Silicon Valley, Technology

Everlaw Lands An $8.1M Investment From Silicon Valley Mega-Fund Andreessen Horowitz

We're just two weeks into the new year, and legal tech just got its first "holy s%^$" moment.

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AJ Shankar

AJ Shankar

We’re just two weeks into the new year, and legal tech just got its first “holy s%^$” moment. Today Berkeley-based ediscovery platform Everlaw announced that it has closed an $8.1 million Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip funds whose portfolio includes Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce, just to name a few. Everlaw prides itself on its simple, intuitive user interface and design coupled with a straightforward pricing structure. Everlaw, whose customers are mostly midsize and large law firms, is being used by 8 of the 10 major class-action law firms and 65% of state attorneys general.

Andreessen’s investment in Everlaw obviously sends a strong signal to law firms about AJ Shankar (whose accomplishments you can read about here), the team behind Everlaw, and the company’s product, but it is also important because of what it says not only about the booming ediscovery market but about legal tech startups and venture capital generally. Marc Andreessen, one of the firm’s founding partners and creator of the Netscape Browser, penned a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal describing how “Software is eating the world.” With this investment in Everlaw, it seems that now extends to “software is eating legal.”

Ediscovery is a competitive space with big players like FTI, Xerox, and Recommind, as well as smaller players like CloudNine, Logikcull, and Zapproved. Will Everlaw be the first of many venture investments in this space? It’s hard to know. It’s been an open question whether or not VCs would invest in legal tech (especially software marketed to law firms), but Andreessen Horowitz is a trend-setting firm, and, in an environment where a very small number of VCs are making 90% of the returns, you can bet that other Silicon Valley players are taking note.

The aforementioned AJ Shankar, Everlaw’s founder and CEO, will be joining me today to talk about what this investment means for Everlaw and the state of the legal industry. If you’d like to follow our conversation as it unfolds, simply click the blue “follow” button below.

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Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder ofReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.

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