“To match hunger with the desire to eat” is a classic proverb, a universal truth that reflects the perfect combination of two complementary elements. On one side, we have a dish rich in data, with a judicial backlog estimated at eighty million cases. Add to this some extra seasoning: a world-record number of lawyers per capita, over a thousand educational institutions, and an environment that fosters litigation — where access to justice is free and enshrined in the Constitution.
Then come the spices and condiments, turning it into a proper banquet: all this data is digitised, available, open to the public, and to some extent structured and capable of being parameterised. It is therefore possible to carry out jurimetrics, identifying recurring practices in court decisions, building a genuine body of case law, and assessing the likelihood of success in a legal action. One can also determine the average duration of proceedings, conduct research, develop legal theories, and consult hundreds of templates for contracts and petitions.
Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs and many other great minds, when describing the phenomenon of technological innovation in Silicon Valley, said the secret lies in planting a seed in fertile soil. It may seem banal, but it aptly describes how things unfold in such contexts — the environment must be propitious, as described above, and the seed lies in the entrepreneur’s willingness to challenge paradigms and explore new frontiers.
And that is precisely what a group of young people from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, did just over fifteen years ago. Eager to innovate, they saw an opportunity to sow seeds in fertile ground. When they founded JusBrasil, their aim was to democratise access to legal information in a country of continental proportions, where data was disconnected and siloed. A judicial precedent from the south of the country, for example, was not available on a unified platform. It was not possible to carry out research on a single database, nor to establish concrete parameters for judicial trends and precedents.
As with any start-up, once a market gap was identified, it was essential to scale — and to seek funding. The exponential growth did not happen overnight, unlike the glamorous stories told in big tech folklore. Five years in, JusBrasil received its first seed investment, and in 2016 raised USD 1.8 million in a Series A round. In 2020, the start-up received a Series B investment of USD 7.7 million, followed by a Series C round in 2021 worth USD 32.5 million. Most recently, it secured USD 86.1 million in a round led by Warburg Pincus, one of the largest private equity funds in the United States. Since its inception, JusBrasil has been backed by investment funds such as Monashees, SoftBank, and Founders Fund, collectively raising approximately USD 128 million.
Currently, the platform contains over 1.2 billion public documents from the Brazilian judiciary, covering more than 1,400 sources of legal data (which have likely tripled since the time of writing). The legaltech, which began with 10 employees, now has around 600, and receives 30 million unique users per month. More than 80% of Brazilian lawyers are registered on the platform — over half a million. In the M&A market, the company has acquired Bipbop, which specialises in data extraction from websites, portals and both public and private systems using crawlers and machine learning. It also incorporated two other legaltechs — Jurídico Certo and Teewa in 2018 and 2019, respectively — as well as Digesto in 2021.
The figures are undeniably impressive. They reflect the level of maturity and entrenchment of a global industry leader, positioning JusBrasil as a key player in the legaltech sector, which is still carving out its space in the private equity market. However, two additional aspects are worth highlighting to explain JusBrasil’s remarkable success: its appetite for Schumpeterian-style creative destruction and its social impact.
Creative destruction, as is well known, is the process through which innovations replace the old, rendering obsolete companies and technologies redundant. JusBrasil continually reinvents itself, launching new solutions to replace older ones. A recent example is JusIA, a generative AI platform that interacts with users to provide contracts, petitions, and answers to both simple and complex legal questions. Other solutions, such as its B2B institutional partnership model for developing research, have formed another growth vertical. Indeed, for the second year running, the Oeiras Valley region hosted, during the Brazil-Lisbon Forum, the launch of a valuable catalogue of all Brazilian judicial precedents related to the General Data Protection Law.
As for its social impact, it bears repeating that the vast majority of Brazil’s more than one million lawyers are self-employed professionals, often lacking the resources to build a robust, scalable organisational and management structure. Thanks to JusBrasil’s automation, offered at accessible prices, a significant proportion of these legal professionals can carry out their work more effectively and, above all, with dignity. Arguably, the platform has been far more successful in fulfilling this role than the professional association itself.
May the fame and success of JusBrasil’s founders never leave them satisfied. As Steve Jobs famously said in his commencement address at Stanford: “stay hungry, stay foolish.”
