Robert Ambrogi Blog
The U.K. legal technology company Apperio, whose platform provides corporate legal departments with greater transparency into their legal spend through automated tracking, management and analysis, says it is “vigorously” expanding its sales operation into the United States.
The company says it is targeting sales to legal departments within corporations that have legal spend of $5 million or more and legal departments within private equity investment firms.
“The Apperio team is very excited to expand assertively into the American legal market,” Nicholas d’Adhemar, a former lawyer who is CEO and founder of Apperio, said in a statement. “Our client base in the U.K. and other European countries are proof that Apperio is a highly useful collaborative solution for businesses and law firms.”
The company’s platform is currently used by in-house legal teams at more than 50 companies in the U.K. and Europe. Among its customers is Finastra, the global financial services software company headquartered in the UK. Other U.K. customers include Network Rail, Royal London, Monzo and Farfetch.
Apperio’s dashboard provides access to all a company’s matters from all its law firms.
The company says that its early U.S. sales efforts — which it is currently running from its London office — have already yielded customers, including prominent private equity firms on both the east and west coasts.
“Apperio has been an essential resource for Finastra and we count on their technology to efficiently manage our legal spend,” Simon Dowler, general counsel of Finastra Group, said in a statement provided by Apperio. “Since we ourselves are a technology developer, we require a high standard of technology-driven efficiency and accountability from our suppliers.”
Apperio’s platform is designed to help companies simultaneously manage multiple law firms and projects, track day-to-day legal spend against budgets, improve the efficiency of their team and spend, and safeguard regulatory compliance.
The platform connects directly to law firms’ practice management systems, providing a real-time dashboard view of all matters, including unbilled work-in-progress and invoiced matters. This capability distinguishes it from e-billing products, which provide visibility only into matters that have been invoiced.
The analytics function lets you slice and dice the data to achieve greater insight into your legal spend.
The platform also provides visual analytics of legal spend data, allowing users to benchmark data across all firms or drill down into specific firms. The platform can monitor key metrics and provide alerts when approaching a predetermined budget threshold.
d’Adhemar founded the company in 2013, after working as a lawyer at both a law firm and in-house. Founded under the name Legal Tender, the company changed its name to Apperio in 2015.
The company has raised $12.9 million in four funding rounds, including a $10 million Series A round in August 2018 led by Draper Esprit.