Wilson Sonsini Rolls Out Doxly Deal Platform In Whole Practice First

Wilson Sonsini (WSGR) has become the first major US law firm to use deal platform Doxly to automate the signing and closing process for an entire practice area. The firm will use the platform for its emerging companies group, in what is a major win for the tech startup.

The news follows the recent co-investment by the law firm in the new legal AI doc analysis system, Lexion, in a $4.2m seed funding round.

Doxly has been going since 2016 and received an investment from Dentons’ NextLaw Ventures (see story). According to Crunchbase, the US company founded by lawyer Haley Altman, has received $3.3m in funding in total, with the last injection of outside capital two years ago.

The move to adopt deal platforms is part of a wider trend across the market that has seen other companies such as ClosingFolders, DealWIP, and Legatics, among others, make headway in this area, often within corporate and finance teams of large commercial law firms.

For Doxly, their approach is to ‘transform the complex, chaotic process of managing legal transactions into a streamlined, efficient process’. This the company does via a secure cloud-based platform which:

  • automates workflows for diligence and closing checklists,
  • provides transaction-specific analytics and reports,
  • enables legal teams and clients to collaborate on documents,
  • automates signature collection,
  • and archives transaction-related information to create digital ‘closing books’ in a secure and trusted environment.

Wilson Sonsini said that it had chosen Doxly after a detailed pilot. The platform claims it ‘can save up to 50-75% of an attorney’s time over traditional methods’ according to its own research. Clearly Wilson Sonsini saw the benefits.

David Wang, corporate strategic innovation counsel at Wilson Sonsini, said: ‘We aim to bring the best legal technology solutions to our clients through a disciplined and data-driven process of testing, iterating, and co-evolving our legal services along-side the introduction of these technologies.’

‘In this framework, Doxly has demonstrated an ability to help our attorneys and paralegals increase the efficiency and precision of the signing and closing process, while concurrently increasing transparency and collaboration, which is why we are now moving beyond the pilot stage and bringing these proven benefits to our clients practice-wide,’ he added.

Meanwhile, an understandably delighted Haley Altman, CEO of Doxly, commented: ‘This first in industry practice-wide deployment at WSGR is an incredibly significant development for Doxly and we are so excited they have chosen Doxly’s transaction management software.

Is this a big deal? For Doxly, yes. Moreover, while it may not seem a big deal for a law firm to make use of a deal platform to improve efficiency, the reality is that many firms shy away from installing systems that can alter existing work patterns, especially when they relate to directly billable work. So, the fact that Wilson Sonsini is rolling this out across an entire practice area is relatively significant.

For more information on what Doxly does, you can check out the short video below: