Using big law firms can come with steep price tags. Recently, Sears made headlines for filing bankruptcy and being billed over $200M by lawyers and advisors, leaving Sears with little remaining to pay employee severance. Bodhala is the legal spend management platform built for legal teams to optimize and understand their outside counsel spend in a centralized platform. The platform also offers a global data set that tracks over 32,000 law firms and 265,000 lawyers, allowing companies to benchmark their legal spending versus their competitors. Already used by clients in the financial services, healthcare, insurance, energy, and private equity, Bodhala has experienced 300+ percent growth in both revenue and headcount.
AlleyWatch sat down with CEO and Cofounder Raj Goyle to learn more about Bodhala, its future plans, and its recent funding
AlleyWatch: Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Raj Goyle, Bodhala: Edison Partners funded our Series A round with a $10M growth investment.
Tell us about the product or service that Bodhala offers.
Bodhala is a groundbreaking legal technology platform created by lawyers and software engineers to transform the half-a-trillion-dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret, and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.
We track over 32,000 law firms and 265,000 lawyers around the globe with that number growing every day.
Our four core product offerings include:
- Analytics: Gain visibility across your legal spend and identify opportunities to improve how you manage your outside counsel spend.
- Benchmarking: Measure the rates you pay your firms against similar companies and spend types.
- Rate Card RFP: Centralize your annual rate card process to measure the impact of your law firm rate increase requests.
- Matter RFP: Drive competition between existing panel firms and high-quality alternative counsel.
What inspired the start of Bodhala?
My time at Harvard Law School, coupled with my cofounder Ketan Jhaveri’s 10 years of experience as a corporate attorney, exposed us to the systemic cracks in the legal system. We saw that law firms were billing hefty rates without much transparency or accountability.
Ketan and I created Bodhala to tackle the outdated legal marketplace. We’re bringing transparency to the billable hour and sophisticated economics to the legal industry—one where visibility and fair competition lead to the selection of the right lawyer at the right law firm at the right price.
How is Bodhala different?
Never before has a legal department been able to know what a legal matter should cost and to uncover the inefficiencies in how a law firm delivers its services. Now they can. Bodhala is built on data – and how we develop it, how we utilize it, and how we analyze it for the benefit of our customers sets us apart. Our proprietary benchmarking metrics and rate review algorithms generate detailed insights into every aspect of legal spend. Our intuitive dashboard puts the information you need to make more cost-effective decisions about legal service providers at your fingertips, effectively boosting efficiency and reducing your bottom line.
What market does Bodhala target and how big is it?
We’re targeting in-house legal teams across several key verticals including healthcare services, finance & banking, insurance, energy, and pharmaceuticals. We provide these teams with the data and actionable insights they need to optimize their outside counsel spend. Globally, half-a-trillion dollars is spent on the legal industry each year.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
The status quo! We’re a category creator so our central challenge is making sure that companies understand that they can actually do something about this spend category that they haven’t been able to do before.
What’s your business model?
B2B Saas
What was the funding process like?
We met Dan Herscovici of Edison Partners last summer and began building the relationship from there. Edison Partners did their due diligence and met with several members of our team to learn more about Bodhala and the technology we’re offering. Thankfully we wrapped up the investment in the early stages of this COVID-19 pandemic. We’re grateful for Edison’s partnership and their investment, especially during this time, is a testament to the work being done here at Bodhala.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Time – working with institutional capital takes time and focus away from running your business so running an efficient process is very important.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Dan understood our mission to deliver groundbreaking legal technology solutions to empower companies to analyze, interpret, and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence with real transparency, real accountability, and real control. He saw that Bodhala is an industry leader, offering a one-of-a-kind platform that goes beyond what e-Billers are doing. Bodhala provides in-house legal teams with actionable insights to optimize their legal spend something that’s especially urgent during the current COVID-19 climate.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
With this financing, we are going to accelerate sales and marketing as well as product expansion. Specifically, we want to enhance our datasets to become even more valuable to our clients. Edison Partners has helped build great software businesses in other verticals, so we are excited to have their expertise as we look to expand.
Specifically, we want to enhance our datasets to become even more valuable to our clients. Edison Partners has helped build great software businesses in other verticals, so we are excited to have their expertise as we look to expand.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
This is common sense, but conserve cash and focus ruthlessly on the value of every dollar.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Leaning into the current crisis and continuing strong growth.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
It used to be the WeWork Honesty Market, but they ripped it out. WeWork isn’t what it used to be.
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