The nine ClauseBase staff will join LawVu\u2019s team \u2013 taking the firm\u2019s total headcount to 160, 100 of whom are based in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
LawVu founder Sam Kidd told the Herald that ClauseBase\u2019s team will continue to work from Europe. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve already got a very remote-working set-up,\u201d Kidd said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest thing you worry about is the culture fit,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
But in this case, ClauseBase and LawVu had already been partnering on some sales, and staff had met face-to-face at a conference in May.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know we could hit the ground running,\u201d Kidd said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great to see a Kiwi company willing to take on some capital for M&A [mergers and acquisitions],\u201d Movac general partner and LawVu director Jason Graham said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe law tech market is going through a lot of disruption with AI. You can build, buy or partner. Rather than spend a year building, this [deal] was a good short-circuit.\u201d<\/p>\n
“It’s great to see a Kiwi company willing to take on some capital for M&A,” Movac general partner Jason Graham said.<\/p>\n
More deals were possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are lots of options on the table. There are lots of AI products being spun up,\u201d Graham said.<\/p>\n
He saw LawVu as a platform which could be easily added to.<\/p>\n
Graham said the $400m valuation represented an \u201cup\u201d round, with the figure including ClauseBase\u2019s valuation.<\/p>\n
Sky not the limit<\/p>\n
LawVu was founded a decade ago by Kidd, who had been working for a start-up that integrated accounting software with the Inland Revenue Department\u2019s systems, along with Tim Boyne, an IT operations manager at a law firm (Boyne left in early 2023 to found SmartSpace).<\/p>\n
The pair saw an opportunity to automate the way in-house legal teams at big organisations create and organise documents.<\/p>\n
Kidd saw issues including management having no idea what the legal team was doing, the left hand of an in-house counsel not doing what the right was doing and huge repositories of unorganised data.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of companies don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t know,\u201d Kidd said.<\/p>\n
The pair signed Tauranga City Council as their first customer. Big names followed, including Sky TV, Foodstuffs, Meridian and a2 Milk.<\/p>\n
ClauseBase co-founder and chief executive Maarten Truyens (from left), LawVu co-founder and chief executive Sam Kidd, LawVu chief operating officer Sarah Webb, LawVu chief marketing officer Greg Stephenson, LawVu chief commercial officer Patrick Clibborn and ClauseBase co-founder and chief operating officer Senne Mennes.<\/p>\n
By the time of a $37m raise in 2022 (putting its total venture capital haul at about $45m), LawVu had 120 staff and was pushing into Australia, the UK and the US.<\/p>\n
The focus is squarely on the top end of town. Large enterprises with US$500m to US$3.5 billion in revenue, with large in-house teams of lawyers.<\/p>\n
Its roster of international clients now includes Tennis Australia, Woolworths Australia, AFL, Arsenal (an English soccer team), Expedia, PwC, Estee Lauder, Discord, Nissan and Etsy.<\/p>\n
ClauseBase brings customers including Deloitte Legal, Daikin and German publishing giant Axel Springer.<\/p>\n
AI taking jobs?<\/p>\n
LawVue also announced today the launch of LawVu Lens, an AI-powered contract analysis engine built directly into the LawVu platform.<\/p>\n
With artificial intelligence creeping into more and more processes, do junior lawyers \u2013 or indeed most lawyers \u2013 need to feel nervous about their jobs?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re worried about AI taking your job, you\u2019re probably doing something that\u2019s low value,\u201d Kidd said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe use AI for software, but we\u2019re hiring more engineers, not less.\u201d<\/p>\n
In terms of law work, Kidd said: \u201cIf you can produce and review contracts faster, you can move higher up the value chain.\u201d <\/p>\n
What about the other major trope for AI cynics: that AI is making things up and gets things wrong?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are some areas where AI is incredibly effective, and others where it can hallucinate,\u201d Kidd said. \u201cWe make judicious use, we try to focus on productivity gains and that we know computers are really good. For an invoice review, a one is a one and a two is a two.\u201d<\/p>\n
For generating clauses and retrieving information, LawVu\u2019s emphasis is on citations and other safeguards. Maintaining high accuracy thresholds is more important than being the first to add a feature, Kidd said.<\/p>\n
Lawyers would always be needed to validate the output.<\/p>\n
And as for the humans of LawVu, many will remain clustered around Bay of Plenty.<\/p>\n
The raise at a $400m valuation \u201cis another milestone that demonstrates how homegrown start-ups like LawVu can successfully expand and find success on the world stage, proving that places like Tauranga can absolutely set the global standard\u201d, Kidd said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur continued growth overseas shows the world that New Zealand isn\u2019t just a small market or test bed, we\u2019re a launchpad for global tech success that can transform industries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The nine ClauseBase staff will join LawVu\u2019s team \u2013 taking the firm\u2019s total headcount to 160, 100 of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[118414,118410,365,9556,11231,138,3391,118411,6446,1138,25337,4508,50246,101215,118415,302,118409,6712,13106,1446,1132,3025,111,139,69,3545,15400,2081,8183,118412,4412,61,118413,66754,16541],"class_list":["post-188718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-103m","tag-400m","tag-ai","tag-artificial","tag-boost","tag-business","tag-buys","tag-clausebase","tag-european","tag-firm","tag-firms","tag-hits","tag-homegrown","tag-inhouse","tag-intelligencefocused","tag-its","tag-lawvu","tag-legal","tag-maker","tag-making","tag-million","tag-most","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-platform","tag-push","tag-raised","tag-software","tag-taurangabased","tag-teams","tag-to","tag-us6","tag-valuable","tag-valuation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}