Legal technology company Disco today announced the close of an $83 million funding round to make AI tools for lawyers. The money will be used to expand its existing product to help lawyers with the discovery process and to hire additional engineers.
As a result, Disco plans to grow its ranks from around 200 employees today to 400 by the end of the year.
The funding and additional engineering resources will help Disco move toward its goal of handling not just the discovery phase of a lawsuit, which is its current focus, but the full litigation life cycle.
“As we look beyond that [discovery], we see many different kinds of adjacent spaces in legal, where we can apply hyper-scalable cloud technology and our AI. We can look into lots of other areas around better understanding how to formulate cases, how to be able to automatically identify evidence through AI that exists in document collections. So we believe there’s a whole market that is very much untapped today across the legal function,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
Disco also plans to use the funds to expand into corporate law and open offices in places like Frankfurt, Sydney, and mainland China in the coming years.
A number of solutions have been built that combine artificial intelligence and law, including DoNotPay’s bot that helps with a variety of legal matters, LexisNexus’ chatbots, and an AI system that can predict the outcome of cases, based on European Court of Human Rights text. More controversial solutions have also been made to help judges with sentencing decisions.
DIsco was founded in 2015 and has raised $136 million to date.
The $83 million funding round was led by Georgian Partners, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, LiveOak Venture Partners, and the Stephens Group.
Source: VentureBeat
