# SimpleLegal

Software for Legal Operations. Sales has Salesforce. Legal has SimpleLegal.

## Elevator pitch
We organize the legal vendors, projects, financials, budgets, and more so that the lawyers can focus on protecting and growing the company.

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/simplelegal
- Entity ID: wefunder:company:5978
- Last updated: 2026-10-08T05:01:06Z
- Generated at: 2026-10-08T17:31:06Z

## Quick facts
- Raised a Seed Round 2015
- 10 years industry experience
- Second startup for this team

## Active fundraises
- wefunder:fundraise:4871: 506(c) successful (USD)

## Story
Fixing the Problem Legal bills are notoriously long, detailed—down to the tenth of an hour—and often flawed. Errors can be caused by undertrained staff assigning the wrong billing increments to a task or lawyers charging for work that’s unrelated or unnecessary. It’s up to the client to vet the bill, line by line. Furthermore, sorting through legal bills so that finance and accounting teams can allocate fees is an inefficient use of employees’ time and companies' budget. Both are tasks that software should be handling, according to SimpleLegal. The startup is positioning itself as an enabler of a data supply chain connecting the law firm, in-house legal team, and finance team by producing a realtime feed of expenses, replacing PDF and paper bills with an interactive, visual dashboard. “Taking the crap off people’s desks is what gets customers interested,” says SimpleLegal co-founder Nathan Wenzel. “It’s what this software is for.” Getting data instead of PDFs means companies can find out how much they’re paying for what and easily follow up with law firms about any questions. Aiming for Efficiency Wenzel and co-founder Patrik Outericky are repeat entrepreneurs , previously running Edge Solutions, a successful data analytics services company. After working for a variety of clients, they developed a suite of analytic applications to help corporate legal departments and insurance companies to review legal invoices. SimpleLegal builds on that process, bringing it to all kinds of businesses. SimpleLegal was born out of impatience with inefficiency—Wenzel observed that insurance companies would typically audit their legal data in assembly line fashion, often assigning skilled, high-level professionals to painstakingly review invoices one item at a time. The ineffectiveness struck a chord for Wenzel who, as a former data consultant, once refused to key expense figures into Excel from a PDF file because it was silly to extract numbers from a computer just to type them back into a computer. Seeing the same problem in auditing legal bills, he set out to develop a software solution that would automate, parse, and organize the muddle of invoices. The system has stood up to the job. In pilots with several companies willing to hand over their historical data, the results of the algorithms closely matched the findings of the experienced human auditors. In fact, in some instances the algorithm detected discrepancies that less-experienced auditors tended to miss. The clients reported that the software was more consistent than some of their employees’ work, Wenzel says. Making the Process Better “We’re not trying to be a new puzzle piece [for auditors],” Wenzel says. “We fit into their existing process.” First, law firms can submit bills by email or direct upload. Then the system takes over, using its natural language processing system to order the data and flag inappropriate charges. Auditors’ judgments continue to play the key role of helping the software constantly stay one step ahead. “People and software working together is how you really create value. Software can weed out the frequent, transactional issues and people can then focus on high-value tasks,” Wenzel says. Target Market Smaller companies spending less than $25 million on legal fees are SimpleLegal’s prime market, according to the founders. The system can save those businesses’ high-level staff from time-consuming bill-proofing—an attractive offer. “What allows us to initiate the sale is this headache that either a founder or General Counsel or the CFO is having where they’re just getting mountains of PDFs dumped on them and having to sort it out,” Wenzel says. Plus, SimpleLegal streamlines payments and invoices since clients pay their bills directly through the system. SimpleLegal is also getting traction with larger companies. It landed a pilot with a Fortune 500 insurer that’s handed over a year’s worth of legal data; about $1.1 billion dollars worth of legal bills. Currently, SimpleLegal charges 1% on the bills that run through its system, but they anticipate moving to a flat-fee, tiered model based on anticipated legal spending in the future. Also down the road, Wenzel says: “Our goal is not just to make auditing better. Our goal is to fix the billing problem created by hourly billing. We've already helped customers move to a fixed price model.”

## FAQ
1. **What is the difference between your product and existing products like Serengeti?**
   - Serengeti, DataCert, Mitratech, Legal Exchange, etc. are all eBilling providers/products that have been in this market for some time. The reason we built SimpleLegal is our belief that those applications, despite an expanding list of features, haven't kept pace with evolving customer expectations over the past 10-20 years. Despite the best efforts of those incumbent vendors, most legal bills are still submitted either as paper or PDF. Their failure to address large market segments is our oppo...

