The legal tech conversation has changed noticeably over the last year. In 2024 and early 2025, most teams were experimenting. They were testing generative AI tools, piloting point solutions, and exploring what might be possible. As 2026 begins, the questions have become more practical: Does AI work at scale, with our data set, and can it fit within our own operational systems and processes?
AI and the Legal Department of 2026: What’s Changing (and What’s Not)
The deal combines decades of experience in managed review and flexible legal staffing with next-gen legal technology and AI-powered services.
Dallas, TX – January 15, 2026 — Purpose Legal, a leading provider of digital forensics, eDiscovery, AI-powered managed review, and specialized legal operations services, today announced its acquisition of Hire Counsel, an iconic brand and respected provider of managed review and flexible legal staffing services for over 30 years.
This strategic combination creates a fully integrated managed services platform that unites experienced people, proven processes, and modern technology under one roof to deliver what customers have long sought but rarely find: depth, scale, and choice without sacrificing quality.
By uniting the best of human expertise and artificial intelligence, Purpose Legal strengthens its leadership in managed review and flexible legal staffing, enabling faster deployment, greater flexibility, and consistent execution across matters of any size or complexity. Purpose Legal will leverage Hire Counsel’s exceptional talent network of more than 70,000 vetted attorneys and decades of trusted client relationships to scale rapidly while ensuring AI-driven workflows are applied with precision, confidentiality, and accountability for today’s most demanding legal matters.
“We’re very excited to join forces with Hire Counsel and its great people,” said Greg Mazares, CEO of Purpose Legal. “The legal industry is at an inflection point and as technology providers and staffing firms move further apart, we see an opportunity to bring the market back together. By uniting Hire Counsel and Purpose Legal, we are building a platform where human expertise and AI reinforce one another, not compete. The future of legal services is AI plus people, working in concert, at scale, with accountability built in. This combination sets a new standard for what a modern legal services provider can and should be.”
What the legal marketplace can expect:
“For decades Hire Counsel has built its reputation on impeccable delivery, vetted processes, flexible talent, and an unmatched commitment to client satisfaction,” said Joan Davison, CEO of Hire Counsel. “Joining Purpose Legal allows us to bring our clients the best of both worlds: a proven workforce management delivery system and a forward-looking technology platform, run by expert consultants, that deploys AI responsibly to address our clients’ most complex challenges.”
Following the transaction, managed review, flexible staffing, and specialized legal operations services will operate as “Hire Counsel, a Purpose Legal Company.” Core eDiscovery, digital forensics, managed services, and infrastructure services will continue under the “Purpose Legal” brand.
Supporting this transaction is Blue Sage Capital, Purpose Legal’s majority investor. Blue Sage worked closely with the Purpose Legal management team to close this transaction. Blue Sage was represented in the transaction by Queen Saenz + Schutz PLLC (Legal), SCA (Accounting ), Cherry Bekaert (Tax), and Lockton (Insurance). Comerica Bank served as the financing partner on the transaction.
Hire Counsel, a portfolio company of Long Point Capital, was represented in the transaction by Sidley Austin (Legal) and Jegi Leonis (Financial Advisor), a pre-eminent M&A advisory firm for the global technology, software, media, and business services industries.
About Purpose Legal:
Purpose Legal is a leader in eDiscovery, digital forensics, document review, and legal technology services. In 2025 it was recognized as one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies in America. Our diverse team of experienced, talented, and motivated professionals is our greatest asset. We assist multinational corporations, law firms and government entities through best-in-breed software, generative AI tools, creative managed services solutions, and deep industry knowledge. Purpose delivers expertise in litigation support, HSR second requests, advisory consulting services, corporate compliance, regulatory investigations, core eDiscovery services and technology, document review, information governance, data privacy, data breach discovery, commercial contract review, and data science. We hire and develop experienced industry professionals who, combined with proven processes and robust technology, help us deliver consistently-effective solutions to our valued clients worldwide. Learn more at www.www.purposelegal.io.
About Hire Counsel:
Hire Counsel, established in 1993, is a leading provider of flexible legal talent and managed review services, supporting law firms, corporations, and government entities across the United States. With more than three decades of experience, the company specializes in delivering highly vetted attorneys, project managers, and legal professionals to help clients respond quickly to shifting workloads, regulatory demands, and complex litigation matters. Powered by its proprietary P3 People Placement Process, Hire Counsel assembles skilled, scalable teams tailored to each client’s unique legal challenges. Recognized for its national reach, operational agility, and commitment to quality, Hire Counsel enables organizations to streamline legal operations, reduce risk, and drive meaningful results. For more information, visit www.hirecounsel.com.
