Swipe right for contract approval…? A team previously with Tinder has raised €15m in a Series A round for their genAI-based contract review and drafting platform, LegalFly. Notion Capital led the raise, which comes just eight months after their €2m Seed round that included Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product at Google Deepmind.
So, there’s the money. Now the company. The Belgium-based startup was founded by a team of former product experts from Tinder: Ruben Miessen, Kasper Verbeeck, Dennis Montégnies and Gregory Vekemans. What they have built – in a short space of time – is a contracting platform that handles review and playbook-based redrafting, for ‘law firms and in-house teams, particularly within the finance and insurance sectors’.
They also noted they have ‘forged strategic partnerships with industry giants such as Slaughter and May, and Allianz’. In Slaughters’ case they were part of this year’s Collaborate legal tech incubator.
Miessen, CEO of LegalFly, said: ‘This investment enables us to scale our operations and innovate further, driving forward the digital transformation in legal services that our clients require globally.’
So, what does the LLM-agnostic platform, which selects the best foundational models for each legal scenario, actually do? Here is what they offer:
‘Review – Review contracts instantly for compliance with the law, identify non-standard terms and business risks, and tailor reviews to your internal policies. Save 60% of your time on more than 90 document types, in multiple languages and different jurisdictions.
Playbooks – Align reviews with internal policies. Review contracts instantly for compliance with the law, identify non-standard terms and business risks, and tailor reviews to your internal policies.
Personalisation – Personalise your review tailored to benefit one specific party. Turn your contract review process from hours into minutes with a review that meets your exact needs. Customise reviews to benefit the party you represent, effortlessly process more than 90 document types and adapt them to different languages and jurisdictions.
Multi-document review – Find the needle in your haystack with streamlined document review workflows. Effortlessly review multiple questions across multiple documents at the same time, with a structured report providing a detailed overview.
Drafting – After consulting the Copilot, you will immediately receive detailed legal advice, enabling you to make informed decisions. LegalFly AI will automatically redraft the clause at risk. Once you’re happy with the new clause, you can easily add improved clauses to improve your legal documents.
Anonymisation – Your privacy is our priority. LegalFly has a strict focus on privacy and ensures that sensitive client data remains within the client’s environment by anonymising data before it reaches the LLM’s. All documents are anonymized by default.’
–
It certainly looks comprehensive and is being pitched at both law firms and inhouse legal teams.
Is this a big deal? There’s a few aspects here. First, this is another North Europe-based company making waves in the field of legal AI. Henchman – which also came from Ghent in Belgium – has done pioneering work on clause gathering for drafting and is now part of LexisNexis; while Leya, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, is gaining attention for its legal workflow and knowledge surfacing capabilities.
Second, LegalFly only launched last year and is already at Series A and building client relationships with major law firms and corporates. Plus, hitting €15m funding not long after starting is impressive in the legal tech world. Although, perhaps the perception of what is normal for legal tech funding growth is changing now in the wake of generative AI – at least for some companies?
A third aspect, which some may ask about, is: can the market accommodate another genAI-based system that reviews documents and helps with drafting? Well, clearly some of its clients already believe so. Moreover, at present many firms and legal teams are very much trying things out. This is still the ‘Shall I swipe left or swipe right?’ moment for a lot of legal AI products. So, they have everything to play for.
And here is what Jos White, General Partner at Notion Capital, which has also invested in Apperio and Bryter, added: ‘We have been looking at making an investment in the market for sometime and in LegalFly we are very confident that they will be one of the enduring success stories. The true test of this is the way it’s being received in the market which has been nothing short of amazing after only a year.’
Good luck to them.