Recently, I posted here an exclusive analysis of legal tech funding from 1984 to 2020, a video timeline showing the evolving bar chart of investments in legal tech over nearly four decades.
Now I am able to exclusively present another analysis of legal tech deals — this time of exits in the forms of acquisitions or other deals from 2001 up to Oct. 25, 2022.
As before, this analysis was compiled and created by Raymond Blijd, founder of Legalcomplex.com, a company that is in the business of tracking investments and market data.
In this analysis of acquisitions, Blijd found:
- A total of 901 deals, of which 892 were unique and 16 involving companies acquired multiple times (such as Consilio and AbacusNext.
- A total dollar value of deals of $59.1 billion.
- The top three categories of deals, based on numbers of deals, were e-discovery, practice management and contract tech.
- The top three categories based on dollar values were e-discovery, intellectual property and tax.
- The average deal value was $65 million.
- The average company age at exit was 11.9 years.
“This is our third analysis on the return of an investment of a legal tech venture” Blijd told me. “The most concerning insight here are the similarities between popularity of e-discovery and contract tech. The most lucrative investments historically are in intellectual property and tax.
“Yet, if we look at the startup pipeline, we see little IP tech. We do see a colorful set of new categories, It’s exciting to see what the fresh crop of startups will return in value at an increasingly younger age.”
For any reader interested in going deeper into this data or getting the full breakdown, reach out to Blijd through his website. His Spark Max custom dashboards provide continually updated insights with numbers and names, and they show narratives in graphs, charts, and maps.
