ROSS shutting down last week is a cautionary example of how a legal tech company with lean cash reserves can be “cash poor” despite raising millions in outside funding. But while the legal research provider’s closure and cash flow issues surprised some, others noted its situation is common across the legal tech industry and the broader startup market.

On Dec. 11 ROSS Intelligence announced it was shutting down its legal research platform because of its legal battle with Thomson Reuters. In May Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware accusing ROSS of scraping copyrighted Westlaw material with a bot and using that data to train ROSS’ AI system. ROSS co-founder and CEO Andrew Arruda flatly rejected those accusations later in an online post. While Arruda continued to refute Thomson Reuters’ claim in the Dec. 11 announcement, he noted that due to the lawsuit, ROSS wasn’t able to raise additional investments and its funds were depleted.