The French Startup Doctrine launches a $ 11.6 million (10 million euros) round of financing with existing investors Otium Venture and Xavier Niel. Doctrine builds a search engine for court decisions and other legal texts.
This is an essential tool if you are a lawyer or if you work in the legal industry in general. There are now a thousand companies that use the service. It currently costs around € 129 per user per month.
A little calculation on the back of the envelope allows you to see that Doctrine currently has a recurring monthly income of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Doctrine competes with Dalloz and LexisNexis. These databases have been extremely popular because it has been so difficult to enumerate court decisions. Not only Doctrine has managed to get a ton of data, but they also have better technology to search for all these inputs.
France is currently trying to share as much open data as possible. Finally, court decisions could be accessible to all. But many challenges must be overcome because each decision must be anonymized.
It may not be a data-driven industry in a few years, but a technology-driven industry. Automating the indexing of court decisions and new laws will be key as more and more data becomes available. That is why Doctrine seems to be in a good position against legacy software in the legal industry.
The startup is currently growing 20 percent month on month. Doctrine plans to hire 160 people over the next 18 months.