Legal.io used this series to impress Tiger Global

Present the company

Legal.io, a hiring marketplace for legal talent, announced in March that it had raised an $11.6 million Series A round.

Hedge fund giant Tiger Global, which has invested in top companies like Facebook, Stripe and Peloton, led the funding round.

Founded in 2015 by a former DLA Piper attorney, Legal.io helps large corporations like

Zoom

, Medallia and Nextdoor are hiring attorneys and other legal professionals. It has more than 40 corporate clients, 70% of which are publicly traded companies with legal departments, according to Pieter Gunst, the startup’s founder and CEO.

Start by showing the pull

Gunst said he likes to get investors’ attention by showing traction, including 4.5 times revenue growth from the start of 2020 to the end of 2021.

Paint a picture of the larger context

Legal.io was founded on the thesis that as online networks like LinkedIn become more mature, there was a greater need for industry-specific recruitment platforms, like Doximity for the medical industry, Gunst said.

The startup is geared toward the needs of the legal industry, especially as lawyers increasingly consider non-traditional paths away from Big Law.

Explain where Legal.io comes in

Legal.io responds to these trends by creating a marketplace for lawyers and other legal talent for temporary and permanent roles. There are more than 8,000 legal professionals in its network, and they have access to information such as salary data and data around which software companies use.

The startup also hosts in-person events, weekly newsletters, and invite-only

Soft

channels to create a sense of community for its users, according to Gunst.

…on the sell side…

Gunst uses Xakia as an example of legal technology software used by some of its corporate clients.

“We know exactly who in our network knows about these tools and how quickly adoption of these tools is growing,” Gunst said.

This kind of information, along with market wages, can help bring transparency to the industry, Gunst added.

… and the discovery side of employment

Legal.io curates job postings across 24,000 available positions, finding the ones it thinks will be of greatest interest to its network, Gunst said. The startup has helped its more than 40 clients make between one and 10 hires.

“We’re not like a traditional recruiting agency trying to fill 50 vacancies. We try to educate our community of legal professionals about what’s happening in the job market,” Gunst said.