Harvey and Legora launched same-named "Intake" front doors for in-house legal requests within hours of each other, Microsoft added legal skills to Copilot, and AI pricing is edging towards pay-per-use, so the question for legal teams is who routes the work and who reviews it.
Legora announced Intake on October 13 and Harvey announced its own Intake the next day, which Legal Cheek called an awkward coincidence. Both promise one place for the business to send legal requests, with an AI agent doing a first pass before a lawyer sees the work. Neither names a customer result.
The one customer comment comes from Carvana's Seena Ghebleh, who told Artificial Lawyer the tool "can apply our playbook" and leaves her an initial review to sign off. That is a design partner talking about an early-access product. Neither company says how often the first pass is wrong, or what happens to a request the agent cannot place.
A front door is the right instinct, because the problem is routing, not drafting. Inexpensive work, standard NDAs and low-risk redlines, still lands on expensive resources because nothing sorts it on arrival. But both launches are products that a legal team configures and then supervises itself. Outsourcing that work to supervised agents means the sorting, the playbook and the escalation rules are run for you, with a lawyer reviewing finished work rather than a queue of first drafts.
On October 15 Microsoft announced Copilot for legal, built on its earlier Legal Agent and delivered as two plugins: one for Word, one for the multi-step Cowork workspace. In Word it reviews agreements against playbooks, drafts from approved templates and applies proposed revisions as tracked changes. Cowork extracts obligations and deadlines and compares agreements across collections.
Microsoft also named partners building plugins that bring specialist data into Word and Cowork, within each organisation's access controls. Two of them, Harvey and Legora, sell competing products.
If contract review comes bundled into the software your lawyers already draft in, what are you still paying a separate vendor for? A review skill makes one lawyer faster. It does not decide which contracts should reach a lawyer at all, and that decision drives the cost.
Law.com reported on October 14 that law firms are planning for consumption-based AI pricing, after Anthropic moved that way this year. Troutman Pepper Locke is building in-house tools with mechanisms to route to different models ahead of pricing changes. The article is paywalled beyond its opening and the visible text gives no price points.
One vendor has already built for this. Jylo 3.0, announced October 13, adds credit management that lets administrators allocate budgets, set usage limits and decide which models each team or person can use. It can also give models custom labels that hide the underlying foundation model. Jylo's CEO Shawn Curran said "The customer should be in control." These are vendor descriptions of a release going first to early adopters.
Under per-use pricing, a model that costs more per task is a cost every time it touches a standard NDA. Who in your department decides which work needs the expensive model, and which should never have reached it?
The Law Commission of England and Wales opened a consultation on October 8 to update product liability law, which dates from almost 40 years ago and covers only physical goods. Its provisional proposal widens "product" to include software and AI systems, however they are supplied. It is a proposal for consultation, not law, and it is UK only.
The Commission's project page lists online marketplaces, fulfilment service providers and UK authorised representatives as potentially liable parties and does not list developers. It also proposes clarifying liability where a product is substantially modified after supply, without saying whether that covers software updates. Those gaps are what an in-house team would want to see closed before relying on it.
If AI systems can be products, who carries the liability when an AI tool you bought produces a defective output: you, the vendor, or the model provider behind it? Your current vendor contracts probably answer that by assumption, not by drafting.
Legora and Harvey want to be the place requests land, Microsoft wants review to happen inside Word, vendors are working out how to bill for use, and a UK proposal asks who is liable when it goes wrong. The tools are converging on the front door. Each one still leaves the legal team running it.
Every launch this week makes the same bet: give the legal team a better tool and let the lawyer drive. But inexpensive work is still done by expensive resources whenever a lawyer is the one sorting, configuring and checking the queue. The cost of that shows up in hours now, and in per-use bills next.
Outsource legal work to supervised agents. Flank's agents know your templates, terms and escalation rules, take the NDAs, standard redlines and procurement agreements, and hand finished work to a lawyer for review before anything leaves.