Bryter last week announced that it has won magic circle law firm, Clifford Chance, as a customer.Clifford Chance will use Bryter’s no-code software to support their Innovation Academy, training staff on ideation, design thinking and prototyping.
“Innovation is a core part of the culture at Clifford Chance, and we encourage our people to continually think outside the box about how we might deliver legal services in different and better ways,” says April Brousseau, Director, Research and Development at Clifford Chance. “We are excited to be working with BRYTER to help our people continue to think differently and explore new ideas to address our clients’ demand for enhanced value and efficient legal advice services.” BRYTER as a platform offers the possibility to develop and deploy digital solutions, as well as reduce development efforts for prototypes in the client conversation.Michael Grupp, Founder and CEO of BRYTER commented: “We’re excited to partner with the Clifford Chance team. I’ve admired the firm’s commitment to innovation for a while now, particularly through its forward-thinking movements like Open Law and its early decision on offering digital solutions as part of a diverse service portfolio. BRYTER’s technology is the perfect fit to such a framework, where it helps the firm to be even faster and more flexible in servicing clients at the same time as enabling legal professionals in dealing with the ongoing challenges to be digitally ready and educated. We’re very much looking forward to a great working relationship together.” Meanwhile, last week saw another enormous fundraising in the contract management space, ContractPodAi this week raised a USD $115 million Series C investment headed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. This latest round saw ContractPodAi’s valuation increase 5x from its previous Series B round in 2019. As part of the transaction, Ayush Jain of SoftBank Investment Advisers will join the ContractPodAi Board. Proceeds from the round will go towards further accelerating ContractPodAi’s platform capabilities and expanding its market presence internationally, leveraging SoftBank’s networks to capture new opportunities in the APAC region. This funding round also marks Vision Fund 2’s first investment in legal technology, one of the fastest growing SaaS categories.
“Despite the inexorable digitization of the workplace, legal processes have largely resisted disruption,” said Ayush Jain, investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers. “ContractPodAi’s technology aims to empower in-house legal professionals to radically improve business performance such as driving faster revenue recognition, increase compliance adherence and optimise operational workflows. We believe the company’s modularized, one platform approach extends way beyond existing Contract Lifecycle Management to capture a vast array of legal use cases across multiple jurisdictions.”
“We are just scratching the surface of what we can do,” said Sarvarth Misra, Co-Founder and CEO of ContractPodAi. “The market is asking for a legal platform, a technology infrastructure that supports in-house legal teams like CRM does for sales teams or fintech for finance. With the backing of Insight Partners, Eagle Proprietary Investments, and now SoftBank Vision Fund 2, we are ready to win the market by driving digital transformation for our customers with our One Legal Platform approach.”
Existing investor, Eagle Proprietary Investments (Eagle), also doubled down on their previous investments from ContractPodAi’s Series A and Series B rounds. Deval Dvivedi, Head of International for Eagle and ContractPodAi Board member said, “ContractPodAi has seen a wonderful journey from the time of its Series A funding and we are excited to continue supporting its growth story.”
And LexisNexis has been granted ‘co-sell ready’ status in the Microsoft Partner Programme to deliver more tightly integrated solutions to the global legal sector.
Lexis says it will deepen Lexis Omni’s integration with Microsoft tools including Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, SQL, Power BI & Apps; and has enabled simpler cloud deployment via Microsoft’s highly secure Azure environment. Lexis Omni, including workflow, document production, automation and legal process management, can now be delivered to desktops, mobile devices, through the web or any Microsoft 365 technology stack via Azure.
“Microsoft business tools, Microsoft 365, Office, Teams, are preeminent on lawyers’ desktops and we are investing to ensure our products and services can work in tandem with their preferred technology, marrying our trusted platform to help them automate business processes, reduce costs and risks, become more efficient and cost effective for their clients’ – whilst working in exactly the way they want to,” said Christian Fleck, Managing Director LexisNexis. “Through this collaborative engagement between our two global organisations, we are making technology and content deployment and consumption easier, and flexible, so that customers can maintain focus on their strategic priorities. This agreement also takes Lexis Omni into a larger marketplace and partner ecosystem.”
Carlos de Torres, Vice President, GPS US ISV, Industry and Private Equity at Microsoft said, “We are pleased that LexisNexis is choosing to integrate with our core business tools, bringing together their market leading transactional automation technologies, information and content within the Microsoft desktop and support the modern lawyer. LexisNexis is a digital pioneer in legal and is trusted for its expertise and innovative approach to product and information development for the legal sector.”