Exclusive: Xakia Technologies expands into EMEA with appointment of Dan Wales as VP

Australia-founded legal matter management vendor Xakia Technologies is expanding into EMEA with the hire of UK-based legal tech founder and serial investor Dan Wales, who takes on the role of VP of EMEA.  

Wales, who founded DW Reporting and sold it to BigHand in 2018, has also invested an undisclosed sum in the company, which counts 50% of its customer base comes from APAC, 45% from North America and 5% from EMEA. It has yet to target the EMEA market but recently won an undisclosed London-headquartered corporate as a customer. 

Founded in 2016, Xakia provides in-house legal teams with a centralised picture of who is working on what matter, enabling them to report more accurately on workload and resourcing – potentially making the case for more resources. 

The Microsoft Azure-hosted platform is built around four key features: legal matter management, legal intake and triage, legal spend and external counsel management, and legal data analytics and reporting.  

It is notably multi-lingual and configurable in English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Danish, Dutch, and Portuguese (Brazil). 

Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Xakia’s founder and CEO Jodie Baker said: “In-house teams are told to do more for less but how do you become more efficient and make the most of your resources? Most in-house teams have no idea where to start but we provide the tools and the ability to capture the information and data to articulate how to do more for less.”  

Wales, who is tasked with growing the EMEA customer base, said: “If you think of vendors who are targeting law firms, they will have a list of around 3,500 thousand firms. Xakia is for in-house lawyers and the potential is vast. It goes right across the likes of real estate, pharma, and manufacturing. 

“There is so much evidence of lawyers migrating in-house and corporates lagging in terms of tech adoption, but Xakia makes innovation easily accessible.” 

Xakia has datacentres in the UK and Netherlands as well as Australia and North America. Its headquarters are in Melbourne, Australia and Kansas City, USA. Wales, who is also founder and CEO of legal consultancy Oliella, is based in London. 

Xakia was recognised as one of 19 Representative Vendors listed in the 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for Corporate Legal Matter Management validates its position in the market. 

In a statement out later today (9 February), Baker said: “The growth of our client base in EMEA over the past 12 months demonstrates the need for a seriously simple in-house legal matter management platform. LegalTech need not be costly and complex to deploy. Xakia removes adoption barriers and is democratising the technology, making it available to everyone, with ease of scalability, usability and affordability. Dan’s appointment will play a critical role in growing our business and supporting in-house legal teams in the EMEA region.”    

Caroline@legaltechnology.com