CC + Latham & Watkins Invest In Reynen Court Tech Platform

Reynen Court, the legal tech open platform, has today announced the completion of a Series A investment round with financing from Latham & Watkins, Clifford Chance and Prins H LLC, an affiliate of Andrew Klein, the company’s founder and CEO.

The company did not give a financial amount. Although Klein told Artificial Lawyer: ‘I can say that we are now very well funded to support a sizeable team of engineers and product managers for the next 24 months.’

(Note: see more AL discussion with Klein below, in Analysis.)

Reynen Court will use the funds to hire more engineers and product managers and also put in place experienced account and deployment managers as it prepares to launch pilots with members of the consortium of law firms backing the platform, they said.

A range of legal technology vendors covering document automation, process engineering and AI are working towards making their applications available through the Reynen Court platform, said the company.

Paul Greenwood, Chief Information Officer at Clifford Chance, and Ken Heaps, Chief Information Officer at Latham & Watkins, will join Reynen Court’s board of directors.

Klein said of the move: ‘Both of these great firms have provided incredible strategic support since our inception.’

A consortium of law firms, co-chaired by Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins, is supporting the development and launch of the platform. Other participating firms include Paul Weiss; Covington; Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; Gibson Dunn; Linklaters; Orrick; Ropes & Gray; Skadden Arps; and White & Case.

Paul Greenwood, Chief Information Officer at Clifford Chance, added: ‘Technology is playing an increasingly important role in our drive to service our clients in a way that is ever quicker, simpler, more efficient, and more robust.’

‘As the new wave of technologies enter the legal market, we need to consider how firms and clients can access them in a secure and integrated manner. We see Reynen Court as the missing piece of this evolving and exciting puzzle and we are delighted to be supporting its progress,’ he concluded.

Analysis

Artificial Lawyer finds this move fascinating. One of the challenges all legal businesses have with a lot of the new wave of tech that has emerged is the need for their input around implementation.

Firms are worried about security, about training, about APIs and a range of issues that make leveraging some AI and automation tools too much of a challenge for some lawyers and their IT teams.

Reynen’s solution to this is to put in place the infrastructure and uniform standards to make all of the above issues easy for firms to handle. One could call it a sort of ‘outsourced emerging tech operations centre‘.

Will it work? Well…..CC and Lathams believe it will. And the firms they have in the consortium are massive and top-ranked also.

Will the AI and automation companies want to play ball? Why not? Unless the arrangements with Reynen Court are too complex or expensive, then what is to lose?

And on these areas Artificial Lawyer asked Klein a few more questions:

Do the tech companies have to pay you to be on the platform? 

‘No. We have two programs for vendors. “Sell With Us” and “Sell Through Us”.

The first enables vendors to be available and managed through our platform to law firms using our platform. In this model the law firms pay us and the vendors just need to go and secure contracts directly with law firms and handle their own support and services.

In the second model, we become a re-seller of the vendor application. We do sales and also support the deployments into the firms. We also provide first line support.

We get a share of revenues in this second case. Vendors can participate in either program or both programs. Law firms and vendors can always contract directly in any case.’

If they join the platform do the members of the consortium pay a ‘group price’ to use one of the tech applications?  

‘No. Pricing is not different. Interesting future possibility, but not part of the day one plan.’

So, there you, straight from the boss.

P.S. it’s worth noting that CC and Lathams don’t often open their wallets to invest in anything outside their own law firms, so that alone is a major step…

Interesting times….