Lexly, a Swedish company that provides fixed price legal services to consumers, such as legal documents along with light-touch lawyer input, has bought Denmark’s LegalHero, which uses a similar business model, but is focused on SMEs.
The move will ‘cement our position as the go-to platform for legal services in the Nordics’ said the company, which last year raised $20.8m in funding. They also plan ‘expansion in the UK and continental Europe’.
The move – plus the funding – suggests that there is a growing appetite for more streamlined and efficient legal service delivery in Europe, especially at the consumer and SME level.
In this case, Lexly and LegalHero provide standard legal documents for most regular needs with the ability to add in legal input, although they don’t hold themselves out as law firms. Whether it’s DIY or with legal input, there is a fixed price on show for these legal needs, allowing people and businesses to have at least some objective measure in relation to what they are buying. Their approach also naturally tends towards standardisation.
Lexly was founded in 2004 with a vision of ‘making justice accessible to everyone’. They believe they were the first company to create this kind of platform in Europe. For example, Rocket Lawyer opened in the UK in 2012 and in France in 2016.
Lexly also has a base in Brazil – a market with huge unmet consumer and SME legal needs. With the merger of LegalHero they now cover Sweden, Finland and Denmark in the Nordics. The company also has a network of around 500 lawyers who help to support the platform’s clients.
Meanwhile LegalHero was founded in 2016 by Kristian Anker and Oscar Almstrup (see in picture below right) with ‘a vision of democratising access to legal services by fundamentally altering the delivery model’. They have around 120 lawyers working through the platform.
Commenting on the deal, Lexly CEO, Magnus Stein (pictured above left), said: ‘Our strategy is to continue growing internationally and to be the preferred legal services provider in each market we enter. LegalHero has successfully taken that position in the Danish SME market and together we can also make a huge change in the consumer market.’
Stein added that they have a successful partner network and work closely with Nordic banks, accountants and insurance companies.
Oscar Almstrup, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of LegalHero, added: ‘[We have] taken the position as the leading platform for SMEs in Denmark by having an undivided focus on building a great digital customer journey.
‘Partnering with Lexly provides LegalHero with the ability to leverage a best in class partner network. Short-term, we expect the merger to result in more than doubling our revenues and team size during 2022.’
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