A Wall Street law firm is betting on software for clients to do their own legal work

Wall Street law firm Cleary Gottlieb has a plan as corporate clients move away from law firms to shrink their bills.

3 mins read

Cleary Gottlieb is getting into the legal software game.
ClearyX, a business owned by the law firm, has built services to help clients speed up legal work.
It's starting with tools for due diligence and contract review, ClearyX's standard services.

A business owned by Wall Street law firm Cleary Gottlieb has begun selling software that could help clients send less work to firms like its own.

For years, law firms have worried that artificial intelligence will make lawyers faster and cut into billable hours. ClearyX, a Cleary Gottlieb subsidiary that provides routine legal work at a lower cost, is betting on a bigger threat: that the tools will let clients do more legal work themselves, leaving less to send to outside counsel in the first place.

ClearyX tells Business Insider it has built software for corporate due diligence and contract analysis, its core legal services. Clients can license it on its own or use it when they hire ClearyX to work on a deal.

It's a calculated bet. If some legal work is becoming cheaper and easier to automate, ClearyX would rather sell the software that enables that shift than lose that business altogether.

Since 2022, ClearyX has used third-party software and lean legal teams to handle work like due diligence and contract review — the kind of tasks clients no longer want to pay Big Law rates for. "The whole genesis was let's get out ahead of it," ClearyX CEO Carla Swansburg said in an interview. "Let's build the thing that's likely to compete with us."

But after years of hearing clients say they wished the technology could do more, the company concluded the existing tools were not cutting it. ClearyX works with companies across sectors, including consumer products, health and wellness, and private equity.

Swansburg said many in-house legal teams were testing AI tools like Claude or Copilot, but getting from a raw model to something useful for legal work still took a lot of effort. Plus, many budget-strapped in-house teams could not afford the specialized legal copilots on the market.

Swansburg said the rise of large language models made it possible for ClearyX to build the software clients had been asking for.

Five speakers sit onstage holding microphones during a panel discussion.

One product, CX+Transact, is built for reviewing deals. It lets in-house teams assign tasks across reviewers, track progress, flag key risks, and export the findings into a report. The other, CX+Insights, is designed for legal and business teams that want to search across their contracts and better understand what's in them. The software then displays those results in dashboards and graphics.

ClearyX is being unusually transparent about price in a market where that information is often closely held. Lawyers looking for what tools like Harvey or Legora cost often end up swapping estimates on Reddit. Swansburg, by contrast, sent Business Insider a full pricing sheet.

CX+Transact will be free for clients who hire ClearyX for diligence services, while stand-alone pricing starts at about $12,000 per project or $30,000 a year. CX+Insights, which is built for broader use across a company, is expected to start at about $50,000 annually for dozens of users. Pricing is still being finalized.

The open question is whether the legal industry really needs another software vendor. Unlike Harvey or Legora, which pitch broader platforms for law firms and legal teams, ClearyX is aimed at narrower workflows like due diligence and contract review — already a crowded corner of the market. Last week, Anthropic added more pressure by releasing Claude for Word, a tool built for Microsoft Word, still the default workspace for many lawyers.

With ClearyX's push into the software business, Cleary Gottlieb is not just testing demand for another tool. It's trying to stay relevant to clients who want to lean less on law firms.

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