BigHand today (4 August) announced the acquisition of legal AI pricing specialist Ayora, in a move that it says marks the next phase in its AI strategy.
Ayora uses historic data to help lawyers and pricing teams create real time matter pricing, but within the breadth of the BigHand portfolio, it is anticipated that its agentic technology can be used well beyond that.
BigHand partnered with Ayora last quarter and says that the response from customers and the wider legal market has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the growing demand for AI-powered pricing solutions. While the partnership was formalised this year, the pair have worked together for 18 months, and chief marketing officer and EMEA revenue officer Briana McCrory told Legal IT Insider that while acquisition was on the cards, it was accelerated due to the response and need from the market.
The acquisition brings Ayora’s tech and eight-strong team into BigHand, with the first phase focused on integrating Ayora with BigHand Matter Pricing. Over time, AI capabilities will be introduced across BigHand’s wider portfolio, including resource management and business intelligence.
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Underlying all of this, Ayora’s data enrichment layer transforms unstructured firm data into structured, contextual intelligence. Ayora, which was incubated in Mishcon’s MDR Lab in 2023, featured in Legal IT Insider’s Startup Corner in October 2023. Co-founder Stefan Ciesla told Legal IT Insider: “You probably know from the days that we’ve done this Startup Corner review that we’ve been obsessed with this idea that law firms are sitting on a ton of pent-up data that could be used for a multitude of better purposes to better run the business.” One example is timesheets, which contain “insane records of experience” but are messy and not good enough for use at scale. As AI has taken off, this has become a bottleneck for firms, with Ciesla using the “garbage in, garbage out” analogy.
“What we have done at Ayora is built data enrichment. We built a system which uses LLMs and our own proprietary tech to profile matters.”
He says that if you go to any firm and ask “Hey, what have you done for HSBC”, they usually don’t have a central record. “They would have to call a bunch of people up and ask them,” says Ciesla, adding, “We solved that issue.”
Ayora classifies matters across a multitude of vantage points and this “really important breakthrough” led to firms including Harneys signing up. But given the hoops that companies need to go through to get access to sensitive data, deployment became a bottleneck for Ayora in itself.
Of the acquisition, Ciesla says: “From our point of view it just made sense because like we can go 100 times faster and benefit from all the amazing work that the team has been doing for many years.”
BigHand has been mapping data models across law firms and already has large client relationships, which Ciesla says means that instead of a painful IT project it will become a case of, “Ok, this is a button, let’s switch it on.”
While there is some overlap with the work that BigHand does with matter pricing, chief product officer Rob Stote said that Ayora takes pricing “to the next level, which is they now take an agentic layer and wrap that around what we’ve done with our software.”
This will be important as firms increasingly wrangle with fixed prices or even just being increasingly held to accurate fee estimates, where they need to rely on data, not instinct.
Going back to the breadth of the impact of the acquisition, Stote says: “I want to stress that for me, it’s not just about matter pricing. If we think about how firms make decisions, if we think about how what’s important for firms is the entire commercial spectrum, the entire operational spectrum. The technology that we’re bringing on board, overlaid on top of a lot of our products, will offer that agentic layer in the resource management space or the BI space. The way that Stefan and Gordon, the co-founder and CTO have built this technology, it allows us to very quickly put that on top of some of our other products and offer that value.”
The value of the deal isn’t public and nor is Ayora’s ARR, so all we really know for sure is that it raised a pre-seed round in 2024 of $1.6m.
