Artificial intelligence has gotten much better at drafting legal documents. Now one legal-tech giant wants to make sure the facts behind them are right.
Legora has acquired the litigation startup Wexler, whose software helps lawyers reconstruct cases from thousands of documents. Lawyers can then trace something a witness or another attorney says back to the source and spot where it conflicts with the evidence. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition is a bid to make Legora more useful to trial lawyers. Much of its software has focused on helping lawyers research, review, and draft documents. Wexler brings it closer to the courtroom.
Disputes turn on the facts of a case, and how the law applies to them, Wexler cofounder and chief executive Gregory Mostyn said. Lawyers can spend weeks combing through thousands of documents to find those facts and sort them into a timeline. Wexler says its software cuts that manual review time by 75%.
The acquisition is Legora's fifth since January. Legora and its larger rival, Harvey, have spent the year buying smaller startups as they race to mop up the law firm market. The deals let them add new products and experienced teams faster than they could build them from scratch.
Mostyn says Wexler wasn't for sale.
The London-based startup had raised $7 million to expand beyond its British roots, and its software was being used by global law firms like HSF Kramer, Goodwin Procter, and Clifford Chance. Mostyn said he was fielding offers for a Series A when Legora came knocking.
He and his cofounder, Kush Madlani, flew to Stockholm to meet the Legora team. A smoked fish dinner with Legora executive Max Junestrand helped settle the question. The chance to bring Wexler's technology to a platform with more than 1,500 customers was too good to pass up, Mostyn said.
The legal tech boom is giving way to a shakeout. Law firms have tested a surge of chatbots and other software in the past few years and are now choosing which software companies to sign up with for the long term. The startups that build for one-off use cases may need buyers with deeper pockets and broader distribution.
Legora and Harvey are driving that consolidation. Both have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in their battle to become the default app for legal work. Legora was valued at $5.5 billion in March. Harvey is worth $11 billion.
Mostyn said Wexler's decision to focus on one complex part of litigation, rather than build a broad legal chatbot, has paid off. He described its software as a "scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife."
With the acquisition, Legora is betting that Wexler's scalpel can give its broader platform a sharper edge.