Double Acquisition Highlights How Legal Industry Is Slowly Embracing AI

livemint.com:

Legal technology provider Reveal, which uses artificial intelligence and analytics tools to aid the legal discovery process, said Tuesday it has acquired Logikcull and IPRO,two other vendors in the e-discovery space. After the deal, Revealwill be worth more than $1 billion, according to private-equity firm K1 Investment Management, Reveal’s majority stakeholder. K1funded the transactions.Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tarun Jain, principal at K1, said the investment is a bet on the growing influence of digital tools and AI in particular on the legal industry—a historically slow-to-adapt sector. “Attorneys have been behind the eight ball on technology," said Reveal founder and chief executive Wendell Jisa. Now, he said, the proliferation of digital data, in the form of emails, text messages and other files, is forcing them to catch up.

Reveal, founded in 2009, provides a cloud software platform that helps firms automate the onerous, document-heavy practice of legal discovery, said Jisa. On the platform, organizations, including law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies, can collect all of a case’s relevant documents and data and use AI and other tools to quickly search and analyze them, he said. Logikcull, founded in 2004, provides a similar cloud service, typically for smaller and medium-size businesses.