The legal technology company raised $5.3 million in a seed round that was led by Pear VC, a venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Three other investors — Seedcamp, the LegalTech Fund and Myriad Venture Partners — also participated in the investment round.
Wexler will use the extra capital for product development, expanding its engineering and commercial teams, and supporting the launch of its artificial intelligence platform into the U.S. legal market.
The tech startup announced its fundraising at the same time that it officially launched Wexler Real-Time, a new legal fact-checking feature that uses AI to allow lawyers to flag false or inconsistent testimony in live depositions and hearings.
Gregory Mostyn, the chief executive and co-founder of Wexler, told Law360 that the company's AI platform has up to this point been all about extracting facts from large volumes — up to approximately 500,000 — of complex documents. He said that Wexler Real-Time represents a paradigm shift because it is "essentially not just ingesting documents, but ingesting live audio."
What Wexler Real-Time will do is listen to audio, transcribe that audio and flag in real time if something is inconsistent with the evidence that's already been uploaded, Mostyn said.
Mostyn added that the new tool will primarily be used for depositions in the U.S., although it can also be used in arbitration proceedings. It can also be used in litigation in England and Wales if a court grants permission for the technology to be deployed during live proceedings.
"The example we test with, and we've been working with, is Richard Sackler's deposition [in 2015] about Oxycontin, saying he wasn't involved in its marketing," Mostyn said. Sackler was president of his family's U.S. company, Purdue Pharma.
"It will flag up in a matter of seconds if something is inconsistent with the underlying evidence," Mostyn said of Wexler Real-Time. "It's really just part of the wider vision of being able to establish the facts in a dispute."
The launch of Wexler Real-Time is another major step for the tech company after it announced in December that it had launched an AI agent, known as KiM, to help streamline legal work for disputes lawyers.
Clifford Chance LLP has formally procured Wexler's entire AI platform for its global dispute resolution practice.
Wexler said Tuesday that it has added other new global law firm customers, including Goodwin Procter LLP and Addleshaw Goddard LLP.
Another law firm, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer LLP, has adopted Wexler's "fact intelligence" platform across the firm's global disputes practice.
It has rolled out the technology after the two organizations worked together to refine and adapt the platform for high-stakes litigation. The system will be used for evidence analysis, creating chronologies, case strategies and preparing cross-examinations.
Charlie Morgan, an international arbitration partner at HSF Kramer, told Law360 that the law firm works "hand in glove" with its clients to help them resolve their biggest disputes. And in those complex disputes, understanding the facts is critical and very time-consuming, he said.
"The technology is moving quickly, but today, where we're at is that our teams are using Wexler to help get an understanding of the corpus of documents to extract the facts more quickly and more effectively," Morgan said.
Morgan added that his firm's disputes lawyers are doing that at various stages of the litigation and arbitration life cycle, from the initial assessment of the factual background and providing the options and the merits of various strategies, to the prehearing planning and preparation for cross-examination.
HSF Kramer said Monday that it has launched a new tool to help general counsel assess their use of generative AI. Its new GenAI Persona Builder collects data on how general counsel and their teams interact with, and feel about, the technology.
The firm announced the launch after Rebecca Maslen-Stannage, chair and senior partner of HSF Kramer, said in an interview with Law360 earlier in September that the firm is investing "heavily" in generative AI to grow its market share.
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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