The nine ClauseBase staff will join LawVu’s team – taking the firm’s total headcount to 160, 100 of whom are based in New Zealand.

LawVu founder Sam Kidd told the Herald that ClauseBase’s team will continue to work from Europe.

“We’ve already got a very remote-working set-up,” Kidd said.

“The biggest thing you worry about is the culture fit,” he added.

But in this case, ClauseBase and LawVu had already been partnering on some sales, and staff had met face-to-face at a conference in May.

“We know we could hit the ground running,” Kidd said.

“It’s great to see a Kiwi company willing to take on some capital for M&A [mergers and acquisitions],” Movac general partner and LawVu director Jason Graham said.

“The law tech market is going through a lot of disruption with AI. You can build, buy or partner. Rather than spend a year building, this [deal] was a good short-circuit.”

More deals were possible.

“There are lots of options on the table. There are lots of AI products being spun up,” Graham said.

He saw LawVu as a platform which could be easily added to.

Graham said the $400m valuation represented an “up” round, with the figure including ClauseBase’s valuation.

Sky not the limit

LawVu was founded a decade ago by Kidd, who had been working for a start-up that integrated accounting software with the Inland Revenue Department’s systems, along with Tim Boyne, an IT operations manager at a law firm (Boyne left in early 2023 to found SmartSpace).

The pair saw an opportunity to automate the way in-house legal teams at big organisations create and organise documents.

Kidd saw issues including management having no idea what the legal team was doing, the left hand of an in-house counsel not doing what the right was doing and huge repositories of unorganised data.

“A lot of companies don’t know what you don’t know,” Kidd said.

The pair signed Tauranga City Council as their first customer. Big names followed, including Sky TV, Foodstuffs, Meridian and a2 Milk.

By the time of a $37m raise in 2022 (putting its total venture capital haul at about $45m), LawVu had 120 staff and was pushing into Australia, the UK and the US.

The focus is squarely on the top end of town. Large enterprises with US$500m to US$3.5 billion in revenue, with large in-house teams of lawyers.

Its roster of international clients now includes Tennis Australia, Woolworths Australia, AFL, Arsenal (an English soccer team), Expedia, PwC, Estee Lauder, Discord, Nissan and Etsy.

ClauseBase brings customers including Deloitte Legal, Daikin and German publishing giant Axel Springer.

AI taking jobs?

LawVue also announced today the launch of LawVu Lens, an AI-powered contract analysis engine built directly into the LawVu platform.

With artificial intelligence creeping into more and more processes, do junior lawyers – or indeed most lawyers – need to feel nervous about their jobs?

“If you’re worried about AI taking your job, you’re probably doing something that’s low value,” Kidd said.

“We use AI for software, but we’re hiring more engineers, not less.”

In terms of law work, Kidd said: “If you can produce and review contracts faster, you can move higher up the value chain.”

What about the other major trope for AI cynics: that AI is making things up and gets things wrong?

“There are some areas where AI is incredibly effective, and others where it can hallucinate,” Kidd said. “We make judicious use, we try to focus on productivity gains and that we know computers are really good. For an invoice review, a one is a one and a two is a two.”

For generating clauses and retrieving information, LawVu’s emphasis is on citations and other safeguards. Maintaining high accuracy thresholds is more important than being the first to add a feature, Kidd said.

Lawyers would always be needed to validate the output.

And as for the humans of LawVu, many will remain clustered around Bay of Plenty.

The raise at a $400m valuation “is another milestone that demonstrates how homegrown start-ups like LawVu can successfully expand and find success on the world stage, proving that places like Tauranga can absolutely set the global standard”, Kidd said.

“Our continued growth overseas shows the world that New Zealand isn’t just a small market or test bed, we’re a launchpad for global tech success that can transform industries.”

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.