SoftBank-backed LegalOn lands $50M to streamline legal workflows with AI

Contract assessment remains a slow, manual process that charges legal teams, forcing lawyers to search dense language, to flag risks and translate legal conditions.

The problem is even so common that in recent years in Tokyo in recent years Legalon technologies Has had an open door for that market: the AI contract review software for legal teams is today used by 7,000 organizations in Japan, the US and the UK, claims the company, and it leads the Japanese market, where 25% of all public companies in the country use their platform.

Legalon’s AI contract review tool, JudgementIdentifies risks and suggests operations based on playbooks built by lawyers and the legal standards of each customer. The company claims assessment assessment times with a maximum of 85%, while the quality and accuracy are improved.

However, success has not tempered the ambitions of Legalon. The company now wants to build AI Agent -Tools further to go with its software, and recently collected $ 50 million to do to do that.

The Series C finance round is led by the Growth Equity Fund of Goldman Sachs and saw participation of the existing investors World Innovation Lab (WIL). New investors Mori Hamada & Matsumoto (a law firm in Japan), Mizuho Bank and Shoko Chukin Bank have also invested.

Although much of the new money is dedicated to the development of more AI-agent products, the company also improves its efforts for the market in the US and the UK, where it says that his company has quadrupled in the past year.

Legalon refused to announce his appreciation.

Founded by two former business lawyers, NoZomu Tsunoda and Masataka Ogasawara in 2017, Legalon wants to appeal to time -consuming tasks before and after the contract assessment process, such as organizing legal applications and the automation of contract management.

According to Daniel Lewis, the global CEO of Legalon, the company distinguishes itself from the hordes of legal technical startups with the help of AI thanks to the foundation in lawyers -oriented, expert legal content. That basis, he says, makes Legalon, unlike other tools that depend on users to rebuild rules, or use generic AI models that lack the precision needed for legal work.

“Our approach ensures that contract reviews are tailored to real legal standards, making the output more accurate, more consistent and more practical for legal teams. Moreover, we have more than 50 playbooks built by lawyers, seamless integration in existing workflows and our solution works on the first day,” Lewis said.

Last week the startup launched another tool: Matter Management Helps to keep legal teams contract requests, allocate owners, connecting matters with relevant people and documents and to collaborate with other departments.

The company has also concluded a non-equity-technical partnership with OpenAI, which gives Legalon access to the advanced large language models of the Chatgpt Maker.

“It’s a technical cooperation,” Lewis explained. “It gives us early access to their latest models, and it positions our engineers to work a kind of side by side with engineers from OpenAI. So in that respect it will promote our goal to build advanced [AI] Agents who use great technology, but can roast this in our own legal content and expertise. “

The AI revolution appears to be a huge wind for legal technical startups worldwide. In June Harvey AI insured $ 300 million in Series E finance, pushed his appreciation to $ 5 billion, and last year Clio also raised $ 300 million and reached a value of $ 3 billion.

But even if generative AI transforms the legal industry, Lewis does not think it will replace lawyers. “The state of technology is not there yet and replacing lawyers is not even our vision,” he said. “Lawyers are still in the driver’s seat. The things that AI cannot do perfectly today are by definition the things that only people can do. And the lawyers who lean on that responsibility are to supervise, to edit, to work out, to exert an opinion – are those who see the most extraordinary leverage of AI now.”

The series C raises the total capital of Legalon to more than $ 200 million. The investors include Softbank Vision Fund, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia Capital China), the Japanese risk capital company Jafco and MUFG Bank.