NewMod General Legal Hits $11.5m Funding in 3 Months

NewMod, AI-native law firm General Legal has announced it has hit $11.5m in Seed and pre-Seed funding since launching officially just three months ago.

Co-founder, Ryan Walker, who previously was CTO at Casetext and then a VP at Thomson Reuters, said: ‘I’m so proud to announce that General Legal – the AI native law firm for commercial contracts – has raised a combined $11.5m Seed and Pre-Seed round led by Audacious Ventures!

‘Our elite commercial attorneys live in your Slack and turn contracts lightning fast, for a fraction of the cost of traditional outside counsel.’

So, what is this all about? Well, see their rate card below – which is an eye-opener. Then read some of the answers to their FAQs.

And as you can see, they will handle your work via a private Slack channel, take just hours, and charge a flat rate of $500 per contract. How many Big Law firms would be able to do that with their current business model?

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Some illustrative FAQs and answers:

‘We’re a law firm that hires only highly-qualified, US barred attorneys. Our attorneys are trained to use our AI platforms to accelerate their work but all agreements handled by our firm are reviewed by an experienced human attorney.

‘We can help with any standard commercial agreements, including MSAs, DPAs, NDAs, vendor agreements, TOSs EULAs, and more.

‘Our lawyers work where you work. Many of our clients use Slack and our lawyers can work with you or your legal team directly in your Slack. We can also support you over email, video-conference, or phone.

‘For our flat review price, our firm will support your contract through every turn all the way to signature. Our lawyers can even join a negotiation with the other side. We don’t bill by the hour, there are no surprise fees, and no minimums.

‘We’re happy to draft new commercial agreements.’

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Is this a big deal?

One conversation that keeps coming up with AL, at least among folks focused on the frontier of the legal tech market, is NewMods / AI-native law firms. And understandably so. Their combination of putting AI at the core of the business, but also adding skilled lawyers around the ‘means of legal production’ creates what AL has been hoping to see since this site started. I.e. lawyers really using AI as it’s meant to be used, not as a little helper on the side of your work, but right in the centre of it, in a way that allows its full capabilities to be leveraged.

Naturally, to do so means dropping the time-based approach to billing. Time to value for clients is thus rapid and the costs are – relatively – far less than what Big Law currently charges.

General Legal, as with many others now, such as Soxton which has already pioneered the area of helping startups, is focused on early-stage companies. And that makes sense. Those companies are new to having legal needs, maybe don’t have a legal team internally, and are cost-sensitive as they’re running on VC money.

But.…..! AL is sure that once they get going, the legal market segments they will approach will expand. In fact, while General Legal says on its website that it’s for those ‘in the growth stage’, its offer of handling MSAs and NDAs could be useful for companies of any size.

And finally, there is the fact that this Y Combinator cohort startup – one of several NewMods in this Winter’s group to get backing from the legendary investor and incubator – is only a few months old and already has some solid capital to help it grow.

More about General Legal here.

Note: ‘NewMod’ is an AL term, which stands for New Business Model Law Firm. This site tends to prefer this over AI-native, or AI-first in this context, because the term AI-native is getting used very broadly and AI-first doesn’t really tell us what is going on at a commercial level. So, NewMod refers specifically to a new business model approach, (i.e. no hourly bills and not shaped in the traditional way), plus it’s the AI that makes that possible – rather than the other way round.

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