Dentons‘ NextLaw Labs, a venture launched last year for financing new legal services technologies, has made its second major investment with legal tech start-up Apperio.
NextLaw Labs and Apperio will work together to streamline matter management, track legal spend in real time and standardise the legal tender process. Apperio’s tools enable clients to monitor the amount of partner/associate time spent on each transaction/case.
Initially known as Legal Tender, Apperio has a dashboard which allows companies to monitor firm’s performance. Clients can set alerts for when price thresholds are reached, and compare firms’ ability to stick to budgets against rivals.
Notably, Taylor Wessing, Olswang and CMS Cameron McKenna are among a host of firms who already signed up to Apperio in April last year. Clients subscribe to Apperio by paying a quarterly fee, and are charged in accordance to the amount of legal work they want tracking, ranging from an overall legal spend of £350,000 up to £10m. Dentons would not provide details on how much the investment was worth.
NextLaw chief executive Dan Jansen said a prototype was already being tested with Dentons partners and business development professionals in London.
He added: ‘This is a client and law firm product we will be selling this to lots of law firms, it helps that Dentons is using this, but if I can only sell to one customer then I’ll have a crap ROI.’
In May 2015, Dentons announced the establishment of NextLaw, which was created to develop a suite of technologies to change how lawyers practise law and provide better solutions to clients. In August last year it invested in an IBM Watson app to answer lawyers’ questions.
In other technology news, Legal Business revealed earlier this week Mishcon de Reya has launched a new venture with e-discovery provider Unified and software developer kCura, agreeing a fixed-price three-year contract.
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk
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