Peak into the private members club in any city and you will find a room full of lawyers and financiers drinking fine port. Little investment business is done, however. Investors want to place their money in fast-growing startups, not stodgy, conservative law firms. But that’s all changing. With the rise of legal tech startups, investors are hungry for deals in the high growth legaltech sector.
The smart money pumped US$1.2 billion into legaltech startups in 2019. All of a sudden stodgy law firms are calling themselves legaltechs. But not all law firms with their newfangled tech solutions meet the definition of a legaltech.
Legaltechs leverage technology to deliver more efficient and lower-cost legal services to lawyers, businesses, and consumers. Their goal is to make legal services accessible to everyone.
The legal and judiciary systems have well-earned their reputations as stodgy. They have traditionally been complex and expensive to use. Facing these barriers, many businesses and individuals have not had fair access to the legal system. Large enterprises pay through the wallet for legal services, while smaller businesses often have no legal recourse if a business partner fails to fulfill their half of the contract.
If you cannot beat them, join them
The legaltech movement is quickly dis0intermediating traditional law firms. Businesses and individuals have been turning to alternative legal services (ALSPs) to reduce costs. These services perform document drafting, contract management, regulatory compliance, investigations support, and other legal services. Through technological efficiencies, they strip time and costs from legal services.
Law firms are facing the stark reality that clients now have an alternative to their high billable hours. To compete they, too, are migrating to alternative legaltech services delivery models. As law firms become a major consumer of legaltech, investors are placing the largest slice of their money in legaltech solutions for law firms.
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Private equity firms have made the bulk of their investments in contract management and document management startups — among the top three technology adoption priorities of law firms, following eSignatures.
One-stop legal outsourcing shops
One-stop shops for legaltech solutions have attracted the most money. Clio, a cloud-based legal services portal for lawyers, raised a whopping US$250 million from investors. Over 150,000 lawyers use the software to automate and organise legal documents, handle billing, and manage client referrals. Legal enterprise software firm Onit took in the second-highest investment round of US$200 million last year.
Remote law services
As more people transition to remote work in response to COVID-19 confinements, sole lawyer practices are accelerating their adoption of legaltech solutions. The trend towards remote work is pushing lawyers to deliver their services in more cost-efficient ways. In this segment, investors are investing in legal contact management software (Liftify US$50,000), cloud contract management solutions, (Icertis US$115,000), and electronic signatures (Fadada US$55,000).
DIY law
Individuals are the third largest consumers of legaltech. LegalZoom has emerged as the largest provider of ready-made legal templates for business services, trademarks, and wills and testaments. The legaltech has received US$811 million in funding, including a US$500 million funding round in 2018 led by Francisco Partners and GPI Capital. Investors are sprinkling money on other consumer legaltechs, including online notary Notarize and will creation website Farewill.
The rise of the AI legal bots
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are bringing significant efficiency improvements to legaltech. Very smart algorithms will be a major growth driver for both established and startup legaltechs going forward. With an AI bot, a lawyer can review a contract in 20–90 per cent less time. Investors have backed over a dozen AI legaltechs including ContractPodAI, Evisort, Lumina, Verbilt and LinkSquares.
Corporate legal departments are using these AI legal bots to analyse and synthesise legal documents. The leader Luminance, incubated by mathematicians at the University of Cambridge and used by over 250 law firms, delivers an 80 per centreduction in contract review time and costs.
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These AI bots also do legal research, patent searches, due diligence, and amazingly conduct client interviews. Josef, a startup founded by young lawyers, has replaced lawyers with chatbots that can conduct client interviews and draft documents.
Propelled by the high-efficiency improvements, legal community demand for AI legal tech solutions is expected to grow 39 per cent between 2018 and 2023.
Smarter smart contracts
Bots are getting smarter but they are not as smart as smart contracts. The Alphabit Fund made what could be the most significant investment in legaltech this year. The specialist investment firm in digital ledger technology (DLT) and the blockchain led the investment round in the PAID Network, an advanced smart agreement enabling attorney-free business transactions, litigation, and settlement processes.
The Paid Network has developed Smart Agreement templates that automatically provide the legal wrapping for contracts. Smart contracts remove trusted intermediaries like lawyers and banks from the transaction. They automatically execute transactions and actions according to the established terms of the contract. A smart contract is executed in near-real-time when the blockchain platform token is deposited, in this case, the Paid token.
With the Paid Network Smart Agreement, parties to an international trade contract can execute a legal clad contract at the same time they execute the payment transaction. Or two counter parties to an over-the-counter (OTC) swap agreement can use the smart contract to remove counter party risk. The Smart Agreement’s escrow account protects both parties.
Legaltech meets fintech
Financial institutions with high volume transactions can reap significant time and cost savings from automation. JP Morgan has been a big beneficiary of legaltech. The investment bank is using legaltech to manage counter party risk in credit agreements, and soon credit-default swaps and custody agreements. In the global OTC derivatives market, counter parties had USUS$2.4 trillion in credit risk exposure in 2019.
JP Morgan Chase, a top-four bank dealer in the swaps market, was seeking a more efficient process for analyzing its 12,000 credit agreements a year. The solution? The investment bank built its own intelligent document management software called COIN (Contract Intelligence) to slash legal costs. The efficiency gains are nothing short of astounding. In seconds, COIN can process contract volume that previously took 360,000 man hours.
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A smart contract has the potential to do even more at a faster rate. The beauty of a smart contract is its simplicity. Any number of functions can be simultaneously performed in near-real-time. The PAID contract, for example, also incorporates the upfront negotiation and arbitration processes, should a dispute arise. A reputation scoring system helps reduce counterparty risk.
The Paid Network is a parachain (blockchain platform with its own token) on Chainlink. As such, it can run all the above services in parallel with services of over 100 parachains. All of the aforementioned functions of legaltech solutions can be wrapped into one smart contract.
Paid Network is the only blockchain legaltech startup to receive funding to date. That’s surprising given the additional business risks mitigated by digital ledger technology. DLT transactions are transparent, trackable, and irreversible.
Following their investments this year, legaltech on the blockchain is poised to be the next hot legaltech investment sector. All major companies across all industry verticals are adopting blockchain business solutions. Ninety-one percent of businesses plan to improve business performance by adopting blockchain solutions, according to the Deloitte Global Blockchain survey. The legal industry, however, has been slower to catch on to the paradigm shift in business transaction management underway.
Many companies are already conducting trade, commerce, and financial transactions with smart contracts. Like the mainframe, the legal industry will need to adopt more efficient technology-driven platforms. The legaltech model is well suited to run on digital ledger technology.
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