May 2026: Time to kill your legal ego?

Welcome to our monthly newsletter, Scooped.

Each month, co-founders Tom Dreyfus and Sam Flynn curate the latest news in legaltech and AI, and share what teams are creating on Josef.

Have a read and don’t forget to subscribe!

—

Greetings 👋

Tom and Sam here.

We’ve been on tour this past month! NYU-built tool Roxanne had a day out in Harlem, team Josef stopped by Portland for breakfast with adidas, and Tom continued to pronounce the death of the intake form…

(Before we dig in: quick shout-out to the in-house team at global staffing giant Randstad, named finalists for several awards at the ALB Malaysia Law Awards 2026! Check out their award-winning workflow tools here.)

Here’s what caught our eye this month.

—

Which in-house lawyers will survive? 🧟

Famed legal provocateur Andrew Cooke didn’t hold back in his recent piece, Legal Ego Must Die:

“The lawyers who will matter most are the ones who can collaborate across product, ops, finance, and engineering, and build legal into the system rather than above it.”

We couldn’t say it better ourselves. Self-service legal infrastructure isn’t any kind of threat. It’s what’ll help you fly.

The barbarians are at the gate! 🙀

Microsoft released its Legal Agent in MS Word, and 20,000 people attended Anthropic’s webinar for legal.

Yet again, the Chicken Little’s are calling it: the legaltech sky is falling in. Us? Right now, it’s neither here nor there: Josef doesn’t tinker at the edges. Josef delivers legal help straight to the business. Good enough doesn’t work in that context.

Portland’s great. But with adidas Bill Frank it’s even better 🍳

We switched up our weekly catch-up with adidas’ Director of Legal Solutions Bill Frank this month, doing it over breakfast in Portland.

In Sam’s eyes, Bill’s positivity isn’t just a personality trait. It’s a change management tool. A positive outlook = less noise, more focus, and a better ability to get the job done.

We left caffeinated and inspired as usual. Recommended combo!

Roxanne had Big Day Out in Harlem 🗽

Over a year since the launch of the AI assistant Roxanne from NYU and nonprofit Housing Court Answers, the tool continues to go from strength to strength.

This month Sam took the rental repairs tool up to Harlem to attend one of Mayor Mamadani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings. We got Roxanne in the hands of tenants, heard first-hand what they’re up against and were reminded why such one-to-many tools are so damn important.

AI can’t stay behind closed doors. It needs to be out in the world, helping people where it matters most.

The intake form is dead! 🪦

Tom planted his flag again this month with a bold claim: the legal intake form is dead! Bold, yes. His argument: quite right.

Intake forms were always a workaround for the fact that legal couldn’t process unstructured information at scale. But with Josef’s new Rapid Ingestion Engine, that problem’s solved.

So why are teams still asking the business to fill out contract fields when they explain everything in an email already? It can be a thing of the past if you want it to be…

Who’s a bigger know-it-all: lawyers or engineers? What about a Lawyer-Engineer! 🤓

We’re scared, and you should be too. This week, an ex-lawyer with 70 followers on LinkedIn claimed to have rebuilt the entire Harvey/Legora feature set in a couple of days and released it as open-source software, to quite some global fanfare. Cool? Yes! Groundbreaking: we’ll reserve judgement.

As we’ve been saying for some time, software isn’t the scarce resource: trust is. Trust that it’s safe. Trust that it works. Trust that you can tell us when it doesn’t. Trust that you can actually help us deploy, scale, and iterate. (We love this take.) The jury is out on when people are going to be able to vibe code the value stack.

—

See you next month.

Tom & Sam