Legaltech roll of honour

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The JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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You know what we think about legaltech.

As an special service, the JC is tracking the legaltechbros he knows about.

This comes, at first, from those enusiastic people at Legal Geek and their “startup map” that they kindly created in 2021, and which is now a dynamic, although somewhat hard to follow, and not fabulously well-updated, online resource.

This gives you the current state of peak inflated expectations, but buries its own fossil record — those legaltech startups which are, for whatever reason, no longer of this earth — in a way which our one won’t. I don’t promise it is accurate, or fair, or up-to-date. If you think your business has been unfairly characterised, let me know.

As we go we are adding new ventures as we find out about them — if you would like yours featured don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

We aim to track two dynamics:

First: those that have just run out of steam altogether — “👻 as of ~”. Since 2021, that is 42 firms out of the 270 odd on the original list — fifteen percent — have gone tetas arriba in just two years. And that was before the tech winter kicked in.

Second: those who have been acquired by a bigger fish🦈 the theory being that the legaltech sector is utterly desperate for any kind of consolidation, so being hoovered up into a bigger operator, as an alternative to just running out of money altogether, is the smart choice. But good luck with that exit package. but here is the weird thing: only eleven firms have been acquired. The needed legal consolidation is not happening. Again, maybe that will change as the tech winter sets in.

Where we see it, we have also added snarkish, superficial and no doubt thoroughly unjustified shade, in the form of emojis about the products based on their business nsame, website presentation and proclivity for meaningless buzzwordery. You are welcome to click on the now 300 websites we have painstakingly collated. In fact, you should. It is a sobering realisation of how homogenous, quotidian, and basically dreary this sector is. There are a few outliers, but broadly the applications all do more or less the same things, with few variations. At least twenty-five firms offering basically the same contract generation and document management service. They are not all going to survive.

As we get on we are planning to build the list out to feature the types of businesses these websites represent, but for now just clicking on the links will reveal a jaw-dropping amount of homogeneity. Lots of frustrated associates at across the big law universe have all had the same idea.

See also

So, with feeling:

The JC’s Legaltech Roll of Honour

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