The State of Legal Tech
This post has been viewed 3,273 times.
Very late last year, Tel Aviv-based business-to-business company LawGeex announced that total 2018 investment in legal technology — a.k.a. “law tech” or (more frequently) “legal tech” — had surpassed US$1 billion.
That was up from the US$233 million invested in 2017, said LawGeex — a four-year-old, 80-employee legal tech firm that has itself attracted US$21.5 million — more than half of that last year.
An arguably more modest view was provided by San Francisco market monitoring website Crunchbase News, which told Canadian Lawyer in late December that total global legal tech investment for 2018 stood at almost US$700 million — up from the US$250 million it reported for 2016.
Also in late December, Stanford CodeX — a database run by Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics in Stanford, Calif. — tallied actual legal tech firms worldwide at 1,107 — just less than half the number reported by Netherlands-based legal tech website legalcomplex.com. Recent Thomson Reuters research, meanwhile, reveals a five-year 484-per-cent increase in global patent filings for new legal tech, with the U.S. and China among the most prolific applicants (Thomson Reuters is the publisher of Canadian Lawyer).
LawGeex vice president of marketing Shmuli Goldberg says that despite the industry’s apparently “explosive” growth, it remains “very early days” for the legal tech industry due to lawyers’ low adoption levels.
Read original articleTags:
