Just three weeks after receiving $30m in funding, the pioneering legal AI company Seal Software, has bought out US-based Apogee Legal, a contract analytics business that it has been working with for several years. Apogee co-founder, Jim Wagner, will now become Chief Strategy Officer at Seal.
The move also follows a landmark close partnership deal with DocuSign, and underlines that Seal is now in serious expansion mode, something that will no doubt cause ripples throughout the legal AI market. The one small relief for many other legal AI players is that generally the company has focused on corporates, rather than seeking to take a share of the law firm doc review market.
All members of the Apogee team, believed to be less than 50 people, will be joining Seal and Seal will be expanding Apogee’s Charlotte, North Carolina operations further as the company’s East Coast, US development center.
The company said that the acquisition of Apogee Legal and the incorporation of its ‘advanced analytics and legal expertise’ into its intelligent Content Analytics (ICA) platform will give users access to ‘a broader and deeper set of analytics and insight’, especially around corporates’ legal and regulatory exposure.
Apogee Legal has been a Seal business partner since 2015 and has worked with Seal across a variety of industries and use cases. Apogee has released multiple ‘advanced analytics packs’ on the Seal platform. These are aimed at particular types of data analysis and extraction, and include:
- Procurement Insight – advanced analytics to address supplier risk, regulatory requirements and common business questions
- M&A Insight – analytics for M&A transactions with an emphasis on enterprise integration and risk management
- GDPR Insight – data privacy solutions and third-party risk for the enterprise
- Financial Services Suite – including QFCs, syndicated credit agreements and ISDA master agreements
Ulf Zetterberg, co-founder and CEO of Seal Software, said of the deal: ‘Over the past four years the Apogee team, which includes more than 20 AI-literate lawyers, has helped many of our clients… Having Apogee officially join Seal means that all of our clients will now be able to access the Apogee team’s expertise and their advanced analytics.’
Jim Wagner, co-founder and managing director at Apogee, added: ‘We could not be more excited to join our partners and officially become part of the Seal team. Seal has established itself as the contract analytics platform of choice for many of the world’s largest organizations. Through this combination we will be able to provide those enterprises with an even more comprehensive set of solutions.’
Other results of the takeover include: Apogee co-founder, Matt Miller, will be responsible on an ongoing basis for leading both the Seal analytics production group and the Seal legal solutions team, and will have oversight of Seal’s Charlotte operations; while Apogee co-founder, Steve Harber, will focus on building out the Seal legal solutions strategy and the Seal legal partner channel.
Overall, this is further proof that the legal AI sector is in tremendous form at the moment and this move, although not likely to trigger a wave of consolidation among peers, will no doubt spur on further expansion among rival legal AI companies in order to keep up.
4 Trackbacks / Pingbacks
Comments are closed.