The most consequential question in legal technology right now is not which AI model is smartest, but which platform decides which model gets used.
That question sat at the heart of the NetDocuments Inspire conference, where chief executive Josh Baxter laid out an ambitious vision for his company’s role in an increasingly crowded AI landscape.
Baxter reached for an analogy most professionals will recognise immediately: the chaos of modern streaming, where a viewer bounces between Netflix, Paramount+, and Apple TV hunting for a single show.
The parallel to legal AI is sharper than it might first appear, because law firms are facing exactly that kind of fragmentation as competing tools multiply and integration promises go unfulfilled.
Smart televisions, Baxter argued, have largely solved the streaming problem, with platforms from Google and Roku acting as universal gateway interfaces that locate content across silos without the user having to search manually.
NetDocuments is positioning its legal context graph as the equivalent fix for the legal sector, describing it as an “organizational brain” capable of cutting through the noise of competing AI systems.
At his keynote, Baxter placed NetDocuments at the centre of a wheel, with prominent AI players including Harvey and OpenAI depicted as orbiting models rather than independent destinations.
The visual is deliberately assertive, framing NetDocuments not as one tool among many but as the connective tissue that gives every other model its instructions and its context.
What the analogy opens up, however, is a question the conference did not fully resolve: in a world of multiple capable AI models, who actually chooses which one responds to a given query at a given moment.
That orchestration decision carries significant commercial and professional weight, because whoever controls model selection effectively controls the value chain running through a law firm’s entire document and knowledge infrastructure.
The stakes extend beyond convenience, touching on cost management at a time when token-based AI pricing is creating serious financial pressure across legal operations of every size.
If the legal context graph succeeds in its ambition, NetDocuments would sit not merely as a document management platform but as the authoritative routing layer for AI across the profession.
Whether clients, partners such as Harvey, or the models themselves will accept that positioning is the defining competitive test now facing the company and the broader legal AI market.