Welcome back to Bloomberg Law’s Legal Ops & Tech newsletter. I’m Evan Ochsner with your updates about the business of corporate legal teams, AI developments in the legal world, and more. This week, we’re looking at data from our State of Practice survey, a lawyer who pivoted to legal tech, and a partnership between a European startup and a major U.S. law firm.

Coming up this week: I’ll be in Las Vegas for CLOC’s annual CGI conference. If you’ll be there, drop me a line at eochsner@bloombergindustry.com and let’s connect.

Amy Feldman, chief legal officer of consulting firm The Judge Group, isn’t overly concerned about how outside counsel use artificial intelligence. She trusts their judgment when it comes to using technology, because she has longstanding relationships with these law firms.

“I don’t really care how the sausage is made, as long as they’re getting it right,” Feldman told me.

Feldman’s response was typical for the in-house legal professionals who responded to Bloomberg Law’s State of Practice survey. Nearly 7 in 10 respondents don’t really care about technology use when hiring outside counsel.

Qualities such as responsiveness, reputation, and expertise were rated much more highly by in-house legal professionals when asked what’s important to them when hiring a law firm to help with their corporate legal work.

Read More: Gen AI Reduces Grunt Work for Some In-House Legal Teams

I got an early look at the results of the survey, which will go out widely in the coming weeks, but take a look at our archive of survey-related content on our Surveys, Reports & Data Analysis page.

Sabih Siddiqi’s last day as a full-time associate at Watson Farley & Williams was May 2. His legal tech startup Iqidis publicly launches Wednesday.

“No one really goes to law school thinking ‘Hey I’m not going to practice,’” he told me. “They don’t think ‘I’m going to legal tech.’”

Siddiqi says there are signs that more lawyers, and other professionals like doctors, will use their training as innovators and entrepreneurs because of gen AI. Not only is the technology creating new business ideas, but it’s also allowing founders to maximize their productivity. Siddiqi, for example, said using ChatGPT sped up the development of Iqidis, which is aimed at assisting with legal drafting and research.

Siddiqi said he thinks that kind of involvement is good for legal tech. There’s a lot of legal tech products out there, including ones like Iqidis. But much of the legal tech market is a bit too focused on the “tech” part and less on the “legal” element, Siddiqi told me.

“They’re all great tools in some sense, but they’re built kind of from the Silicon Valley perspective, not from the lawyer perspective,” he said.

Max Junestrand, founder of the legal AI startup Legora, told me he moved to New York with the US launch of his software because lawyers in the Big Apple are “rock stars.”

His groupie status just got a boost. Legora announced last week that it’s entered into a “strategic partnership” with Cleary Gottlieb, which will deploy the legal tech software firm-wide.

This isn’t Legora’s first partnership with a major US firm: It revealed an association with Goodwin Proctor when the company announced its US launch in March.

Legora is pitching itself as an expansive AI-powered legal tool with a wide range of capabilities. Its European customers include the multinational law firm Bird & Bird and the Spanish clothing label Desigual.

Legal Tech for Plaintiff Firms Raises $60 Million (TechCrunch): Sapphire Ventures led the funding round for startup Supio. Read More

Attorneys Pick Tech Startups Over Big Law (Business Insider): Some JDs are choosing to work at well-funded legal tech startups instead of practicing law. Read More

Legal Isn’t the Only Industry Undergoing Tech Transformation (Financial Times): A startup is taking aim at lower level tasks in finance. Read More