Past barriers to the use of technology in the legal field include time constraints, cost concerns, and lack of commitment to professional training. Company administrators tend to view any non-billable activity, such as training, as a waste of time. Sunak himself acknowledges that contract lifecycle management vendors have provided a poor buying experience over the past decade. He believes the climb was spectacular because it started from a small base. Corporate legal departments spend millions of dollars, but don`t use technology as much as you might expect. The legal profession has been the most isolated from technology and digital transformation, so the trend of startups has inevitably occurred, although there is still some skepticism about the transformation of these tools, Hutto added. It has long been known that the legal profession has not embraced technology as quickly as other industries. “Enthusiasm for legal technology has been growing for some time,” Zack Hutto, consulting director in Gartner`s legal and compliance practice, told TechCrunch. “Corporate spending has increased by 50% and we expect budgets to triple by 2025.” “There is an explosion of investment in contract management and other areas where substantive legal work could be improved.
But what we do at Legl takes a different approach – we focus on legal activities, on running a complex regulated business that is client-centric and where there has been very little cloud-based technology so far,” she suggests. “The in-house legal department brings unique skills to a company that have real value to stakeholders on the career ladder, but they are often seen as a bottleneck for the company. Modern legal teams need to consolidate their headquarters at the executive level. To do this, they need consistent and accurate data at their fingertips,” Sunak said. Regional teams also have requirements outside of contract lifecycle management and are often forced to use siloed single-use products that don`t integrate with other business systems across the enterprise, creating major challenges for data adoption, usage, and flow. Series B was led by several technology investors, including existing investor Octopus Ventures (which led its Series A), though Legl does not specify the other backers in the round. The company`s aforementioned investors include Backed, Samaipata and First Round Capital, as well as a number of angels. Legal and Compliance Tech has been an increasingly active category for startups in recent years. However, Salasky suggests that most measures have focused on contract management or other targeted “point solutions,” while Legl aims to differentiate itself by providing a more holistic platform for law firms to improve their ability to serve clients by providing them with a range of digital tools capable of automating and supporting their business operations.
This frees up in-house know-how to focus more on core legal work. Co-founder Rich Lee explained that litigation often takes 18 to 24 months and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. New Era develops a digital and virtual tool that reduces the time and cost of dispute resolution by up to 90%. The company highlights the risks so that companies and their law firms can reduce unnecessary litigation. Gartner predicts that legal budgets allocated to technology will triple by 2025. Already 2021 has been a record year for legal tech, with $1.4 billion invested by venture capital firms in the first half of the year — more than all of 2020 and well above what was raised in 2018 and 2019, according to Crunchbase data. Legal Tech startups bring law and order to the fragmented industry But spending and investment in legal tech aren`t necessarily correlated with adoption. For example, according to a 2020 study by the American Bar Association, only 58% of companies use cloud-based data storage, while only 7% use AI-enabled tools (e.g., ContractPodAI, Cognitiv+, and SirionLabs). While valuations of public software-as-a-service companies have taken a hit in recent times as investors cool the sector amid a broader sell-off in post-pandemic tech stocks, SaaS startups have yet to raise funds to grow their emerging businesses — or they hope to be able to do so on reasonable terms despite these broader market gains. “With this new investment, we will continue to grow our in-house legal team business, expand our presence in international markets such as Canada, the UK and Australia, and build a multi-product suite that will extend beyond contract lifecycle management to other use cases for in-house legal teams,” CEO Vishal Sunak told TechCrunch via email. “[We] think that…
There are opportunities to develop more products that the entire legal team can leverage in areas such as intellectual property management, external lawyers, and governance risk compliance. “Over the past year, we have expanded our vision of a new category in the legal space – client lifecycle management – by investing in the underlying CRM, which enables law firms to not only digitize previously manual business operations throughout the client lifecycle, but also better understand their client base.