Clio, the legal software company, said on September 30, 2026 that it had acquired Learned Hand, a startup that builds an AI workspace for judges and court clerks. Clio described the purchase as its first direct expansion into the judiciary. Terms were not disclosed.
Learned Hand will become part of Clio's judiciary business and serve as the base for its court products. Clio said it would keep supporting the startup's existing deployments and pilots while investing in the product and the team.
Founder and chief executive Shlomo Klapper leads a team that has designed its product with judges and court systems. Clio said it would share more about its judiciary products in the coming months.
Clio did not say how many Learned Hand employees would join, but said the startup's team would continue to work on the product inside its judiciary business.
What Learned Hand built
Learned Hand's software connects to a court's case management system and helps judges and clerks get to grips with pending matters. It works through filings and the issues in dispute, supports legal research, and helps draft bench memoranda and orders that follow the procedural rules of each case.
Courts across the U.S. use the tool, according to the release, including the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, which Clio described as the largest trial court in the country. Dealroom, summarising Business Insider's report, said the product extracts facts from filings and drafts memos, orders and opinions with citations linked back to the record.
LawNext described Learned Hand as a court-focused product already in use in several courthouses, according to a summary by Let's Data Science. Neither Clio nor Learned Hand said how many courts or judges use the software, and the companies did not give details of the AI models behind it.
“We started Learned Hand because judges and clerks needed technology built around the realities of judicial work.”
Why Clio is buying
Clio's argument is that AI is speeding up legal work for lawyers while courts remain a bottleneck. Business Insider reported, according to secondary summaries, that Clio chief executive Jack Newton expects AI to add to the pressure on already overloaded state trial judges, as more people use chatbots to research the law and represent themselves.
Clio plans to pair Learned Hand's workflow software with its own legal data. Clio Library holds more than one billion legal documents across over 110 jurisdictions, and Clio Docket covers about one billion U.S. court records and filings, the company said.
“Learned Hand has already shown what becomes possible when you build alongside judges,” said Pablo Arredondo, senior vice president for the judiciary at Clio.
Clio said combining court records, legal research content and Learned Hand's workflow tools would let it build AI products for courts that are grounded in the law and in each case's own record.
The founder and the funding
Klapper worked at Palantir in a role similar to a forward-deployed engineer before going to law school and joining the litigation firm Quinn Emanuel as an associate, Business Insider reported, according to Dealroom.
Klapper had raised about $5 million for Learned Hand, according to Business Insider. He had been in talks for another round, including with Clio's corporate venture arm, before the acquisition. No investors were named.
“We started Learned Hand because judges and clerks needed technology built around the realities of judicial work,” Klapper said in the release.
Clio builds a judiciary team
The deal follows two senior hires aimed at courts. In August, Casetext co-founder Pablo Arredondo joined Clio as senior vice president, judiciary. In September, Clio said former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack would join as general manager, judiciary.
With Learned Hand, Clio now has a product already running inside courts for that team to build on, rather than starting its judiciary push from scratch.
Clio was last valued at $5 billion in a Series G round in November 2025, according to Bloomberg, and Dealroom lists it as having raised about $1.8 billion.