About Blue Sage:
Blue Sage Capital is an Austin, Texas-based private equity firm that has been investing in profitable, growing, lower middle-market companies since 2002. Blue Sage currently has over $1.5 billion of assets under management and seeks to partner with founders, families, and management teams as the first round of institutional capital for businesses that enjoy leadership positions in niche manufacturing, environmental solutions, or specialty services industries. Blue Sage typically invests $25 million to $60 million in control buyout investments and recapitalizations of companies with $25 million to $200 million of revenue. Visit bluesage.com.
Discover how legal teams can leverage Language Weaver’s secure and scalable AI-powered machine translation to manage multilingual content with confidence. In this webinar, we’ll show you how to leverage advanced features such as:
In addition, we will explore how Language Weaver helps firms support data privacy, compliance and operational efficiency. With 13 of the top 20 AmLaw firms already using Language Weaver, discover how your organization can benefit from enterprise-grade security and seamless integration into legal workflows.
Today, public safety agencies and legal teams have witnessed a surge in digital evidence, from surveillance footage and body-worn cameras (BWC) to recorded interviews and social media posts. Navigating this sea of information, identifying sensitive components, and ensuring their proper redaction is daunting, placing an immense burden on the already strained resources of legal teams and law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the consequences of incomplete or erroneous redaction can be severe, potentially breaching privacy laws, undermining legal proceedings, and eroding public trust.
Traditional infrastructure models are being re-evaluated as enterprises face rising pressures around data security, compliance requirements, cost management, and operational agility. Choosing between Build Your Cloud (BYC), SaaS, and Public Cloud deployments is now a strategic decision that shapes long-term scalability and governance.
This blog breaks down the strengths and limitations of each model to help IT and business leaders align their deployment strategy with organizational priorities.
This strategic comparison provides a clear framework for identifying which model best supports your enterprise’s operational, security, and compliance needs. Whether prioritizing control, convenience, or cost efficiency, understanding these differences is crucial for long-term infrastructure success.
Read the full analysis here:
https://www.knovos.com/blog/byc-vs-saas-vs-public-cloud-deployment-a-strategic-framework-for-enterprise-decision-makers/
Empower your legal team in their AI journey. Easily automate bespoke and routine processes, include agentic steps in workflows, create AI agents, and simplify how you work.
Now, legal teams can build and deploy custom, bespoke enterprise AI agents to automate a wide variety of legal tasks. ELM’s Automation Agent (ELMA) combines deep legal expertise with powerful Agentic AI capabilities.
Build custom legal workflows by describing modular steps in plain English. Simplify, test and scale automations with clarity and precision, and deploy instantly.
Click to learn more and visit Elevate at Legalweek, booth 461.
Save time, improve report accuracy, and approach investigations more comprehensively with highly accurate AI transcription and translation.
As legal teams increasingly adopt AI-driven tools, one concern comes up again and again:
How do we protect sensitive data without stripping it of the context that makes it useful?
For many organizations, the answer so far has been aggressive redaction or overly simplistic anonymization. While these approaches may reduce exposure, they often come at a high cost, they remove the very details that AI, analytics, and legal professionals rely on to extract value from data.
Legal data is not just a collection of names, dates, or identifiers. Its value lies in structure, relationships, and nuance. When key elements are removed or distorted, documents lose meaning, datasets become unreliable, and AI outputs degrade quickly.
This is especially problematic in legal workflows such as:
In these contexts, protecting privacy by destroying context is not a sustainable solution.
Nymiz addresses this challenge by combining advanced anonymization and redaction techniques designed specifically for legal data. Our technology transforms personal and sensitive information while preserving the structure, logic, and semantic relationships within documents and datasets.
Key capabilities include:
This approach allows legal teams to maintain consistency and meaning across datasets, achieving an anonymization accuracy of approximately 85% in real-world environments while preserving the structure and relationships that AI and analytics depend on
AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on. When context is lost, results become unreliable and confidence in AI drops. By preserving meaning while protecting privacy, legal teams can trust both their data and the insights derived from it.
This makes it possible to:
We’re meeting with legal and security leaders during Legalweek to discuss how privacy-first collaboration can scale without adding friction or risk.
Schedule a meeting with our team before Legalweek to make the most of your time in New York.
Purpose Legal also unveils PurposeXi CaseOptics™ for early case intelligence, to be showcased at Legalweek 2026
DALLAS – Feb. 17, 2026 — Purpose Legal today announced PurposeXi™, an expert intelligence platform that brings together the company’s full line of AI-powered services across early case intelligence, investigations, document review, and other data-driven legal workflows into a single, integrated framework. Purpose Legal is a leading provider of digital forensics, eDiscovery, AI-powered managed review, and specialized legal operations services.
