Soxton Founder Logan Brown Publishes Essay on BigLaw's Decline

Soxton founder Logan Brown has published a commentary arguing that AI is rewriting the structure of the legal industry. The first task she was handed at the firm she joined out of Harvard Law was manually matching the length of signature lines across 18 different sets of documents. While she did it, she wrote, the firm billed the client more than $600 an hour. The practice of handing non-legal work to junior lawyers with prestigious credentials and charging a high hourly rate for it was long taken for granted, and her essay starts from the claim that it no longer is.

Brown's forecast is that what technology did to search is close to what is about to happen to the legal industry. "A decade from now, many BigLaw firms will be skeletons of themselves," she wrote. As the big firms shrink, the reach of high-quality legal help expands dramatically, and the advantage now concentrated among the few clients who can afford it flattens out. The industry she entered upon graduation, she wrote, is already dramatically different.

Her evidence is the money flowing into legal AI. Harvey and Legora entered the scene less than five years ago and catalyzed the change among large firms, and the two behave more like tech companies than law companies, sponsoring sports leagues and putting celebrity spokespeople on billboards, she wrote. Harvey's official announcement, which METAL has checked, says the company raised $550 million on September 9 at a $15.5 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with existing investors including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, a16z, Coatue and Goldman Sachs Alternatives taking part.

Harvey co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra said in that announcement, "The opportunity for companies to accelerate their competitive advantage with AI has never been higher." The same post says 80% of the firms in the Am Law 100 use Harvey, and that in-house legal teams at five of the Fortune 10 are customers. The raise followed Harvey's first post-trained open-weight model and the launch of Harvey LAB, its legal agent benchmark.

Selling legal software was long a running joke about near-impossibility. Partners had no incentive to maximize efficiency and no desire to relearn skills they had paid dearly to acquire. That same corner is now the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, she wrote. Big firms are hiring top-name engineers and turning themselves into tech companies behind the scenes, and the convergence of law and technology, she said, was unimaginable when she was in law school.

The second change is the direction people are moving. Lawyers are realizing they no longer need a big firm's infrastructure or training model, and star players are walking out with their books of business. Brown pointed to Chris Kercher leaving Quinn Emanuel to launch a small, tech-driven firm as early rather than exceptional. Young attorneys, she argued, now have options besides billing hours for years with no share of the profit.

Brown came out of that current herself. She graduated as valedictorian at Vanderbilt University, finished Harvard Law, and spent more than two years as an associate at Cooley, the Silicon Valley firm that works mainly with startups, before leaving in May 2025 and founding Soxton the following month. At twelve she walked into the district attorney's office in Lawrence, Kansas, with a résumé and landed an internship, and after school she worked there more than 40 hours a week. According to a report, she said, "I have always cared about technology and the law. I had wanted to bridge that gap."

Soxton bundles AI, a small team of lawyers and fixed fees. Rather than replacing BigLaw right now, it takes on the earliest stage that founders currently bring to ChatGPT. It handles incorporation, first employees and advisers, and everyday questions, and its most used service returns a requested agreement tailored to the ask. Companies that already retain a large firm, she said, bring Soxton the smaller matters they would not take there.

The money and the scale point the same way. Less than six months after it was founded, Soxton raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Moxxie Ventures, with Strobe, Coalition, Caterina Fake and Flex participating. According to a report, it has served more than 500 companies, with 2,500 startups on the waiting list. In the essay she wrote that the AI-powered firm she runs receives hundreds of applications every day.

Not everyone in the profession welcomes the shift. Lawyers point to hallucinations, mistakes and other shortcomings of the technology, and Brown wrote that the use of AI in white-collar professions is still in its infancy. Even so, her judgment is that the way most people practice is already changing. METAL has reported on the Australian firm Gilbert + Tobin automating legal work with an 87% active usage rate for ChatGPT.

What the essay aims at is not the rate card but the unit being priced. When hours shrink in an industry that sold hours, the product itself changes. From the moment the time spent matching signature lines stops carrying a price, what a firm can offer a client is judgment and accountability. How densely a firm has stacked those two will decide how large it gets to be.