Steve Preston
Recently, I wrote a column about the “Great Salesforcization of Legal” where I noted that there was a widespread attempt by tech companies to transform legal in the same way that Salesforce transformed sales departments. In the same way that Salesforce turns selling and following up from a disjointed process into a collaborative assembly line, CRM’s are now popping up for all parts of the legal process.
One of the companies I mention in that post is Anaqua, whose SVP of Marketing, Steve Preston, often describes Anaqua as Salesforce for the innovation process. Like sales, the innovation process has a lot of moving parts and a lot of different people who are touching the process. Anaqua streamlines and automates innovation from beginning to end, from idea to IP, so that no item slips through the cracks. With Anaqua, law firms and companies (Anaqua markets to both corporations and law firms), get one place where all the different parties involved in innovation and intellectual property can collaborate.
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Different than the typical start-up trajectory, Anaqua got started when people from The Coca-Cola Company, Ford Motor Company, Kimberly-Clark, and British American Tobacco came together to identify a need for a system that would manage the entire innovation process, something the then available enterprise software available simply didn’t accomplish. According to Crunchbase, the company has had both a $100M private equity investment (although the amount was not disclosed), $25 million in venture capital funding from blue chip venture capitalist Bessemer Ventures, and, earlier this year, Anaqua acquired AcclaimIP and Free Patents Online, all of which indicate that both they and Silicon Valley believe there are major growth opportunities. And, to be sure, Anaqua is not the only player in this space. Competing vendors include Lecorpio, CPA Global and smaller start-ups like IPfolio.
I love introducing lawyers to both interesting legal tech companies and the people who are out selling and marketing to lawyers, so I’m glad to be joined by Steve Preston from Anaqua, to share more about his company, innovation and the future of legal. As always, these aren’t live chats, they are real-life conversations that take place asynchronously, so for best experience follow along by clicking the blue follow button below.
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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 [email protected].