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2018. A Big Year for Legal AI

David Gingell

David Gingell, Chief Marketing Officer, Seal Software

By David Gingell, Chief Marketing Officer, Seal Software [1]

The race is on as companies in the legal space and more widely, compete to survive in an ever-evolving digital era. As we continue to see the struggle of legacy giants [2] in recent news, it is evident that only those who keep up will thrive. Businesses are online more than ever, and companies must adapt by optimizing key business practices, defining new revenue opportunities and more proactively engaging their customers.

That’s why we are so excited to report our landmark partnership with Docusign, in support of their new System of Agreement strategy, which was unveiled at their customer conference, Momentum, last week. In conjunction with that announcement, came the news that we (Seal) have secured a $30MM investment from Toba Capital, our principal existing investor, to support our next stage of growth.

I will talk about what our Docusign partnership means shortly; first but I wanted to touch upon the significance of Toba’s investment. It is a great example of the ‘quickening’ of Legaltech and the value businesses now place in contract analysis and legal AI. Indeed, the investment also comes at a time when law firms are increasing their efforts to investment in other AI contract review platforms.

To put the investment into some perspective, this is the largest direct injection into legal AI on record. Money is beginning to flow into legal AI and investors clearly see that the automation of process work, and large-scale analysis tasks, will eventually become mainstream. If it hasn’t already.

LawGeex, for instance, announced they had secured $12 million in funding in April. Eigen Technologies announced a $17.5m investment from Goldman Sachs and Temasek. Meanwhile UK-based Luminance gained $10m in a funding round and continues to target law firm clients for its platform. Law firms are also investing in AI contract platforms, with TLT acquiring a stake in LegalSifter, and Reed Smith taking equity in Heretik to develop the platform.

There is no doubt that the legal AI sector is growing at an unprecedented scale, gaining buy-in and investment from investors, corporates and law firms, at the same time as partnering with major tech companies.

For Seal, alongside recent investment, it is our customers that are fueling Seal’s growth and our continued innovation. More use cases for contract and the broader content analytics are regularly emerging, keeping us in the vanguard of the machine learning and NLP market. Some of the largest Fortune 100 companies and many Global 2000 firms benefit from using the Seal platform, and we are deeply humbled at the confidence shown by Toba Capital, and our partners, in our future.

What does our partnership with Docusign mean?

You may or may not be a regular user of Docusign’s platform and solutions, but our new partnership will see the roll out of an entire suite of capabilities that will be available to DocuSign’s 400,000 customers, as well as Seal’s own and future customers. DocuSign will also distribute Seal Software technologies through its platform extensions program.

Our partnership with DocuSign highlights the commitment, passion and innovation that has reaffirmed Seal’s undisputed market-leader status. DocuSign’s System of Agreement strategy transforms one of the foundational elements of business—the agreement process—and that aligns with our own vision for the extraction of insights from content using artificial intelligence.

Modernizing the way businesses prepare, sign, leverage and manage contracts and the DocuSign Platform Extension program for connected apps is key to accelerating this transformation.

By enabling DocuSign partners to plug directly into the DocuSign SofA ecosystem, DocuSign Platform Extensions advance current capabilities for a seamless user-experience. The “Total Search” and “Intelligent Insights” platform extensions by Seal Software add 360-degree visibility into what is inside your agreements, regardless of source location.

Our partnership, coupled with our additional funding from Toba, confirms our commitment to a new era of intelligent content analytics (ICA) and expands our reach into the enterprise. Product innovation and actionable insight are at the forefront of business strategy as Seal continues to drive digital transformation.