Technology at the service of the Rule of Law
Why we invested in Jus Mundi
Long considered the poor cousins of the Tech scene, start-ups digitising the Legal industry were underinvested compared to other spectrums of the venture world because of the numerous hurdles they faced : regulatory risks, fragmented markets, reluctance from practitioners.
Yet, all these considerations are to be buried deep. In just a few years, Legal Tech has boomed. In the first semester of 2021 alone, the sector has raised more than all of 2020. 2021 is on track to break a new record, after the record-high $1,2Bn raised in 2019. The French Tech fully contributes to this explosion with more than 200 Legal Tech startups and sales expected to reach €100m in 2022, according to France Digitale. Covid-19 had a decisive impact, but was rather the catalyst than the cause of an already existing trend. The strong increase in Legal Tech startups creation began in 2010, founders betting on the digitalisation of the industry long before the market and investors saw any interest.
This trend, impacting a whole industry by leveraging cutting-edge technology was bound to attract our interest at C4 Ventures!
It’s in that context that we met Jus Mundi, THE start-up turning upside down the legal research market by building the first multilingual, open access, international law search engine.
Jus Mundi’s story
Jus Mundi was founded by Jean-Rémi de Maistre, a lawyer by trade, specialised in international law and arbitration. He quickly identified the main pain point of his industry:
- The unprecedented development of trade and international investments during the past 40 years led to an explosion of litigations using international law. 7 out of 10 US and EU companies above €100m of revenues are facing an arbitration. 40% are party to at least 4 arbitrations.
- To reduce the risk impaired by the complex nature of international trade and operations led in different geographies and legal systems, private and public stakeholders have increasingly turned to international arbitration. This technique allows, as soon as the contract is drafted, to plan the dispute settlement process. Both parties enjoy swift and effective procedures, run by experimented arbitrators expert of their trade. The procedure is confidential, and deprived of any national bias, thus strengthening the objectivity of the final decision.
- The number of decisions was boosted by the flourishing of world trade. This gave birth to a nebulous and ever more illegible corpus of treaties, international norms, rulings, and awards. Overall, €7Bn are spent globally by law firms and practitioners for their international law research.
Along with 5 other talented co-founders, Jean-Rémi set out to bring clarity to this corpus by building Jus Mundi.
The platform offers significant economies of scale to both law firms, corporates and governments. It uses the best of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to facilitate access to the data, give coherence to the corpus and allow litigants to find the best match when looking for a lawyer. Jus Mundi’s Freemium model allows to create value in the intelligent use of data rather than its retention.
Jus Mundi’s value proposition encounters tremendous interest from the market, with an already long and quickly growing list of clients. They experience an almost inexistent churn rate, their clients usually asking for more after their trial period or their first yearly subscription.
Thanks to this very strong market fit, Jus Mundi is already the search tool of:
⚖️ Main street law firms such as DLA Piper, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Dentons,
💼 Legal departments of corporates such as Iberdrola,
🏛️ Governments including the British Foreign Office and the Japanese ministry of Foreign Affairs,
🎓 Top-rated universities like Harvard University, University of Cambridge and Sorbonne Université…
Technology at the service of the Rule of Law
Thanks to its tech and data excellence, Jus Mundi offers features that meet three essential market needs :
1.Reducing the opacity of the corpus by giving open access to the most important database of regulations and — most importantly — rulings and awards
Jus Mundi fulfils a growing aspiration of the market - and of the general public -to see more transparency in arbitration and international law.
The search engine already covers Investment arbitration, Commercial arbitration, International public law, Law of the Sea and International commercial Law. The database will soon be extended to Sports, Labour Environment, Intellectual property and Human Rights.
It offers open access to more than 4 500 treaties and 37 000 awards, which are usually confidential, thanks to Jus Mundi’s privileged partnership with the main stakeholders of the field such as the International Bar association and the International Chamber of Commerce of Paris (ICC), the most important and prestigious global arbitration centre.
2.Providing consistency to a fragmented corpus leveraging cutting edge technology
International law, and arbitration in particular, naturally produce complexity. Different legal systems are convened at each new case, thus increasing the fragmentation of the corpus. 30% of a lawyer’s time is spent on legal research. 70% of major legal firms’ cases are international.
Yet, traditional legal databases are too often monolingual and stiffened by their arborescence. The international law user suffered a double constraint, lacking both a global multilingual database allowing to find intelligence in all legal systems, and the flexibility of a genuine key word search.
Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), Jus Mundi is able to bring coherence in this conundrum. The tech team swiftly mastered and deployed the technology. NLP enables users to break the binding constraint of indexation in a multilingual framework.
The data is delivered via a user-friendly interface. The tens of thousands of documents digitised by Jus Mundi in every language are processed with an algorithm that recognise languages and syntactic structures of each text, delivering relevant answers.
Within minutes, practitioners find on Jus Mundi what usually takes young associates two weeks to gather.
3.Helping users to find the lawyer best suited to their needs by creating the first international law social network
Thanks to Jus Mundi, everyone, from corporations to small businesses or individuals, can now find the best match to be advised or defended.
Behind the impressive corpus of regulations and awards is a vast community of lawyers, arbitrators and counsels. Jus Mundi gathers more than 25,000 of them in an open directory. It’s an entire community of lawyers, judges, university professors and students, legal departments of corporations, NGOs, civil servants that can interact and produce open legal doctrine published in Jus Mundi’s Wikinotes.
Jus Mundi also offers to its subscribers a unique feature: the conflict checker. It helps users identifying any possible conflict of interest between stakeholders.
Last but not least, Jus Mundi is the perfect embodiment of the thriving French Tech.
- Founded in France just two years ago, it already finds its revenues overseas, with more than 70% of sales in the US and UK.
- Attracting domestic and foreign investors: We took the lead of the round, accompanied by the US VC fund FJ Labs (Fabrice Grinda & Arne Halleraker), Acequia Capital (Hank Vigil Rauten Hofmeyr Leif Danielsen), Financière Saint James (Michael Benabou & Clément Lamolinerie) and existing investors that renewed their trust in Jus Mundi: Elkstone Partners, Seed4Soft (Marc Jalabert, Eric Boustouler), Holnest, INSEAD Business Angels Alumni France, Chris Guzowski, Cédric Page, Elie Rotenberg, Guillaume Beauregard…
- Attracting talents from all over the world: Already 40 employees of 20 different nationalities work at Jus Mundi. Diversity is also a core value of the company where 50% of women are in senior management positions. Jus Mundi also managed to attract more than 20 lawyers on its payroll. They are the ideal interface with the start-up’s clients, users and partners.
- Contributing to research thanks to the tech team’s expertise in NLP and multilingual search.
Everything about Jus Mundi was bound to hook us up and convince us to lead their Series A round of €8,5m ($10m) to fuel their growth and help them recruit key talents at a critical stage of their development.