Designed for scale, governance, and defensibility, PurposeXi serves as the foundation for Purpose Legal’s Grounded in Human Intelligence (HI) + AI philosophy—codifying how advanced AI is applied alongside expert judgment, validation, and oversight, and ensuring insights are explainable, auditable, and tied directly to underlying evidence.
“AI is not new to Purpose Legal, nor is the responsibility that comes with using it in real legal matters,” said Jeff Johnson, Purpose Legal’s Chief Innovation Officer. “PurposeXi reflects the discipline we’ve built over many years of applying AI in high-stakes matters, where both speed and defensibility are essential. This platform builds on our success and formalizes how we bring human expertise and AI together so legal teams can act faster, with confidence and control, and deliver better outcomes.”
Introducing PurposeXi CaseOptics™
As part of the PurposeXi platform, Purpose Legal also announced the availability of PurposeXi CaseOptics™, a new early case intelligence solution that enables legal teams to move from uncertainty to clarity in days—not weeks—by surfacing expert-validated insights at the outset of a matter.
Powered by eDiscovery AI’s Insight ECI technology and delivered through Purpose Legal’s expert-directed workflows, PurposeXi CaseOptics identifies the documents that matter most in large data sets before document review begins, rapidly analyzing and categorizing large document collections to surface key evidence, insights, and issues, while identifying irrelevant data to reduce cost and complexity. PurposeXi CaseOptics gives legal teams strategic insights into case strengths and risks earlier in the discovery process, helping them make informed decisions supported by the data.
Engineered Intelligence, at Scale
PurposeXi and PurposeXi CaseOptics embody Purpose Legal’s Engineered Intelligence, at Scale approach. As an AI-first legal services company built on the deliberate acquisition and integration of legal expertise, Purpose Legal pairs advanced technology with a managed network of experienced legal professionals to ensure intelligence is not only fast, but also explainable, defensible, and actionable.
“Speed without governance introduces risk,” said Kris Taylor, President of Purpose Legal. “PurposeXi and PurposeXi CaseOptics demonstrate what’s possible when AI is guided by experts who understand the legal consequences of every decision and have the experience to stand behind the results. Following our recent acquisition of Hire Counsel, the formalization of our data-driven legal workflows into a single integrated platform represents a new stage of maturity in Purpose Legal’s commitment to integrating HI + AI.”
Live Demonstrations at Legalweek 2026
Purpose Legal will demonstrate PurposeXi CaseOptics at Legalweek 2026 in New York City March 9-12, offering attendees a first-hand look at how expert-directed early case intelligence fits within the broader PurposeXi platform to support smarter, defensible decision-making across the eDiscovery lifecycle. Visit Purpose Legal at Booth #335.
To learn more or request a demonstration at Legalweek, visit https://www.purposelegal.io/.
About Purpose Legal
Purpose Legal is a global legal services and technology provider built for high-stakes, data-intensive matters where accuracy, speed, and defensibility matter most. Through its PurposeXi™ platform, the company combines purpose-built AI with deep litigation, review, and forensic proficiency to deliver expert-validated intelligence that legal teams can trust. We pair powerful technology with experienced practitioners who ensure insight turns into action. Founded in 2007, Purpose Legal is a leader in eDiscovery, digital forensics, document review, and legal technology services. In 2025 it was recognized as one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies in America. Our diverse team of experienced, talented, and motivated professionals is our greatest asset. We assist multinational corporations, law firms and government entities through best-in-breed software, powerful AI tools, creative managed services solutions, and deep industry knowledge. Learn more at www.purposelegal.io.
The most profitable personal injury firms today share a common advantage: they’ve modernized their operations with integrated, AI-powered legal technology.
This guide explains how forward-thinking firms are replacing disconnected tools with unified platforms that streamline workflows, improve visibility, and strengthen case outcomes. Instead of juggling multiple systems, modern practices are consolidating intake, CRM, document management, communication, and reporting into a single environment that boosts efficiency and reduces overhead.
Inside, you’ll learn how leading firms use automation and analytics to:
Streamline case management and eliminate administrative bottlenecks
Gain real-time visibility into firm performance and financials
Reduce overhead by integrating intake, CRM, and document workflows
Improve client experience and retention through secure, transparent communication
The guide also highlights how AI-powered tools can automate repetitive tasks, summarize records, predict timelines, and generate insights that help firms make smarter strategic decisions.
For firms focused on growth, profitability, and long-term competitiveness, adopting a unified, AI-powered practice management platform is quickly becoming the foundation of modern legal operations.
Read the full guide here: https://allrize.ai/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/How-Personal-Injury-Firms-Can-Streamline-Strengthen-and-Scale.pdf
