Legal tech covers software used by law firms and in-house legal teams: contract lifecycle management, e-signature, document automation, e-discovery, matter and case management, and compliance workflows. Organisations use it to draft, negotiate, store and prove agreements, and to keep track of deadlines, obligations and regulatory duties.
The sovereignty angle is concentrated in the document store. A contract repository is a long-term archive of commercial terms, disputes and counterparties, and many tools add AI features that send text to a model hosted elsewhere. Ask where those features process content, who holds the encryption keys, and how the tool supports a lawyer's duty of confidentiality. Lock-in is real as well: clause libraries, templates, workflow rules and audit trails are often kept in proprietary formats.
When choosing a European option, look at whether documents can be exported together with their metadata and signature evidence in open formats, whether national requirements for electronic signatures and archiving are supported, whether access can be restricted down to individual matters, and whether the processing agreement names subprocessors and their locations.