution, including U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts used a large section of his annual year-end message to argue that AI’s use in court requires “caution and humility.”

Although the technology has benefits, like helping people who can’t afford a lawyer with basic filing, Roberts said it can’t replace human jurors, using the example of the way a judge can measure a defendant’s sincerity during their sentencing.

“Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact,” Roberts wrote. “And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”

Roberts’ caution about the use of AI in the legal profession is in keeping with research that shows most lawyers don’t think their field is ready for generative AI.

While surveys show that 62% of legal professionals believe that effective use of generative AI will separate successful firms from unsuccessful firms in five years, 72% of lawyers said they doubted their industry is sufficiently prepared to integrate AI.

Robin AI’s new funding comes nearly a year after the company raised $10.5 million in a Series A funding round.

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