Why the legal sector needs tech that goes beyond ‘good enough’

Two of the largest tech acquisitions in Israeli history closed within months of each other and, for the lawyers on both sides, it also meant two of the largest document reviews in the country’s history landing on desks at exactly the same time. 

Chambers Global’s 2026 report named Google’s $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion purchase of CyberArk as the anchors of a broader surge in tech sector M&A activity in 2025. 

That kind of deal flow doesn’t happen by accident. The country’s legal sector entered a new chapter over a decade ago, when legislation was updated, and the number of international firms with a formal presence in Israel has since nearly doubled. 

Today, Israel has the highest number of lawyers per capita of any country in the world, while the United States has the largest legal services market in the world, generating over $300 billion in annual revenue.

But what remains little known is how deals of that scale generate enormous volumes of documents to review. The firms handling them are all doing it with a legal tech sector that, as numbers show, is still catching up to the scale of the work. 

Technology is supposed to be what closes the gap, but the legal tech industry hasn’t scaled at the same pace as the deals it needs to support. 

The challenges created by increasingly complex legal work are at the heart of what brothers and Altorney co-founders Shimmy and Rachi Messing set out to solve. They built Altorney to help modernize how legal teams handle demanding document reviews and data.

This is important because, as in many industries, not all legal tech tools are created equally. Legal tech that is just “good enough” can lead to missed deadlines, operational bottlenecks and repetition of work. At worst, it can jeopardize the outcome of the case itself. 

Why legal tech can’t afford to miss the mark 

The legal sector is no stranger to tech products. There are already 4,358 companies specializing in legal SaaS around the world, 336 of which were created in the first half of 2026 alone. 

But to Messing, that saturation creates its own problem for buyers rather than solving it. “Lately, the market is flooded with options. You have the massive legacy platforms that everyone uses out of habit, and you have the trendy, new AI-everything startups pulling in big headlines. They are functional, sure. But as a business owner who built a platform to solve my own industry frustrations, ‘functional’ isn’t the standard we should be settling for.”

That proliferation means legal teams are long accustomed to adopting new software, but it also means they need to be more selective about where they apply it, and avoid tech overload. 

“At the end of the day, legal tech shouldn’t require an army of specialists just to keep the lights on. It should be intuitive, incredibly fast, and ruthlessly accurate, whether you’re looking at ten thousand pages or ten million,” Messing stressed. 

A journey into legal tech 

To tackle the need for legal tech that goes beyond functional to support demanding areas of legal work, Messing founded Altorney with his brother, Rachi, in 2021. 

Together, the two brothers aim to address a widespread limitation for legal teams with two custom products that work in tandem to remove a specific operational barrier to growth.  

“Legal matters often create two constraints at once: more information than a team can analyze efficiently and more work than the available team can execute. MARC brings intelligence to the data; Altorney brings the right people and management infrastructure to the work. Each can be used independently, or together as one intelligence-and-execution system,” Messing continued. 

In other words, MARC turns complex data into clear, actionable intelligence while Altorney gives legal teams the people and management tools to act on that intelligence. Used together, the two allow legal teams to move from understanding the scope of a matter to executing the full legal workforce lifecycle without the usual handoffs, delays and layered costs.

It’s also a direct answer to the inefficiency MARC was built to solve; loading entire document sets into review platforms, paying to host all of it, only to cull most as non-responsive. 

According to a report from the company, MARC helped a Fortune 500 client cut total review costs by 62% and  hosting costs by 78% by loading only relevant documents, while compressing a typical review cycle from three weeks to three days. 

As Messing put it, using MARC means “legal teams find what matters, understand why it matters, and act on it sooner. It combines ‘broad, explainable analysis with fast setup and flexible deployments across litigation, investigations, transactions, compliance, privacy requests, and data breach response.” 

The importance of predictable economics 

Creating value is only half of the equation. Pricing and long-term affordability can make or break whether that value actually reaches clients. 

Alongside the growing capabilities of AI, 2026 has also been the year when the true cost of the technology has hit the spotlight, as enterprise organizations have grappled with high-profile bill shocks after AI companies shifted to usage-based token economics. In fact, 82% of corporations are now concerned about the token costs that they’re seeing inside their business. 

A 2026 FinOps Foundation report, drawn from nearly 1,200 practitioners managing more than $83 billion in annual cloud spend, further found that 73% of organizations have seen their AI costs blow past original projections, even as the per token price of AI itself keeps falling. 

It’s the exact trap Messing built MARC’s pricing to avoid. “For business owners, predictability is everything. Too many platforms hide their true cost behind complex hosting fees, user licenses, and data ingestion surcharges that skyrocket as your data volume grows,” he explained. 

For that reason, MARC was built to scale within the margins legal firms already operate under, keeping cost per document predictable so teams can control the bottom line and avoid bill shock. 

“MARC doesn’t force a one-size-fits-all pricing model on a legal team that already has its own way of working,” said Messing. Instead, teams can choose from a range of pricing models that best fit how they operate, from client-hosted, fully managed Saas or bring-your-own-AI-key. 

Altorney‘s workforce platform runs on a different model, with a platform fee that starts at $200 per active reviewer per month and decreases at higher volumes. “Under this model, the client funds reviewer payroll directly at the hourly pay rate set by the client and accepted by the reviewer.” 

That transparency runs throughout the platform’s functionality, with staffing decisions, time, budgets, reviewer performance and project progress all staying visible in one place, giving legal teams a level of operational control a conventional staffing transaction doesn’t offer. 

“Clients typically save approximately 40% compared with traditional staffing-agency models, while gaining direct visibility into talent, time, budgets, performance, and project progress,” Messing concluded.  

Helping legal firms stay ahead of the curve 

Among the forces reshaping the legal sector right now are a wave of high-value, document-intensive tech deals, legal teams under pressure to move faster without adding headcount, and a legal tech sector still building out the tools to keep pace. 

As the sector continues to burgeon, entrenching itself in work on a global stage, tech solutions can help firms scale so they capture emerging opportunities while keeping overhead costs under control. 

Messing’s argument is that the gap between deal size and available tools is a problem stakeholders must take seriously, wherever it shows up. Closing that gap, in his view, means legal teams should be able to work through complex matters in meaningfully shorter cycles without the tools becoming the bottleneck. 

The question now facing law firms and in-house counsel is simple: it isn’t whether to modernize, it’s how fast they can afford not to.