Everlaw, a legal startup that provides a cloud service for law firms to use in storing documents and making them easily searchable and accessible, announced an $8.1 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz on Thursday. Horowitz is one of Silicon Valley's blue chips funds whose portfolio includes Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce.
Everlaw stands out from other legal e-discovery tools available for lawyer firms because it uses artificial intelligence to help lawyers quickly and easily sift through the millions documents of emails, reports, and presentations that winning a big case can require, Business Insider reported.
Everlaw offers advance features including data visualization tools, activity tracking, email threading without natives, automated language detection and translation, and a story builder to help lawyers in the creation of narratives.
Everlaw founder and CEO, A.J. Shankar, said he never imagined he'd start a legal technology company. When he was getting his Ph.D in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, he began working for a local law firm as a technical expert on a case.
Shankar formed Everlaw in 2010 with a $1.5 million funding from friends and family. The 22-person company now serves 9 of the top 10 class action law firm in the U.S. and more than 65 percent of state Attorneys General, according to TechCrunch.
Everlaw is now being used by plaintiff's attorneys prepare for the new trial over General Motors' 2014 faulty ignition switch recall that linked to nearly 400 injuries and deaths.
A.J. Shankar told Above the Law that Everlaw will use the new investment to accelerate development on its litigation platform and increase awareness of Everlaw in the market. He said that the clients will see more and better new features in the cloud-service with a much better speed.
Shankar said that huge features in Everlaw are the design and speed. He said that in a recent class action case, a law firm tried out Everlaw versus their usual go-to solution. They found that Everlaw saved 700 manhours of search in the $450 million case.
Everlaw charges its clients by the volume of data that its software helps them to find files they can use to make their case. The law firms also pay based on the volume of data they stored on the service. "The more you store, the cheaper it gets," Shankar explained.
In addition to backing from a prominent venture capital firm, a former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, has joined Everlaw's board.
