Intapp's new AI platform, Celeste, is now generally available to law firms after launching in February and reaching full release on July 15. The software is designed to solve a problem most AI vendors don't address: making sure the technology respects the same ethical walls, confidentiality rules, and information barriers that govern human employees at large partnership firms.
Intapp was founded in response to a complaint. In the early 2000s, a small Silicon Valley data integration company went to file a patent, and the attorney handling the paperwork said his law firm was a disaster in exactly that area. "Can I license this thing?" he asked. The firm's chief information officer liked the product enough to quit his job and join Intapp as its first salesperson. The company never raised venture capital, and its first outside money arrived with the 2021 IPO.
CEO John Hall describes the customer base as "large partnership firms," a category he estimates at around $4 trillion in annual revenue in the United States. Most software companies don't chase this market because it's awkward to serve. Building the model is not the hard part. Knowing which of a firm's 3,000 employees may see which document, and proving it afterward, is.
What "governed AI" means in practice
The distinction between Celeste and tools like Harvey (an Intapp partner), Legora, or ChatGPT Enterprise comes down to permission. A generic AI assistant answers the question it is asked to the best of its automated ability. That's a problem in a law firm.
"One of the problems with the horizontal systems is that they tell the truth," Hall said. "But you may not be a person who is supposed to get that answer inside the firm."
The failure mode of a chatbot at a law firm is not hallucination. It is honesty. Someone asks about a deal they are ethically walled off from, and a regular AI assistant helpfully tells them about it anyway. Celeste is designed to know who is asking. Ethical walls, material nonpublic information rules, and independence requirements apply to the software the same way they apply to employees. A partner walled off from a deal gets the same answer from Celeste as a colleague would: no answer at all. Every interaction leaves an audit trail, because regulators may have questions about it.
Building a large language model is hard. Building one that knows which of a firm's employees may not know a given fact and can prove it in an audit two years later is a different kind of hard. That is the bet. For legal professionals exploring how these systems work in practice, AI for Legal covers the compliance considerations that come with adopting these tools.
The financial picture
Intapp's fiscal year closed on June 30 with strong numbers. Cloud annual recurring revenue reached $495.7 million, up 29% year over year. Total ARR was $590.5 million, up 22%. Top-line revenue came in at $577.8 million, a 15% increase.
The company is profitable on an adjusted basis. Adjusted net income was $103.6 million, and free cash flow hit $144.7 million, or 25% of revenue - three years ahead of management's long-term targets. The number of clients paying more than $1 million a year grew from 109 to 142. Microsoft co-sold eight of the 10 biggest deals, and more than 30 cloud migrations were signed in the fourth quarter, a company record.
Shares are up roughly 20% since the earnings report and 93% over the past three months, though still down 16% from last December's all-time peak. At a $3.07 billion market cap, Intapp trades around 5.3 times sales and 20.4 times forward earnings estimates. Management sees a $50 billion addressable market for agentic professional services software.
Celeste's rollout is the thing to watch
Celeste only became generally available after the 2026 fiscal year ended. Its market traction and monetization are what to watch. There are no shortcuts to 25 years of knowing exactly how a law firm thinks.
For professionals in legal roles, the practical takeaway is that AI adoption in firms is shifting from "what can the model do" to "who is allowed to see the answer." The tools that win will be the ones that enforce ethical walls and leave audit trails, not the ones with the most impressive reasoning. That's a different standard than most AI products are built to meet, and it's worth factoring into any evaluation of AI software for your firm. Paralegals and support staff working with document review and contract analysis will want to understand these governance requirements as part of their training - AI Learning Path for Paralegals covers the practical applications.
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