Legal tech startup Lexoo nabs $4.4m

Legal tech startup Lexoo has closed a $4.4m Series A round led by Earlybird.

The company’s investment round also drew support from Forward Partners and Ned Staple, general counsel at Zoopla Property Group, amongst others.

Lexoo will use the funding to expand into new markets and to develop new tools to help its lawyers work more efficiently.

“The traditional global law firm is a flawed delivery mechanism. The large dominant firms bill by the hour and are incentivised to overcharge. Furthermore, the decision makers are often senior equity partners and so take a very short-term view,” said Daniel van Binsbergen, co-founder and CEO at Lexoo who previously worked as an M&A lawyer at global firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek.

“We have created a competitive and transparent market that is aligned with the interests of the customer rather than the partners of big firms.”

Lexoo claims to have more than 800 lawyers on its marketplace, all of which have been individually vetted.

“We’re seeing a new generation of in-house lawyers challenging established practices of big firms and looking for alternatives. Indeed there is a growing realisation that smaller specialist firms are not only more cost effective but also provide superior service. Meanwhile, larger corporates are increasingly hiring legal operations managers to review procurement practices and bring down legal costs. All of this is extremely encouraging for Lexoo,” van Binsbergen added.

Fabian Heilemann, partner at Earlybird, who will be joining the company’s board, commented on why he decided to back the startup.

“We are delighted to be investing in Daniel and the whole Lexoo team, who have the perfect combination of tech expertise and legal industry background needed to take on the B2B big law market. We love their vision and believe they have the potential to evolve from a marketplace into a virtual and distributed tech-driven global law firm.”

“I was struck by how Daniel and his team understood the need to grow supply and demand in unison, which is critical to building successful platform businesses and generating network effects. There’s undoubtedly a structural shift going on in the legal sector, with both lawyers and their clients wanting greater flexibility and more efficiency. Indeed the number of deals and volume of money going into innovative businesses in the sector shows that significant change is already well underway,” concluded Ned Staple, general counsel at Zoopla and co-founder of FarmDrop.