What it is

Opus 2 is a London platform, founded in 2008, for running commercial disputes from case assessment to the final hearing. It sells two products that a disputes team buys together or separately. Opus 2 Cases is the matter workspace: documents, transcripts, a shared chronology, issues, people and facts, annotated and linked by the whole case team. Opus 2 Hearings is software plus service for the hearing itself: electronic bundles, real-time transcription by speech-to-text plus human editors, electronic presentation of evidence, and the infrastructure for in-person, hybrid and remote hearings. Opus 2 says it delivered more than 1,100 litigation and arbitration hearings in 33 countries in 2025, and that 98% of the Am Law 50 and 96% of the Global 50 are customers (company figures, June 2026).

On case preparation it is closest to LexisNexis CaseMap+ AI; on the hearing side, to Epiq’s court-reporting and hearing services. It is not an eDiscovery review platform, and it is not the matter management system an in-house legal ops team uses for spend and outside-counsel billing.

Astorg’s Mid-Cap fund has held a majority stake since March 2021, with Five Arrows and founder Graham Smith-Bernal reinvesting. Greg Blackman has been CEO since December 2023.

The question this page answers: does Opus 2 replace your transcript, evidence and case-management stack, or sit next to it? It replaces the case-prep and hearing layers: chronology tools, transcript-management software, e-bundling and trial presentation. It sits next to your review platform (Relativity, Everlaw) and your DMS (iManage, NetDocuments).

Why it shows up in Legal Ops stacks

One record from prep through hearing. The chronology, annotated transcripts and hearing bundle live in the same matter. Teams that work in Cases before a hearing do not rebuild the bundle in a separate e-bundling tool.
The AI sits on the matter record. Opus 2 bought Uncover, an Amsterdam legal-AI startup, in a deal announced on 9 October 2025. The Winter 2026 release (January 2026) put Uncover’s tools into Opus 2 Cases: Matter Assist answers questions across a matter’s content, Document Assist runs questions and tasks over selected documents, and General Assist is a general-purpose LLM inside the platform, with a prompt library and builder. On 20 August 2026 Opus 2 announced Ingenuity, an agentic framework that runs specialist agents on the structured matter data (the chronology, issues and links teams build). Opus 2 says that data produces nearly 11 million insights a month.
AI in the hearing room. Since June 2026, clients have been testing AI live transcription and Testimony Insights, which flags inconsistencies between live testimony and the documents in the hearing bundle.
Connectors to where documents live. iManage and NetDocuments connect through a partnership with SeeUnity. A Relativity integration lets reviewers preview Opus 2 transcripts and earmark key documents from inside Relativity. Hearings can run on Zoom or Microsoft Teams inside Opus 2’s managed environment. We found no public MCP server as of 14 September 2026.

Pricing reality

Opus 2 publishes no price list, and Capterra lists no free trial (checked 2026-09-14). The one public reference point is the UK G-Cloud 14 listing for Opus 2 Software & Services: £2,500 to £13,500 per licence per month, from a pricing document dated April 2024. The listing does not say what a licence covers, so ask whether it is a seat, a matter or a hearing.

The math at those rates: six months of preparation on one licence costs £15,000 at the bottom of the band and £81,000 at the top. Hearings add transcription and on-site support, quoted per hearing. Ask whether hearing costs can be billed as a disbursement under your client’s outside-counsel guidelines; that decides whether the firm or the client carries them.

Best for

Best for litigation and arbitration partners and litigation support managers at large firms running high-value commercial disputes that end in a hearing, especially international arbitration, where one team needs the chronology, transcripts and hearing bundle in one place and runs several hearings a year.

Not for you if you run volume litigation such as personal injury or mass torts (look at Filevine), if you are a small firm with a few low-value matters a year, if you only need US jury-trial presentation (TrialDirector 360 from IPRO is the narrower buy), or if you are an in-house team looking for matter and spend management.

Versus the alternatives

Everlaw Storybuilder: included at no extra cost in Everlaw, with AI deponent backgrounds, testimony summaries and inconsistency checks. Pick it when your review already runs in Everlaw and the matter is US litigation without a heavy hearing phase.
LexisNexis CaseMap+ AI: the long-standing case-analysis database for US litigators, relaunched with AI in March 2025. Pick it when you want per-user case analysis tied to Lexis research and do not need hearing services.
RelativityOne aiR for Case Strategy: pick it when review, fact development and case strategy should stay in one Relativity workspace.
TrialView: the fast-growing challenger. The Irish company raised $4.1M in a round led by Elkstone Ventures in November 2025, reported close to $3M ARR, and says 15 of the top 20 UK firms use it for workspace, e-bundling, evidence presentation and hearings. Pick it when you want Opus 2’s core scope from a smaller vendor, and use its quote when you negotiate with Opus 2.
A general legal AI assistant (Harvey, Legora): pick one for research and drafting across practices. Neither runs a hearing or holds a structured chronology, so they sit alongside Opus 2 rather than replace it.

The direct answer: shortlist Opus 2 when your disputes end in hearings and you want prep and hearing on one record. If review is your centre of gravity, start with the case-prep tools inside your review platform.

Watch-outs

Ingenuity is announced, not specified. The August 2026 release names no individual agents, no general-availability date and no price. Guard: get the list of agents in writing with each one’s status (GA, beta, roadmap) and whether it is in your subscription, and pilot on a closed matter where you already know the answer.
Hearing AI is in beta. AI live transcription and Testimony Insights have been in client testing since June 2026. Guard: keep the editor-checked transcript as the record, and have a person verify every flagged inconsistency before it reaches a cross-examination.
DMS sync runs through a third party. iManage and NetDocuments connect via SeeUnity. Guard: ask who licenses SeeUnity and which direction the sync runs, and test that ethical walls carry over on a restricted matter before rollout.
Little public review signal and no public price. Capterra shows no user reviews for Opus 2 (checked 2026-09-14). Guard: anchor negotiations on the G-Cloud band, and ask for two reference firms in your jurisdiction and practice area.

Edit this page on GitHub