- Data-intelligence and legal technology platform Bodhala announced it raised $10 million in funding led by Edison Partners
Data-intelligence and legal technology platform Bodhala announced it raised $10 million in funding led by Edison Partners. With this round of funding, Bodhala is going to focus on product expansion and sales and market acceleration as it transforms and modernizes the purchasing of outside counsel services.
Every year, companies spend nearly $500 billion on outside counsel with hourly billing rates tracking about 4 times the rate of inflation. And Bodhala applies data science, machine learning, and AI-driven insights to help companies analyze, interpret, and optimize legal spend.
Bodhala saw over 300% growth in both revenue and headcount in 2019 and is on pace to do the same in 2020. And Bodhala also saw significant client growth in the last year across each of its key verticals, including financial services, healthcare services, insurance, energy, and private equity.
Bodhala data shows the top-15-by-revenue firm street rates went from under $700 in 2000 to over $1,650 per hour today. And average equity-partner profits at the top U.S. 100 firms have doubled since 2004 to $1.88 million in 2018, according to American Lawyer (with eight firms averaging more than $4 million).
And general counsel and procurement leaders are looking for more transparency into their legal costs and performance along with a method to shift spending towards their optimal panel firms.
Bodhala co-founders Raj Goyle and Ketan Jhaveri met at Harvard Law School and pursued careers in politics and law, respectively. Goyle was a member of the Kansas House of Representatives and ran for U.S. Congress in 2010. And Jhaveri worked for the U.S. Department of Justice and spent 10 years practicing antitrust law at Simpson Thacher Bartlett LLP. In 2014, they came together and went to market with their legal spend management solution two years later.
Key Quotes:
“The legal industry is a non-functioning market where law firms have had full control, leaving in-house counsel at the mercy of ever-increasing fees from their counsel without the leverage the ‘buy-side’ deserves to have. Our mission is to bring a market-driven economy to the legal industry—one where visibility and fair competition lead to the selection of the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price. The groundbreaking platform we have built is uniquely positioned to address this issue and through our partnership with Dan Herscovici and the Edison Partners team we will be able to continue to drive real and meaningful change in this market.”
-Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala
“With Bodhala, internal legal departments are able to direct work to the right outside lawyers, consistent with but not exclusively based on relationships, and then guide the work more appropriately to manage legal risk, outcome, and cost. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this has become even more important, as clients consume Bodhala data to hedge the risk of being overly reliant on too few relationship law firms or partners.”
“Bodhala is at the center of a rapidly changing legal system marked by the emergence of legal operations as a profession, the changing economic models of law firms, and the rise of new technologies. Relationships are no longer the sole proxy for evaluating the value that a law firm brings to its clients. We’re creating a clear win for everyone involved in our modern legal system, from corporate legal departments to law firms to alternative service providers.”
-Ketan Jhaveri, co-founder and President of Bodhala
“Bodhala co-founders Raj and Ketan developed the first modern platform to bring data-intelligence, let alone real-world economics, to the legal services spend of large and enterprise firms. Analysts estimate AI-driven legal technology will be a $37 billion business by 2026, and the Bodhala SaaS platform delivers the insights general counsel and claims officers need to make meaningful decisions about their budgets, while still producing equal or better legal outcomes.”
-Daniel Herscovici, Partner at Edison Partners — who led the investment. Herscovici will be joining Bodhala’s Board of Directors.
