If you’re like us and wondered what on earth had happened to Lupl, you’ll be interested to note that it has completed a USD $14m funding round as it builds momentum for a 2021 formal launch. The legal matter management platform has also hired Jeff Green from Ankura Management Consulting, who has taken on the role of CEO; and former King & Spalding legal tech solutions director Cheryl Wilson Griffin as chief customer officer.
Lupl is being incubated through its development by a trio of international law firms, CMS, Cooley and Rajah & Tann Asia, working with input from an advisory board of 16 leading in-house lawyers from blue chip multinationals. The wider testing group includes Slaughter and May, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Khaitan & Co and One Essex Court.
This latest funding round is in addition to the circa USD $10m raised prior to Lupl’s beta launch, taking its overall funding to in excess of USD $25m and making it among the most well-backed legal technology start-ups at its stage of development. The suggestion is, however, that its informal launch in June last year somewhat jumped the gun.
Lupl has been in worldwide private beta testing since March 2020, and we’re told that during the beta, more than 30 development sprints have been completed and several hundred new product features have been added in response to user feedback from participating law firms and legal departments. Among others, these features include a “Knowledge Hub” which provides a global repository of matter and workflow templates, designed to help users operationalise legal knowledge and repeatable process, and a data and analytics dashboard surfacing real-time analytics about legal matters.
Lupl says it is on track for a wider public release commencing from the beginning of April 2021. The initial focus will be accelerating the rollout of Lupl within participating organisations followed by a phased onboarding of legal departments and law firms.
The ‘bring your own system’ platform has strengthened its management team with the hire of Green and legal tech veteran Wilson Griffin, who latterly headed the programme management office at King & Spalding. By the end of 2021, Lupl says that it expects to have a team of more than 75 people around the world.
Chief commercial officer Matt Pollins said: “During our beta phase, we’ve been blown away by the interest in our open industry platform amongst legal departments, law firms, technology and knowledge providers. This is a pivotal year for Lupl and I’m excited to be joined by Jeff and Cheryl as we start to scale up our global team to launch the platform in 2021.”
Partnerships
Lupl has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Singapore’s Ministry of Law to leverage the platform to advance the digitalisation of the legal sector in Singapore. This collaboration will begin with a series of industry engagement sessions in the first quarter of 2021.
We’re told that over 100 other industry partnerships are in progress. These partnerships span enterprise communication and collaboration tools, document management systems, pricing and scoping tools, data and analytics tools and standards, and industry knowledge libraries. Further details of current and future partnerships will be announced in the coming months.
You can read our earlier commentary here: https://legaltechnology.com/lupl-what-it-is-what-it-does-and-what-its-not/