Lawyers opening an unfamiliar matter will see its full context - summary, key parties, activity timeline, relevant precedent and the people who have done the work before - under a reimagined NetDocuments platform built around what the company calls the first context graph for legal work. AI agents working inside the platform, or in external tools connected via MCP including Claude and ChatGPT, draw on the firm's institutional knowledge rather than a single session's uploads.
NetDocuments says the system continuously maps how every matter, document and communication in a firm connects, across hundreds of millions of records, while respecting existing permissions and ethical walls. Private preview opened with the announcement, with broader rollout in the coming months. The full announcement is at Business Wire.
"Legal data is fundamentally different. It is language, not fields, and unlocking its meaning requires understanding it as a connected whole - every matter, every document, every communication, at firm scale," said Josh Baxter, Chief Executive Officer at NetDocuments. "That kind of context has never been engineered into a legal platform before."
The company built the system with partners including AWS and Elastic to continuously process and connect documents under strict governance. For AI applications, the shift addresses a structural limit: until now, legal AI has operated on whatever a lawyer could upload into a single session.
Platform capabilities include search by meaning across the full firm with permissions preserved, automatic matter overviews, and AI-powered drafting, redlining, playbook generation and document comparison across NetDocuments and Microsoft 365.
"One lawyer described it to us as the picture of a matter that has always lived in a lawyer's head, now made visible, interactive, and ready for an agent to work with," said Dan Hauck, Chief Product Officer at NetDocuments. "You cannot retrofit this. It has to be built into the core."
The new platform launches alongside the original NetDocuments interface. Both experiences are fully supported, share the same underlying data and operate under the same governance model, allowing firms to move on their own timeline.
While the launch focuses on law firm practice, NetDocuments says the platform is built for corporate and public sector organisations facing the same challenge of activating institutional knowledge. The company supports more than 7,000 law firms, corporate legal departments and public sector organisations, and recently appointed Kaleb Holden to drive growth in the Asia-Pacific region.