Machine learning-based contract review platform LawGeex has received $7m in Series A funding from a number of high profile investors including Japanese HR and information services company Recruit Holdings, the owner of Indeed.com. Previous investors Lool Ventures and LionBird also participated in this round, bringing LawGeex’ total funding to $9.5 million.
LawGeex was co-founded in 2014 by CEO Noory Bechor and CTO Ilan Admon. Targeted at corporate legal teams, the Tel Aviv-headquartered startup’s strapline is that it can speed up the entire contract review and approval process to under 60 minutes.
An SaaS platform, LawGeex enables corporate counsel to prepare a benchmark contract against which any counterparty contract will be compared. The machine learning-based system, which has been trained to recognise relevant contractual and legal terms, creates a check list of areas that are standard and any clauses or terms that deviate or are missing. Contracts that match pre-defined criteria are approved (and a thumbs up email sent), whereas those with red flags (or thumbs down) are escalated to the legal department. This enables corporate counsel to focus on negotiation, rather than time consuming review.
“LawGeex is transforming everyday legal operations by automating the contract review and approval process. We help businesses run faster and smoother by removing the legal bottleneck,” said Bechor. “Customers who waited weeks to get a simple contract approved in the past, can now complete the entire review and approval process in under 60 minutes. This means corporate counsel and legal teams can finally focus on the big picture instead of getting lost in the paperwork.”
Legal teams can define their criteria based on best practices, or create their own custom ‘playbooks’, outlining exactly what the platform should accept or reject in any contract. By enforcing a single set of standards, LawGeex also helps companies minimize legal risk and ensure compliance.
While LawGeex typically engages with a corporate’s legal department, Bechor says that they are also speaking to the C-suite. LawGeex clients tend to be in contract heavy sectors such as insurance, finance and healthcare although Bechor points out that the LawGeex “has a very big radius because every business reviews contracts.” He adds: “We see a lot of traction.”
Dylan Marvin, head of legal at 350-strong enterprise social intelligence company Brandwatch, said: “Using outside counsel could cost more than $300 per hour, while adding to the in-house legal staff could cost over $100,000 per year. Since subscribing to LawGeex as a contract review and negotiation solution, we have seen results of 80% time saved, 90% cost savings. The platform responds within the hour with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” email. If it’s “thumbs up”, the sales person can go ahead and have the contract executed by an authorized signatory. If problems are spotted, the concerning clauses are flagged back to me for further handling.”
LawGeex currently supports a wide range of standard business contracts, from NDAs to purchase orders and software licenses. The additional capital will be used to ramp up its team of engineers, data scientists and legal experts as well as sales and marketing support staff.