It’s not often that a services provider gets a hefty venture capital investment. Last week, though, OpenStack cloud builder Mirantis raised $10 million. And today, Modus eDiscovery raised $10 million for its data driven service for driving down the costs and finding far more than any number of lawyers can pouring over information by hand.
The round was led by Harbert Management Corporation and Azalea Capital. Modus CEO Abtin Buergari also participated in the financing.
Modus, out of Washington, D.C., has no intellectual property per se. What it does have is a legal market that still spends huge sums on lawyers to pore through legal documents. It’s so labor intensive that top-tier law firms will contract to e-discovery firms that employ lower paid lawyers to do the discovery work.
Modus takes legal documents and turns them into data. Instead of man hours, Modus gets paid for every gigabyte it makes searchable. By making the documents searchable, Modus has ways to find documents that a human simply can’t compared to the analytics that can be done pragmatically.
The e-discovery world is like a lot of markets. Dominant legacy players have systems and processes they have used for years. But data has a way of changing everything. Modus is leveraging the shift to offer services that save money and get more insight.
Modus plans to use the funds to expand into large markets, in particular California and New York. It’s in those markets where law firms are more inclined to change their ways, especially as the overall judicial system evolves and adapts to this new data-driven world.