## Team
- Nathan Wenzel (Co-founder and CEO)
- Patrik Outericky (Co-founder and CTO)

## Recent posts
- SimpleLegal Acquisition (2019-05-19T19:09:21Z)
- Predictive First. Software should produce Outcomes, not just Reports. http://blog.simplelegal.com/predictive-software-for-general-counsels (2014-09-16T17:24:40Z)
- Several SimpleLegal customers on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list! We'd like to help everyone on the list. Do you have connections into these names? http://www.cnbc.com/id/101734664 (2014-06-17T23:53:02Z)
- Just announced automated predictive invoice coding. Early beta customers were seeing 90% reduction in the time required to code invoices with accuracy rates of 90%-97%. http://blog.simplelegal.com/predictive-invoice-coding-with-machine-learning (2014-04-24T17:44:55Z)
- SimpleLegal called a Diamond by Blue Hill Research. Says our focus on product usability is what makes us stand out from the crowd. The article goes on to say, "the company is expanding the addressable market for legal spend management." http://bit.ly/1q7Ahmn (2014-03-05T21:26:10Z)
- SimpleLegal growing revenue 50% month-over-month, from November 2013 to December to January 2014. (2014-02-03T15:25:22Z)
- Part 2 (of 2) of CEO Nathan Wenzel's interview with GC Research Club in their series on legal tech investment, innovation, and start-ups. http://community.sion1.com/GCresearch/post/GCRC-Startups-and-Innovation---Nathan-Wenzel-from-Simple-Legal--2- (2014-01-20T22:13:07Z)
- SimpleLegal now helps law firms submit bills! Moving forward with our mission to fix legal billing and be the connection between vendors and customers, we have launched our first product aimed at helping law firms bill. http://blog.simplelegal.com/quickbooks-to-ledes (2014-01-17T17:13:49Z)
- Part 1 of CEO Nathan Wenzel's interview with GC Research Club: http://community.sion1.com/GCresearch/post/GCRC-Startups-and-Innovation---Nathan-Wenzel-from-Simple-Legal (2014-01-10T18:19:09Z)
- SimpleLegal now integrates with Xero accounting software! Next up is integration with QuickBooks. We're one step closer to a complete back office API eliminating all paper invoices. http://blog.simplelegal.com/how-to-connect-simplelegal-to-xero-accounting-software (2013-12-20T22:35:10Z)
- A new customer came to us with a 200-page legal bill. We wrote up a blog post of how we helped them learn more about their legal spend. Check it out! http://blog.simplelegal.com/what-does-a-200-page-legal-bill-look-like (2013-11-22T20:53:20Z)
- SimpleLegal in the press. 6 Silicon Valley Startups That Could be Huge. http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/6-Silicon-Valley-Startups-Launched-In-The-Last-4921650.php (2013-10-24T20:06:01Z)

## Q&A
- Q: .
- Q: What is the difference between your product and existing products like Serengeti?
  - A: Serengeti, DataCert, Mitratech, Legal Exchange, etc. are all eBilling providers/products that have been in this market for some time. The reason we built SimpleLegal is our belief that those applications, despite an expanding list of features, haven't kept pace with evolving customer expectations over the past 10-20 years. Despite the best efforts of those incumbent vendors, most legal bills are still submitted either as paper or PDF. Their failure to address large market segments is our opportunity. We believe a platform that can drive down costs, integrate with customer applications, and that is embraced by law firms will not only win market share, but will greatly expand the size of the market. Unencumbered by legacy systems, we've built our platform on a modern architecture where we can automate processes and efficiently scale our systems. Though we don't feel it's necessary to race to the bottom, a low cost infrastructure will be a strategic advantage (see Jeff Bezos quote #2: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/09/09/the-25-smartest-things-jeff-bezos-has-ever-said.aspx) SimpleLegal is built to integrate with customer systems. Our API based infrastructure means our customers can interact with their data much more easily. IT can load their data warehouse. Finance can create their accruals. Accounting can load their payables. All directly from our platform. We believe law firms are a key stakeholder in our platform. We want them to like our product because it can help them serve their clients better and get paid faster. We already have our first firm putting our product in front of their customers as a value-add service. Check out our video demo for a brief intro to SimpleLegal: http://blog.simplelegal.com/simplelegal-video-demo
- Q: Would you please provide more details, including IDs of the investors, on the Form D filed with the SEC today, indicating you raised $10M in new VC funding?
- Q: Hello, My name is miss laura, i saw your profile and it drew my attention to write to you. I would like you to communicate me through my e-mail address (sgt.lauraralph2@gmail.com) laura