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Daniel Lewis
Legal one has just raised $50 million to basically help lawyers streamline contract reviews. It's had some absolutely insane success. You would not believe who is currently using it and who has put money into funding. And all in all, I think this is basically going to be what we're going to see as a broad market change for AI and legal in the future. So let's get into all of that on the podcast today. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to try any of the top AI models that I talk about on this podcast, I would love you to go check out AI Box AI. This is my own platform. It's currently in beta and you have access on the platform to the top 40 AI models. Basically everything from OpenAI to anthropic to Google to Meta to Deep seek all of the top models there. And so the cool thing that we've added is the ability for you to use all the text models, but also a bunch of image models, audio models, and you can talk with all of the models in the same thread. So you can just switch between models. You. They'll look at the context of what you were talking about before and continue on the conversation. So this is a really cool tool. I would love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. It's basically one subscription, 20 bucks a month, instead of having to pay subscriptions to all of these different platforms and essentially going to help save you money and allow you to try out models you haven't tried before. So you can go check it out. There's a link in the description. Let's get into what Legal One is doing. So I would say one of the big things is Softbank is one of the big backers of legal one. They've just landed this $50 million and basically what they're trying to do right now is solve this problem where contract review. So whenever a lawyer is writing up a contract, they send it over to a company or a company or a person is receiving a contract. They get their lawyers to review, make sure everything looks good. I've talked to many people in business that say they've had their lawyers review a contract or agreement from an organization or from an entity. And there's been some, like, basically the whole thing was good, but there's been some sneaky things slipped in there. I talked to one lawyer in particular. I remember when I was in college, my, my business law professor, he talked about one company in particular that he worked for and he saved them. Like, I think it was something like $20 million that basically there was a clause and a little thing that was kind of snuck in there and he had them change it and in the future it was relevant and saved them like $10 million from a very small thing. So I think this is definitely a big area that people want, that people put a lot of value on and a lot of attention to. But, but it takes so long. These documents can be astronomically, insanely long, especially when you're talking about business law and a lot of other areas. So what is the solution? I think just like people have turned to AI to parse through political like bills in the Senate or you know, here in the United States. I think this is also a fantastic place to turn to lawyers and contract law. And so obviously I'm not the only one that thinks this. Legal One has, has been used by 7,000 organizations across Japan, US and the UK. It's leading the Japanese market. So about 25% of all public companies in Japan are using Legal One to review all of their documents. And they have basically their main tools called Review. It looks at, it's not going to do everything for you. It's not replacing lawyers, I would say. But what it does do is it identifies risks and it also suggests edits based on playbooks built by lawyers and each customer's legal standards. So the company says that their tool, which is called Review, basically cuts down review time by 85% and they say that also improves quality and accuracy. So this is, I mean obviously quality and accuracy. I think everyone can argue about whatever, but the 85% time save I do not doubt and I think that's 100% right. And if, you know, lawyers, time is money. As someone who has, you know, used lawyers for many different purposes in my, in my companies, from company set up to, you know, when you run into a trademark dispute, it costs a lot of money and they bill by the hour. So if you can cut down costs by 85% or time by 85% that cuts down costs, it's fantastic. So one thing I'll say is currently Legal One is looking to build out a whole bunch of AI agent tools that are going to basically work with all of their software. So they just raised $50 million to do that. I think they're also going to spend some of that $50 million on their go to market strategy. So marketing, apparently in the United States they're really exploding. This is a series C funding round and it was led by Goldman Sachs, it's their growth equity fund. They also had some of Their existing investors like World Innovation Lab, they had Mori Hamurata and Matsumoto which is a law firm in Japan. They had Mizo bank and Shoko Chunk bank who also invested. So I think they're very big in Japan and so they had a lot of players from there. But of course we're seeing Goldman Sachs and other and lots of other players that jumped in. They didn't actually want to disclose what their valuation was, which you know, I'm always interested to see. But they did say that in the United States and the UK their business has quadrupled over the past year. So it's growing fast. I think it was kind of like really big in Japan and now it's expanding to a lot of other markets. This was basically started by two former corporate lawyers in 2017 and they've seen a ton of success. According to Daniel Lewis, who is global CEO of Legal One, the company is basically trying to stand out from all of the other legal tech startups by basically using its attorney drafted expert legal content strategy. So so he says basically that base makes Legal One unlike any other tool that you can use to rely on users to build rules from scratch. So anyways, this is what they said specifically about it. He said our approach ensures contract reviews are aligned with real legal standards, making the output more accurate, consistent and practical for legal teams. In addition, we have more than 50 attorney built playbooks so seamless inter playbook, seamless integration into existing workflows and our solutions work out of the box on day one. So I mean basically I think what they're saying is it's very complicated to, to do a lot of this stuff. You can't just ask ChatGPT review this contract and let flag it for any errors. I think basically if you have a lawyer that is an expert in a particular type of contract law and also in a particular country, right. Because laws vary by country. Who could say hey, review this contract, which is an XYZ type contract and flag it for all of these different things. So they have lawyers building these templates basically of the types of things that you need to flag and review a contract for the clauses that are common, get gotchas inside of that. So it basically helps to have the expertise of a lawyer to build out these templates and make the AI the most useful it can possibly be. Just last week they launched another tool that was called Matter Management and it basically helps legal teams look at and kind of track the contrast requests. They can assign owners, they can connect matters to relevant people and documents and they can collaborate with other departments. So they're building out a lot of cool stuff. They also have something interesting that I don't see a lot they have. Basically it's kind of, it's a non equity tech partnership with OpenAI. I'm assuming OpenAI is just like, hey, look, here's one of our big users, let's kind of work with them. And so it pretty much gives Legal One access to ChatGPT's most advanced models. And whenever they have something new come that comes out before they give it to everyone else, Legal one can test it out, basically. So this is kind of cool. This is of course where tons of other legal companies are raising or have raised a lot of money. So there's definitely competition in this market. In June, RV AI raised about $300 million in a Series E funding. They have now a $5 billion valuation. Last year, Clio raised $300 million, reaching a $3 billion valuation. So even with all this competition, I think that they're doing fantastic. This is their Series C round and it basically brings their total raised capital to over 200 million. So they're doing very well. They've raised a ton of money. They've had SoftBank as an investor, they had HSG, which is formerly Sequoia Capital China, and then they had some Japanese venture capital firms, Jafco and MUFG Bank. So I think this company is going to do a lot of things. It's getting a lot of adoption, a lot of users. I'm excited to follow along and I'm really excited for what AI is doing in the legal field. I think this is something that we're going to just see continue to grow and grow into the future. If you enjoyed the episode today and if you learned anything new, the number one thing that could really help the podcast and the channel grow is if you could leave a rating and review. I know you probably hear me say that all the time and like I listen to podcasts all the time and they ask for that and I'm like, oh, I'm too busy or I'm driving half the time. But honestly, if you could just take a second to leave a review, it really helps out. The podcast over on Spotify it's the, it's the about tab. And on Apple Podcasts you could drop some stars. Leave a comment I read all the reviews and I really do appreciate them. So thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure to go check out AI box AI. I'll leave a link in the description if you want access to all of the models we talk about on on the show for one subscription price so you don't have to, you know, pay $20 for every new AI model that comes out. 20 bucks and you get access to 40 of the top models. And we're adding new ones all the time. Thanks so much for tuning into the show, and I will catch you in the next episode.