Intelllex Logo

In a sign of the Asian legal tech market's recent growth, knowledge management company Intelllex on Wednesday announced it has raised USD $2.1 million to support its international growth. The round is led by Quest Ventures, with participation from Thomson Reuters, Insignia Ventures, K3 Ventures and a Singaporean government-backed fund.

Speaking with Legaltech News earlier this week, Intelllex co-founder and co-CEO Chang Zi Qian said the startup company's new funding will largely be used for engineering and development of its core knowledge management product, as well as business development in particular practice areas, such as financial services and listed companies. Currently with offices in Singapore and the U.K., Intelllex also has its eye on international expansion, with Hong Kong next on its list.

Intelllex focuses its attention on larger law firms, corporate clients and regulators; Chang noted his team usually works with internal innovation teams and knowledge management teams. With that in mind, it's no surprise that international firms are Intelllex's most common clients, along with larger regulatory bodies.

The platform itself looks to differentiate itself from competitors through the tight integration of legal concepts and uploaded documents to the system, marrying the capabilities of document management with specialized legal research capabilities. In particular, it looks to focus its tagging and training system by practice area rather than firm- or company-wide, in order to better adopt to those more specific nuances of practicing.

Chang told LTN that he equates the process of law to a person, made up of interconnected components. "Cases are delivered from legislation, they're connected. Legislation is connected to regulation. Legal documents make references to these sources of law, they're also regulated and make references to one another. They're all connected. Therefore, what we're trying to do here is match up the law as the foundation of technology with the man, who establishes the relationship between words, between concepts."

Intelllex works by separating documents in its system, whether directly uploaded or integrated with outside DMSs or systems like SharePoint, into configurable "stacks." When a document enters the system, the proprietary AI platform works to determine the legal topic at hand, the type of document (case filing, affidavit, deposition, etc.), and the legal question or issue contained within. The system also performs OCR as needed, then automatically tags the document based on a taxonomy that is either Intelllex's preset or configured by the customer.

From there, users search for topics based on those legal topics, questions or by type of document. When applicable, the search results given contain the legal topics present in the document, the tags applied to the result, as well as summarization of what the document is about. These results can be analyzed via a list view, or a visualization map that connects given topics to one another.

Chang noted that this additional information is what separates a KM system like Intelllex from document management, which he described as more akin to a warehouse that has a bit of everything, but trying to find something can be difficult. "What we want with a knowledge management system is to be more like a library, not a warehouse. In a library, things are categorized with certain knowledge dimensions, because of the models lawyers have when they retrieve documents."

Intelllex's growth was spurred through participation in multiple incubators such as Thomson Reuters' Labs Incubator and Barclays Bank's LawTech Incubator (Eagle Labs). But although Chang called the current state of Asian legal tech market nascent, he pointed to other funding in the region such as Chinese KM company Powerlaw.ai's deal with Sequoia as evidence that investors are beginning to pay more attention. And he hopes that investments such as the one Intelllex has received spurs even more investment and growth.

"We hope that our funding round will give some confidence for the space that we operate in, and hopefully more startups will join us in this space to unlock the innovation required," he explained. "We really think it takes an equal system of startups and technologies for this to work, and I hope that we can bring together more people and give investors confidence."