Chris Fisher is founder and managing partner of Myriad Venture Partners, a fund that invested in four legal tech startups in 2025. As a former in-house attorney and chief strategy officer of Xerox Holdings Corp., he’s well-positioned to explain how various concerns about a legal tech bubble would affect corporate legal departments. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Q: Should corporate legal departments be worried about a possible legal tech bubble? How much would they be affected if one of the startups they’re buying failed?
The GCs have to be worried about something like that bursting for a different reason than the investors. The investors worry about it because they’re economic animals. The GC’s concern is more around like, “Hey, am I going to partner with somebody that is going to disappear, or fall behind where I can’t provide that service? Or I have to replace them and it really throws a wrench into my operation.”
If a startup you’re working with is the backbone of how you draft or negotiate or close every contract, that could be a lot higher impact than if you’ve got a one-off thing.
Q: How would a wave of acquisitions/consolidation of the legal tech market affect legal departments?
It could absolutely impact the GC. A lot of this depends on how well the M&A is done. If the M&A is done really well, the companies have done their homework, they know how to integrate these platforms, and they know how they’re going to either integrate or transition their clients. Because at the end of the day, they don’t want to have a client churn on them because they’ve done the M&A integration poorly.
But GCs can also be on the other end of that, where they have to transition to a new platform, the transition process is sloppy, and the new platform is not any better, and they just have a bad experience.
Q: Should corporate legal teams care about how much money individual startups are raising?
They definitely should. It’s an important data point. First of all, those big funding rounds show that the founders and the businesses have built something of value.
When you’re buying, you can ask these questions. You should know how solvent your partners are, especially when you’re dealing with startups. Startups all have an element of risk, and a lot of that fixed risk is runway. You can take some additional comfort from the amount they’ve raised, but some of these folks raise money because they want to suck oxygen out of the room for attention. Some raise money because they’re burning a lot; they’re not the most efficient businesses.
Q: Favorite fictional legal character?
I like the Lincoln Lawyer. I like the new series that’s out, that’s pretty good. The books are good.
