The next evolution of legal tech aims to augment lawyers, not replace them
In an era where artificial intelligence promises to do everything from writing sonnets to diagnosing illness, legal technology remains curiously stuck in the middle lane. Grand claims abound, yet many practising lawyers still rely on Word documents, email threads and PDF markups to navigate some of the world’s most complex and consequential work.
Danish legal-tech start-up Juristic has ambitions to steps into this gap – with more focus on being transformative, and less on the theatrics. Its core proposition is not to dazzle with AI magic tricks, but to embed intelligence, of both the human and machine kind, directly into the workflows of legal practice. The result is a platform that feels less like a chatbot bolted informed by old habits, and more like a legal operating system built for the future.
Visualising the Law
Most legal tech to date concentrates on logistics: storing documents, tracking tasks and automating contracts. Useful, certainly, but rarely lacking the transformative element Juristic brings to the table. Juristic operates on the assumption that legal reasoning itself can be structured, visualised and made more efficient.
At the heart of its offering is a concept the firm calls the “editable context window”. The idea is simple: instead of interacting with AI through prompts and separate tools, lawyers work within a visual interface, whether a transaction diagram, a litigation timeline or a regulatory workflow, where they can choose to summon or restrain AI as needed. The context is continuously updated, visible and malleable.
In effect, it turns the AI context from a black box into a living breathing workspace.
Suppose a team is building a litigation timeline from thousands of emails and court filings. Juristic’s software can extract key events, suggest a chronology and draft supporting documents. Lawyers can then amend the timeline, add nuance or correct errors, and re-engage the AI in specific sections to generate affidavits or memos based on the revised version. The system respects a cardinal rule of legal practice: human judgment is key – and that happens through continued interaction with the legal case substance.
Thinking in Diagrams
Perhaps most intriguingly, Juristic begins not with documents, but with diagrams. This may seem an odd starting point in a profession built on text. But legal work – particularly in corporate, regulatory and disputes – is often diagrammatic in nature. Structure charts, flows, and chronologies are some of the vital models that lawyers use long before they commit anything to writing.
By turning these models into functional interfaces, Juristic has built a system where documents are not the starting point but the byproduct. Change the structure, and the step plan updates. Adjust the timeline, and the memo evolves. This is not just automation. It is context-aware drafting.
A Break from the Prompt Economy
Much of the recent excitement in legal AI has centred around prompt-based models and approaches. These systems are impressive to demonstrate but often frustrating in practice. Legal language varies to a large extent across jurisdictions and industries. According to many lawyers, prompt engineering is frustrating and without proper training, often a waste time.
Juristic can solve for the prompt entirely. By working from structured visualisations – essentially legal thinking made visible – the AI has a far richer, more accurate context to work from. That means less guesswork, fewer hallucinations and more relevant outputs.
Essentially, the platform can understand the visualisations, timelines and workspaces to create legal output or draft deliverables. Next on their agenda, co-founder Christian Mellado Hjortshøj says, is predictive features, which will allow Juristic to quantify the legal context in the background while the lawyer is plugging away at their work.
“But it’s key that the tools are still just incredible tools for the end user, advanced technology aside. Legal AI works best when it’s embedded into the workflows.”
The platform doesn’t try to cover every task. Rather, it focuses on two phases where lawyers spend most of their time: understanding and production. The first involves analysis, mapping and structuring. The second entails creating deliverables. Juristic’s tools – Structure, Timeline, Flow and the embedded AI layer, JuristIQ – span both. AI is not always present and is not required for the tools to work, but it is always available.
Substance Over Style
It is this shift – from outputs to outcomes – that marks Juristic as part of a new wave of what might be called Legal Tech 3.0. If Legal Tech 1.0 was about connectivity (email, databases), and 2.0 was about supporting tools (document automation, case management), the third wave is about intelligence. Not artificial intelligence in isolation, but augmented decision-making embedded directly into legal work.
Unlike a lot of earlier efforts, which often treated legal professionals as a problem to be automated away, Juristic treats them as co-pilots. Its tools are not designed to replace judgment, but to scaffold it. The emphasis is on traceability – the legal equivalent of showing your workings in a maths exam. Importantly, because the results and sources are tagged and directly linked to, AI-generated results can be examined, edited and attributed to their sources. This way, lawyers remain in control, not just of the outcome, but of the reasoning.
A Platform, Not a Product
The larger significance of Juristic may lie in its model, not its modules. In an industry where legal tech vendors often scale to the extent that every step is automated, Juristic is doubling down on traceable control – building tools that accommodate how lawyers actually work, not how outsiders think they should.
With customers in 12 countries, the approach clearly seems to resonate. But one thing is clear: Juristic is not building a faster legal assistant. It is building an environment where legal reasoning – human and artificial – can coexist, transparently and collaboratively.
In a profession founded on precedent, that may just be revolutionary.
