Technology

SimpleLegal Announces $10M Series A: Live Conversation with CEO Nathan Wenzel

What does the company plan to do with the new cash infusion?

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It’s been something of an open secret in legal tech circles for a while now that SimpleLegal, a cloud based software solution aimed at streamlining the operations and workflow of corporate legal departments, has raised a $10M series A round. Today, they’re announcing that this new round of funding is led by Emergence Capital, early investors in Salesforce and a slew of other successful cloud-based software companies (earlier investor RinconVP and Susa Ventures also participated). It is also another feather in the cap of Y Combinator, whose partners seem to have a knack for picking great legal start-ups (see e.g. Casetext, Ironclad, Legalist, Willing, Ross, just to name a few).

But I knew SimpleLegal before they were this cool.

As many founders who talk to me will tell you, I don’t do product demos, and here is why: I’m not your target customer. Something might look cool to me or have a sleek interface, but if I’m not purchasing your service it’s hard for me to draw any meaningful conclusion about the product. That’s why I look at one thing and one thing only: traction. Are lawyers (or consumers) buying your service or not.

So after Jack Dreifuss, the uncommonly extroverted sales director at SimpleLegal told me about his company, I introduced him to a friend of mine, a forward thinking in-house counsel at a rapid growth start-up in NYC. Part of this was me being nice, but part of it was my way of testing whether the product had legs. Well, a short time later I got a call from Jack thanking me for the intro, which had led quickly to a demo and a sale (unfortunately I don’t take commissions). The quick turn around time between intro and sale signaled to me that SimpleLegal was really onto something. They have become the new kids on the block in a sea of mature ELM (enterprise legal management) competitors including Wolters-Kluwer, Mitratech, Thomson Reuters and Onit, and the investment from Emergence is further validation of SimpleLegal’s growth.

What does the company plan to do with the new cash infusion, how will they fare in the ELM industry and what are the broader implications of their raise? Nathan Wenzel, CEO of SimpleLegal, joins me today to discuss. Click below to follow along as our conversation unfolds.

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

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