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A $5.9 billion legal market, international law firms entering Riyadh and a sovereign push into Arabic AI are creating new demand for legal technology in Saudi Arabia. Oqood’s expansion into the Kingdom is one sign of where that market may be heading.
Saudi Arabia’s legal market is becoming larger, more international and more technologically demanding at the same time. Foreign firms are opening Riyadh offices, Saudi law is taking a greater role in cross-border transactions, and artificial intelligence is moving deeper into the Kingdom’s judicial and technology infrastructure.
One regional company entering that market is Oqood AI. The Arabic-first legal AI platform has expanded into Saudi Arabia, according to the company, making its technology available to Saudi law firms and corporate legal teams. Its seed round was led by Sanabil, the PIF-owned investment company.
The significance of that move is less about one new entrant than the market it is entering. Saudi Arabia presents legal AI developers with an unusual combination: scale, increasingly complex international legal work, a heavily digitised justice system, and a body of authoritative law that remains fundamentally Arabic.
A larger, more international legal market
The starting point is size. Ken Research estimates Saudi Arabia’s legal-services market at roughly $5.9 billion, citing regulatory reform, foreign investment and expansion across sectors including real estate, infrastructure, capital markets and financial services. For a legal-technology provider, that scale creates a substantially larger addressable market than most individual Gulf jurisdictions can offer.
But the more consequential shift is in the kind of work being done. Saudi Arabia has opened its legal market more directly to international firms, allowing foreign law firms to operate independently under the Kingdom’s licensing framework rather than only through affiliated Saudi practices. Reuters reported that the 2023 reforms enabled foreign firms to practise independently. Global firms including Quinn Emanuel, Morgan Lewis, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Clifford Chance and Herbert Smith Freehills now operate in the Saudi market under an increasingly internationalised licensing environment. As of late 2024, the International Bar Association reported that around 15 firms had been granted approval, with a further 15 applications pending.
Those entrants increase demand for legal technology capable of handling cross-border transactions, bilingual drafting and review, regulatory research, and work that moves between English-language commercial documents and Arabic statutory sources. Bloomberg Law has reported Riyadh practitioners arguing that firms can no longer treat Saudi law as a governing-law clause added to documents drafted elsewhere; Saudi law increasingly has to shape the transaction itself.
AI is already inside Saudi legal infrastructure
Technology is not arriving in a vacuum. The Ministry of Justice runs Najiz, an e-justice platform offering more than 160 judicial services, through which more than 43 million services were delivered in the first half of 2024 alone.
The Virtual Enforcement Court goes further. The Ministry reported that the Virtual Enforcement Court initiated around 400,000 enforcement applications in 2024. According to the Saudi Press Agency, the court advances artificial intelligence and data analysis to anticipate problems, applies automatic classification of enforcement requests and electronic verification of bonds, all under judicial supervision. Automated legal processing is therefore already operating inside the Saudi justice system at significant scale, under judicial supervision.
Arabic is where legal AI gets harder
Which raises the obvious question: why would Saudi firms not simply use the same global AI tools they use elsewhere?
It would be easy to read the Kingdom’s emphasis on Arabic as cultural policy. In legal AI it is closer to an engineering constraint. Saudi Arabia’s authoritative legal sources are in Arabic, and an answer is only as useful as its ability to point to the specific article supporting it. A model may generate fluent Arabic while still applying reasoning that does not fit Saudi law, translate a term into its nearest English equivalent and lose what it means locally, or cite an authority that does not exist.
The risk is measurable. A 2026 HAQQ benchmark of 3,000 answers across 300 commercial and cross-border legal tasks found that 24% cited or applied law that did not support the proposition being made. Bilingual contracts compound it: a system that cannot track which version governs is not saving a lawyer time, it is creating exposure.
This is the problem the region’s Arabic-first providers are built around. Oqood, whose platform is designed for Arabic and the codified legal systems of the Gulf, treats Arabic as a primary legal language rather than a translated layer over an English-first core. A system built to read the Arabic statute as the operative text is solving a different problem from one translating its way toward the same answer. The company holds ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 attestation, and says its architecture can be configured around enterprise security and data-governance requirements.
Saudi Arabia is building the wider Arabic AI stack
What makes the Kingdom unusual is that it is also investing in the infrastructure that this problem requires.
Saudi Arabia designated 2026 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence in a Council of Ministers decision approved on 10 March. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs SDAIA’s board, has placed data and AI at the centre of the transformation agenda. In 2025, PIF launched HUMAIN, a company built to develop the full AI stack. Saudi Arabia ranked 14th in the 2025 Global AI Index, while AI companies in the Kingdom secured $9.1 billion in funding.
That push is increasingly Arabic-specific. SDAIA’s ALLaM programme has been built around a corpus of more than 500 billion Arabic tokens, illustrating how directly the Kingdom’s AI strategy is being adapted to Arabic-language use.
Policy reinforces it. In February 2026, Saudi Arabia approved its National Policy for the Arabic Language under Council of Ministers Resolution No. 588, creating a national framework to strengthen Arabic across government, private and non-profit sectors. The policy sits on top of longstanding Saudi requirements around Arabic in government correspondence and certain contracts involving state entities and foreign companies.
What Saudi legal AI will have to prove
Arabic capability alone is unlikely to determine which legal AI systems gain adoption. Law firms and corporate legal teams also have to assess source traceability, security, confidentiality, deployment controls and how reliably a system handles Saudi legal materials.
Execution risk remains for every provider. The field is competitive, with international and regional technology providers targeting the same legal market.
The question is increasingly not whether AI will enter Saudi legal practice, but which systems lawyers will trust with real work: systems that can operate accurately in Arabic and English, show the authority behind their answers, protect confidential material, and navigate Saudi law without reducing it to translated text.
