Clio is buying legal data platform vLex for $1 billion in cash and stock. The deal landed Monday.
Clio just smashed $300 million ARR and is snapping up vLex, a 26-year-old legal intelligence company.
This move comes about a year after Clio’s massive $900 million funding round that doubled its valuation to $3 billion. 
vLex was mostly bootstrapped before private equity firm Oakley Capital bought it in 2022. Clio’s CEO Jack Newton said vLex was a hot property.
Harvey, the AI-native legal startup, tried buying vLex last year but fell through, as reported by The Information.
vLex’s huge database of legal documents is valuable for boosting AI models used by lawyers.
Jack Newton told TechCrunch:
“Data is one of the only long-term defensible competitive moats a company can have in the space.”
vLex competes with Thomson Reuters’ legal database and LexisNexis. This deal comes right after Harvey inked a partnership with LexisNexis to fuel its AI with their data.
Clio specializes in law firm management tools like time-tracking, invoicing, and payments. Now it’s moving toward practicing law itself.
vLex created Vincent, an AI model built on its legal database, and Clio plans to bring Vincent’s smarts to its small and medium law-firm customers.
Newton said:
“AI is going to drive a convergence of what have historically been distinct categories of software: the business of law and the practice of law.”
