Oakley Capital, the pan-European private equity investor, is pleased to announce that Oakley Origin portfolio company vLex is combining with Fastcase, a leading US legal intelligence business, to form the world’s largest law firm subscriber base and a library with more than one billion legal documents from more than 100 countries.
Business Services
vLex combines with Fastcase to form the world’s largest law firm subscriber base
The combined business will derive c.45% of revenues from the U.S. and reach over three million users worldwide.
Legal tech disruptors merge to form world’s largest cloud-based law library
One billion legal documents offer ultimate training data set for legal AI
Deal accelerates vLex’s U.S. expansion and creates significant cross selling opportunities
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Washington D.C., Fastcase’s product reaches more than one million US lawyers through law firms, state bar associations, and third-party platforms. It is used for legal research, litigation analytics and as a bankruptcy workflow tool. Fastcase currently reaches almost 20% of the Amlaw200, a leading industry ranking of U.S. law firms, and enjoys double-digit ARR growth with ~90% recurring revenues.
We’re pleased to be joining forces with vLex at such an exciting time for our industry. The merger of our two businesses creates the biggest collection of law data and the ultimate training data set for legal AI. We have ambitious growth plans and our partnership with vLex provides the resources and know-how to execute them.
Ed Walters
CEO and Co-Founder — Fastcase
Barcelona and Miami-based vLex is a cloud-based legal information subscription platform, providing over two million users with access to an online library of global legal and regulatory information. Oakley backed vLex in 2022 to help it accelerate its strategic goal of building a digital-first leader in the legal research market.
The legal profession has been a late adopter of technology, but lawyers are gaining more of an appetite for artificial intelligence tools in recent years. Bringing these two highly successful businesses together will help democratize the law for legal professionals worldwide through a dynamic and robust platform that improves legal research accuracy, efficiency, and affordability.
Lluis Faus
Founder — vLex
Combining the two businesses will unlock significant revenue and cost synergies which can be reinvested in new products and services including the development of AI tools, as well as provide cross-selling opportunities. The new company will offer unprecedented scale in legal tech, reaching over one million lawyers in the U.S., and a combined library with over one billion legal documents, providing a comprehensive, structured training data set for legal AI.
The new combined entity will be called vLex Group, and its products will retain the name of vLex in global markets and Fastcase in the U.S. Fastcase’s founders are reinvesting in the combined business and will carry on managing Fastcase in partnership with Lluis and Angel Faus, founders of vLex.
vLex Group continues to monitor other high-quality legal information and analytics platforms globally as it consolidates a currently fragmented LegalTech market.
M&A is a key growth strategy for Oakley so we’re pleased to be supporting vLex as it expands its business into North America with the exciting combination with Fastcase. This is an attractive business that will help vLex grow its presence in a critical market, adding more legal data, functionality and analytics for the benefit of both companies’ customers.
Peter Dubens
Co-Founder and Managing Partner — Oakley Capital
