Aussie legaltech specialist LawAdvisor looks to grow its global market share with London move

LawAdvisor has moved its headquarters from Melbourne to London as it focuses on its corporate business and looks to increase its share of the international legaltech market.

The startup hopes that placing itself at the centre of legaltech and working with stakeholders at their international headquarters rather than local offices will help it to grow its LawAdvisor Corporate arm. The service is intended to transform how panel firms are appointed and legal ops are managed, offering tools for collaboration, procurement, project management, workload optimisation, and progress and budget tracking.

LawAdvisor initially offered a platform to enable consumers to more easily identify and pursue legal claims and connect them directly to lawyers when it was founded in 2015. The platform was followed by the development of a range of legal ops solutions and the firm distinguished itself in the Australian market by emphasising better accessibility to leading legal technology.

Early backers included Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, who in a statement said that founder and CEO Brennan Ong has “the knowledge and expertise to build something that solves the challenges that lawyers actually are facing and not just those that technologists think they're facing”.

With a background as a lawyer and a software developer, Ong looks to apply his expertise in designing solutions that directly address gaps in the legal tech space.

“We did not want to simply digitise legacy processes, but to build solutions to real problems, based on first-hand knowledge of the legal sector," he said. "The way corporate counsel procure legal services today is in dire need of change.”

He added that procurement decisions were "too often made on a referral basis, without due attention paid to whether the firm is right for the brief or providing good value for money".

Management of legal matters at even the most tech-enabled law firms often missed the mark, he said, with inefficiencies meaning lawyers spend too much time on coordination that detracts from time they could spend on substantive legal work.

The startup has collaborated with corporate legal departments and law firms including Lonely Planet and Bird & Bird to create a legal ‘operating system’. This system underpins a number of distinct solutions, each targeted to serve a particular pain point in the legal sector, which are due to be launched later this year. These solutions are meant to give lawyers access to a range of different workflow and collaboration capabilities and microservices, which they can also integrate with other applications via a suite of APIs.

Outside of its corporate business, LawAdvisor’s digital services include a practice management platform, contract creation technology, and a platform designed for growing start-ups and businesses.