Legal tech acquisition announcements are pretty staid affairs. A press release provides some choice quotes from the parties, some screenshots highlight some use cases, and everyone wishes each other well.
Henchman, a contract drafting tool provider co-based in Belgium and New York, will join the LexisNexis family as announced in this press conference:
If I gave ChatGPT shrooms it would not hallucinate the idea of LexisNexis putting out this announcement. Nothing against LexisNexis, but it’s LexisNexis and doesn’t need edgy, gonzo marketing to build name recognition. Which is a shame because while C-suite purchasing decisions might live in stodgy air, the battle for legal tech is always an adoption play and a fun hook goes a long way to convincing the rank-and-file to take the time to learn a new tool.
Henchman, on the other hand, has a long history of using humor to get the word out. And they’re good at it.
The comedy gets butts in the seats — or at standing desks if clients just had their own butt lifts — but actually watching the product work closes the deal. I saw them at ABA TECHSHOW’s Startup Alley earlier this year. In that competition, it described itself like so:
Legal professionals rarely start from scratch when drafting contracts or negotiating details. They spend at least 60 minutes searching through old contracts or consulting colleagues for relevant precedents. Henchman automatically centralizes past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database and delivers them intelligently in lawyers’ familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments. This eliminates time-consuming tasks and allows lawyers to focus on adding value and expertise.
So Henchman goes through the document management system and indexes a firm or company’s documents at the clause level and lets the user take advantage of that in drafting. With this acquisition, Henchman’s core functionality will be available to new and existing Lexis customers, while the technology will be married to Lexis+ AI’s Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 “enabling the use of trusted customer data as grounding data for generative AI drafting,” according to the press release. “Henchman’s capabilities will also be added to Lexis® Create, the Microsoft 365 add-in solution that enables point-of-workflow integration for generative AI drafting in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and Copilot.”
The deal will be finalized in the second half of the year.
And hopefully some of this cheeky marketing will come along with the deal. Oh, sorry Henchman… is it too soon to say cheeky?
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
