Microsoft's Copilot for Legal Aims at Hundreds of Thousands of Lawyers

Microsoft launched Copilot for Legal on 15 October, and the company says the product could eventually reach hundreds of thousands of lawyers worldwide. Carina Negreanu, Legal Vertical leader at Microsoft, laid out that ambition in one of the first detailed interviews since the release, speaking to Artificial Lawyer.

Negreanu joined Microsoft with the team from Robin AI. Her brief is broad: legal workflows across many functions, including HR, compliance and procurement.

The scale is the story. Copilot already counts more than 30 million signed-up users globally. Only a subset are lawyers, yet that subset spans lawyers, HR directors, compliance experts and procurement heads — anyone, in short, who may need legal input. The potential user base is, by any honest arithmetic, enormous.

What does the product actually do?

Copilot for Legal centres on three core workflows: question-and-answer, review, and editing. Around those sit 20 additional skills covering areas such as obligations and playbook generation.

Once enabled, the legal capabilities activate automatically when Copilot detects legal documents. This is the original vision realised: software that behaves like a genuine copilot rather than a tool one must summon.

For larger jobs, a feature called Copilot Cowork supports bigger-scale tasks, including reviewing multiple contracts at once. The product also integrates with Excel, PowerPoint and Teams — a contract review table can flow into a spreadsheet, for example. Negreanu refers specifically to the benefit of centrality: a working environment lawyers simply do not need to leave. Word, the base layer of nearly all legal work, makes that ambition credible.

Which models power it?

Model choice remains open. Copilot for Legal taps both OpenAI and Anthropic models, available through Copilot's model picker and subject to regional restrictions. Microsoft is not, in other words, marrying a single vendor.

How accurate is it?

Accuracy is a key focus area, Negreanu said. Microsoft is already seeing 70%-plus acceptance rates for suggested review changes. Edit retention sits in the 'high seventies'.

The company also tests a subtler metric: whether reviews using the same playbook produce consistent results. Consistency, alongside edit quality, is the measure that matters in a review pipeline. Further public benchmarking is planned.

What about the legal tech partners?

Partners remain part of the strategy. Microsoft is building native legal capabilities while using connectors to bring in specialist expertise, including from legal tech companies that supply data. The aim, Negreanu explained, is to handle more of the workflow in one place.

Here lies the quiet tension. Microsoft has dabbled in legal before; this time it means to stay. If it stays, what is on offer will inevitably expand. That expansion means some partners' offerings will, at some point, be replaceable by what Copilot for Legal itself provides. Positive relationships today do not guarantee channel status tomorrow.

What is the practical consequence for practitioners?

For law firms and corporate legal teams, the calculus is straightforward. Copilot for Legal arrives not as a separate purchase requiring adoption campaigns but as a capability embedded in licences many organisations already hold. Review, drafting support and playbook-driven consistency may arrive, in effect, by default. Firms that have invested in specialist legal tech should now ask which of those tools Copilot will replicate, and which connectors genuinely add something Microsoft will not build. That is a procurement question, a training question and, eventually, a budget question.

Where can readers hear more?

Artificial Lawyer, which conducted the interview, is chairing two forthcoming conferences. Legal Innovators UK runs on 4 and 5 November at the Minster Building near the Tower of London, with complimentary passes for those working inside law firms and corporate legal teams. Legal Innovators New York follows on 17 and 18 November at Quorum by Convene in Midtown.

The takeaway: Microsoft has entered the legal vertical with distribution few vendors can match, and it intends to stay.