Legal IT Insider has been given the first peek at the brand-new legal technology and GRC M&A tables from Spark – a dashboard for legal and regulatory solutions launched by legal tech analytics company Legalcomplex.com. Legalcomplex.com was co-founded by data wizard Raymond Blijd, who previously worked for Wolters Kluwer.
The M&A tables show us that the total value of disclosed legal tech investments is up 147% since 2019. The volume is up 31%.
The largest acquisition going back to January 2020 was CPA Global’s acquisition by Clarivate Analytics in July 2020 for a whopping $6.7bn. That is not so closely followed by Flexera’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo for $2.65bn. Salesforce’s acquisition of Vlocity is next at $1.3bn, followed by the $715m purchase of Conga by Apttus and then Apax Partner’s $193m acquisition of MyCase.
It is also clear that the number of deals each month is increasing. January 2021 doubled from nine legal M&A deals in 2020 to 19 in the past month. The number of GRC deals in the same period has risen from six to 16. You won’t be surprised to hear that most M&A happened in contract tech.
Blijd is also founder of non-profit platform Legalpioneer.org, established five years ago in March, where you can search for businesses and startups in the legal sector. The Legalpioneer dataset started, Blijd tells us, with the question ‘who will beat law firms’ and contains data on new legal tech companies each month.
You can take a look at Spark here: https://www.legalcomplex.com/spark/
