Blackstone has invested 50 million dollars in Norm Ai, a legal and compliance technology startup that is simultaneously launching an independent law firm built around its artificial intelligence platform. The New York-based firm, Norm Law LLP, will use Norm Ai’s technology to handle legal work for Blackstone and other financial services clients, founder and CEO John Nay said.
Norm Ai develops AI agents that help corporate legal and compliance teams automate standards-based regulatory reviews. The company says it has deployed thousands of these agents inside large global financial institutions, collectively covering more than 30 trillion dollars in assets under management. Since its 2023 launch, the startup has raised over 140 million dollars across funding rounds backed by Blackstone, Coatue, Bain Capital, Vanguard, Citi, New York Life, TIAA, Craft Ventures, Henry R. Kravis, and Marc Benioff.
Blackstone, which has participated in two prior rounds, will work closely with Norm Law “to identify legal services that Blackstone procures that could benefit from an AI-native approach,” chief technology officer John Stecher said in emailed comments.
Nay said the decision to create an affiliated law firm emerged because many Norm Ai customers were relying on outside counsel for work that was “adjacent to, but relevant to, the work we were doing.” Norm Law will remain independently owned in line with rules that bar non-lawyers from owning legal practices. The firm will generate revenue from its own clients and will pay Norm Ai for access to its technology.
Norm Law launches with only “a handful” of lawyers, though the firm plans to hire senior associates and partners in the coming months. Nay declined to identify current attorneys. An advisory committee guiding the firm’s buildout includes former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner Troy Paredes, former SEC general counsel Dan Berkovitz, former New York State Department of Financial Services superintendent Ben Lawsky, and Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters.
Norm Ai describes its core methodology as “Legal Engineering,” a discipline in which elite attorneys are trained to convert legal workflows into AI agents. Nay said these legal engineers have embedded their expertise directly into Norm Ai’s products, enabling expert-supervised AI agents that handle high-stakes reasoning tasks. The same approach underpins Norm Law’s operations.
According to the company, it has designed a process for tailoring and supervising AI agents inside live legal workflows, optimizing collaboration between its systems and practicing attorneys. Norm Ai says the model aims to improve speed, consistency, and auditability in high-volume regulatory and compliance work for institutional clients.
Norm Law becomes the latest legal-technology venture to open an affiliated law firm, following similar moves by startups such as Eudia, which launched an AI-augmented subsidiary in Arizona under the state’s liberalized law firm ownership rules.
Nay said Norm Law is “the first AI-native law firm built to serve global institutional clients such as Blackstone,” with the practice at the intersection of AI systems and expert legal oversight.
Legal AI has a growing field of well-capitalized competitors now surrounding Norm Ai. Harvey, one of the most prominent players in the legal AI market, has closed a new 150 million dollar funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that values the San Francisco startup at more than 8 billion dollars, according to three people familiar with the deal. Eudia, a Palo Alto-based augmented-intelligence platform for Fortune 500 legal teams, secured up to 105 million dollars in Series A funding earlier this year.
