Funding in the contract lifecycle management space reached a record high in May, with investment in 2022 now exceeding $1bn and up by over 50% on this time last year.
On 10 May – timed to coincide with the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium conference – SirionLabs announced a fresh round of finance, raising $85m in Series D funding led by Partners Group, a leading global private markets firm.
On 11 May – also timed to hit CLOC – no-code CLM vendor Evisort announced that it has raised $100m in capital, including equity and venture debt financing. The announcement follows recent key executive hires, including Michaela Dempsey of Workday as chief marketing officer, Steve Tucker of Docusign as chief sales officer, and Dwight Krossa of Knowable as vice president of product.
Another big announcement during the conference was that LexisNexis Legal & Professional has acquired CLM vendor Parley Pro, which will form part of LexisNexis’ enterprise legal management (ELM) platform CounselLink.
You would be forgiven for thinking that was enough for one month for CLM, but on 18 May, France-founded SaaS corporate governance and contract management provider DiliTrust, announced that it has raised €130m.
These giant raises follow the $100m Series C from LinkSquares in April, and the $150m Series E raised by Ironclad in January.
According to data shared exclusively with Legal IT Insider by our information partner Legalcomplex.com, in the year to date, $1.78bn has been raised in the CLM space across 74 deals. Compared with this time last year, that investment sum is 54.3% up.
If you were in any doubt that corporate legal teams are digitising the way they operate – or at least attempting to – these numbers speak volumes. Cyrus Driver, managing director of private equity, technology at Partners Group, who will join the SirionLabs board of directors, observed: “The addressable market for CLM is expanding rapidly as more organizations undertake digital transformation initiatives.”
Once upon a time, talking to the corporate legal ops community, it was clear that the larger and more outspoken corporate teams and CLOC leaders were doing the do, with many others doing the panicking.
That is changing aided by the growth of legal operations roles and growing evidence of the efficiencies and savings that CLM can bring. Those savings come not just from creating proper storage and workflow around your contracts, but from the hugely valuable data that the systems capture. “Every time an organization buys, sells, hires, or otherwise transacts, it creates a contractual data layer. We created Evisort because it is absolutely critical for organizations to easily access and manage this data inside their contracts,” said Evisort’s co-founder and CEO Jerry Ting at the time the $100m raise was announced.
The catch is that much like anything, CLM systems only work if you have the right people and processes in place, and in-house legal teams are hugely overstretched. No wonder that law firms such as Baker & McKenzie and Norton Rose Fulbright are building fully-fledged client facing legal operations teams. Law firms ought to be sharing their learnings on the dos and don’ts of buying and implementing technology at a time when there is a risk that corporate legal teams will rush into decisions that they can’t easily extricate themselves from.
caroline@legaltechnology.com