Theorem Legal this month unveiled a newly designed marketplace to help corporate legal departments manage the full lifecycle of procuring legal technology and outside counsel, from supplier discovery and product comparison through to RFP creation and vendor selection.
While the company was originally known for its legal technology directory, Theorem says the platform has grown into something much broader, aimed at addressing the often fragmented and labour-intensive procurement processes used by many legal departments today.
The platform, co-founded in 2019 by attorney Josh Maley, is free for in-house counsel and legal operations professionals, with Theorem generating revenue through subscription tiers for participating vendors and law firms seeking greater visibility and access to RFP opportunities.
Speaking with Legal IT Insider, Moustafa Abdel-Kader, strategic director of growth and partnerships at Theorem, who joined from Association of Corporate Counsel in November, said: “Other platforms charge legal team but for us its vendors that pay, depending on how much visibility they want and how much access to RFP opportunities, so there are different subscription levels.”
In-house legal teams are able to go from a discovery and research process to submitting RFPs for legal tech and also law firm matters. Abdel-Kader says: “They can literally do everything. They can manage suppliers through the marketplace. They can search through it. They can do comparisons. They can update their own legal tech stack on their profile so that they’re able to see what is going to work within their tech stack as they’re searching through. So it’s a really great end-to-end procurement process for them.”
Users can compare tech products side by side before initiating an RFP process. Buyers can specify business requirements, purchasing priorities, timelines and desired capabilities, while vendors that match the relevant search criteria are alerted to opportunities.
For outside counsel engagements, corporate legal teams can either invite firms from existing panel arrangements or open opportunities more broadly to the market.
A key focus for Theorem is reducing the administrative burden traditionally associated with responding to RFPs, particularly those circulated through email and spreadsheets.
“What we’re trying to do from a law firm perspective and for a legal tech perspective is really simplify the way that they are able to view these opportunities, but also respond to these opportunities,” Abdel-Kader said.
Maley added: “An RFP can sound like a large, formal exercise, but our platform AI generates category-specific templates to turn a team’s requirements into a structured request and invite the right providers to bid. That means it’s faster, more transparent, and all in one place.”
Often RFPs involve looking at data held in multiple spreadsheets and reinventing the wheel in the responses. To address that challenge, law firms and vendors can preload responses to frequently asked questions and reuse them across future submissions.
Standardisation point is particularly relevant at a time when legal departments and vendors alike are attempting to navigate a growing volume of AI-related due diligence and procurement questions. Rather than requiring suppliers to repeatedly answer different versions of substantially similar questionnaires, Theorem’s approach aims to provide a more consistent framework for information gathering and evaluation.
The marketplace is already being utilised through branded deployments created for industry organisations including CLOC and the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), which offer access to members as part of their benefits programmes.
Theorem’s bet is that as corporate legal departments face increasing pressure to justify legal spend and make technology purchasing decisions more efficiently, an integrated marketplace and procurement platform could remove much of the friction that continues to characterise legal RFP processes today.
To find out more, head to https://www.theoremlegal.com/
