Sutton: Avantia set up on a contrarian bet
An alternative business structure (ABS) which specialises in work for the asset management industry has been acquired by a US software company.
Carta said it has ambitious plans to grow Avantia Law on both sides of the Atlantic.
Carta, based in San Francisco and New York, acquired Avantia last week, creating a new ABS regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) called Carta Law.
Carta is known for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, which helps private equity teams manage portfolios and optimise investments, while Avantia, set up in 2019, was the first law firm to offer bespoke AI-driven legal services to private equity investors, specialising in contracts, compliance, and limited partnership transfers.
We reported in late 2024 how Avantia – which also has two offices in the US – was already employing AI agents [1] to conduct both legal and non-legal work.
Work is now taking place to integrate Carta’s ERP platform and Avantia’s AI technology, to create one single system for deal activity, fund administration and legal and compliance work.
Clients will pay a fixed fee for each service, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Carta Law said its new offer would help private equity firms save money and work faster.
Henry Ward, Carta’s chief executive and co-founder, described Avantia Law as “an insanely fast-growing law firm”.
Avantia was formed in 2019 by James Sutton, a former associate at Slaughter & May who went on to be general counsel at private equity house Och Ziff (now Sculptor Capital Management). Today, the firm’s AI is used by a third of the world’s largest funds, managing more than $15tn in assets.
Avantia has a team of 13 solicitors who oversee what the AI produces, with 10 people based in the US as well.
Speaking to Legal Futures from New York, Carta’s head of corporate development, Davis Thacker, said: “Our London office is actually going to be our third largest office globally now, behind New York and San Francisco. We’re excited. We totally plan on growing that team. We’re going to grow the team in the US as well.”
Mr Thacker has worked at Carta for seven years, and said legal was a core part of the business.
“The classic way to look at Carta is through the fintech. We deal with money. We do cap table. We do accounting for funds. But I always thought one of the best ways to view Carta was from a legal lens. Because everything that we do comes downstream from a legal document, or a transaction in the private markets. So we’ve always viewed our business as very tangential to legal.”
Mr Thacker said the timing has not been right until now to buy a law firm.
“When we’ve looked at the legal industry in the past, it felt like technology was always a limiting factor, in terms of the depth and degree that we could go in and automate and really make our mark on the legal industry.
“But if you look at the advancements over the past couple of years and, especially over the past six months, this is just changing so quickly. We think that now is a really good time to make our mark and really dive deeper into legal services.”
Mr Thacker praised the team at Avantia: “They are outstanding, started by James Sutton, who brings such a level of gravitas and trust with the bigger private equity firms. They’ve always been a tech enabled, AI enabled, law firm. That’s in their DNA.
“When we’ve looked at acquiring a traditional services business in the past, part of the challenge of bringing them into a technology company like Carta is the cultural fit. You have to have lawyers that are comfortable and excited about technology, and the entire Avantia team lives and breathes that.”
In 2025, Carta turned over $500m and is now valued at $7.4bn. But this combination of software and AI could open the door to even greater growth.
Mr Thacker said: “The thing that gets me excited is the opportunity to own the entirety of the service, connecting the AI with our underlying system. That’s very compelling for the customer and allows us to go full stack on a lot of these different problems in a way that we weren’t able to do before. This is a big moment for us.”
Mr Sutton said: “We founded Avantia in 2019 on a contrarian bet – that AI could deliver legal and compliance outcomes, not just assist with them.
“Pioneering that outcome-as-a-service model drove rapid growth across some of the world’s largest asset managers, and ultimately brought us here. Now, as part of Carta, we are excited to take it to the whole ecosystem.”
Mr Thacker said the SRA was “great to work with”. He explained: “They didn’t ask a tonne of questions, but they asked the right questions, which is something that I always appreciate with the regulators. It was definitely a good process.
“There’s a tonne of innovation happening in the space right now. Huge. You have Harvey and Legora. You have Claude announcing their plugins. You have us buying a full-scale law firm. It’s really exciting. We’re excited to be on the frontier of it, too.”