Vancouver-based legal-technology firm Clio today announced it is providing about spending US$1 billion in cash and stock to buy Miami-based vLex, which is a pioneer in legal technology that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with a comprehensive and global legal-research platform.
Clio, officially Themis Solutions Inc., has been a darling in Vancouver's technology scene. Last year, it attracted US$900 million in venture capital from a consortium including Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), Sixth Street, Tidemark and the venture-capital arm of Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG; GOOGL), known as CapitalG.
Clio may be best known to sports fans for it being the official sponsor on the Vancouver Canucks' away uniforms — a likely pricey sponsorship for which details have not been made public.
"This is a watershed moment for Clio and the broader legal profession," Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton said Monday in a statement.
BIV spoke with MDS M&A Lawyers' CEO Ben Slager, who was not involved with the deal but said it was great news for Vancouver's technology cluster and companies that work alongside it.
"Here's a sign of strength — a B.C. company acquiring, instead of being acquired," he said.
"It's good for the support ecosystem around Clio. There's probably going to be an equity call .... So it shows that the whole ecosystem is feeling very confident about the space."
He said the fact that the deal involves software as opposed to hardware likely helped it complete, given that software is unlikely to be included in any U.S. tariffs.
"There's a lot of capital flows going to tech services, as opposed to hard tech, because people are still trying to figure out whether there will be tariffs on hard tech," he said.
Newton explained that for the past 17 years, he has been building Clio's platform, which enables law firms to operate at their highest potential.
"With vLex, we're building on that foundation with technology that understands the substance of the law," he said. "By bringing together the business and practice of law in a unified platform, we're revolutionizing every aspect of legal work. This sets the stage for a future powered by agentic AI, and marks the establishment of a new industry category — one that will empower legal professionals to serve clients with unprecedented insight and precision."
The deal will result in Clio able to combine its own legal operating system, now used by more than 200,000 legal professionals, with what vLex calls its "cutting-edge legal intelligence platform." The vLex platform includes what the company calls Vincent, an AI, built on what it says is the industry's most comprehensive global legal database.
"Together, these platforms establish a new category of intelligent legal technology at the intersection of the business and practice of law, empowering legal professionals to seamlessly manage, research, and execute legal work within a unified system," Clio said in a news release.
Thousands of legal teams already use Vincent, Clio said.
"Renowned for its accuracy and advanced cross-jurisdictional reasoning, Vincent has transformed legal AI, delivering faster, deeper insights across global matters," the company said in the release. "It's powered by vLex's proprietary global database of more than a billion editorially enriched legal documents — the most comprehensive global legal library in the world."
"This signals the onset of a transformative era in the legal industry, unlike anything we've seen before," said vLex co-founder and CEO Lluís Faus in a statement.
Goldman Sachs acted as Clio's exclusive financial advisor. Law firms Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Gowling WLG served as legal counsel to Clio in the transaction.
One lesson Newton shared in a speech at the recent Web Summit in Vancouver was to focus on a clear and small niche and do it well.
Newton called these niches “verticals,” and equated them with companies that seek to provide “horizontal” technologies that solve a whole bunch of different problems.
Focusing on niches “positions you for a much deeper and expansive opportunity to deliver truly deep value to that vertical, and you're able to build a product that is fit perfectly for that vertical, and that will eventually see you outpace and displace the horizontal players in that space,” he said.
