What happened
Jonathan Kanter, who led the Justice Department's Antitrust Division until he stepped down in 2024, has started a legal tech company called FluxCap with Doha Mekki, the division's former acting chief, The Verge reported. The startup employs former DOJ staff and engineers who previously worked at Palantir. It sells AI software for legal research and analysis aimed at plaintiffs pursuing cases against powerful companies.
The platform pairs proprietary technology with existing large language models. It is built to identify the facts and legal framework that decide a case, flag weak points in a lawyer's reasoning, and search large volumes of discovery documents for signs of anticompetitive conduct. FluxCap is starting with antitrust and plans to move into other practice areas. Its lawyers spent months testing it on real and hypothetical cases.
Antitrust boutique Kressin Powers is among the first customers, and Kanter said the company is in discussions with both public and private enforcers. He said the tool gives small teams virtual capacity roughly equal to 20 or more people working nonstop. He added that the hardest part was getting it to surface relevant evidence, because executives rarely state anticompetitive intent openly.
Context
The division Kanter ran received $245 million from Congress for fiscal 2026 and has more than 400 attorneys. Kanter said a large state attorney general's office might assign about 10 people to a case. In the Biden years, the department took Google to trial on two occasions and filed monopoly suits against Apple and Live Nation, and the division obtained a $45.5 million Tech Modernization Fund grant for case tools.
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