Written by: Alina Midori
Silicon Valley’s investment firm Accel-KKR recently injected an undisclosed amount of money into Lemontech, a Chilean software company developing legal solutions.
In Summary
Lemontech provides cloud-based tech products to lawyers and corporate legal departments. With its technology, these clients can efficiently track and bill their legal cases.
Besides the funding from the majority investment, there will also be a different board of directors. New advisors include Accel-KKR founding partners Tom Barnds and Rob Palumbo. Additionally, there will be John Crowell who directs the firm’s Latin America office.
Though terms and details of the investment aren’t public, Lemontech founder Ignacio Canals stated that the company would use this opportunity to accelerate its international expansion, product development and innovation.
Handling the law
Based in Santiago, Chile, Lemontech has been leading the legal-tech industry for over 15 years. Some of its top products include TimeBillingX and CaseTracking.
The first one is a SaaS platform allowing law firms to control their time per engagement and use flexible billing methods, such as rates per hour, retainers, etc. It also creates detailed reports about partnering firms’ productivity.
Similarly, CaseTracking provides updates and notifications from court systems. Currently, this software manages over 1.5 million cases throughout the region.
Lemontech also launched IPManager specifically for Chilean lawyers. This software assists those handling copyright, patents and intellectual property matters. With this, it is also linked to The National Institute of Industrial Property in Chile.
In-Depth
But how could Artificial Intelligence be a day-to-day advantage for those who work in the legal field? For starters, all repetitive and low-value tasks can be done automatically. That’s to say, software rather than people can run large amounts of information.
“Our focus is to democratize justice for this to work automatically (…) with Artificial Intelligence,” said Canals when Lemontech hosted Legaltech Summit Santiago 2018. This was the first meeting in Latin America that gathered 600 lawyers to discuss technical challenges among law firms.
“Lawyers can join in and become more productive;” added Canals. “Instead of focusing on one trial, they could handle 100 or 1,000.”,
About the Accel-KKR
Accel-KKR is a private equity firm with over US$8 billion in capital commitments. The firm focuses on technology, software and IT-enabled businesses. Part of its strategy is to develop strong partnerships with managers from its portfolio companies.
Its headquarters are located in Menlo Park, California, and it has additional offices in Atlanta, London and Mexico City.
