Logan Brown, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer, began the year billing hours at the global law firm Cooley. Now she’s building a tech-first law firm that meets the routine needs of startups, without the Big Law price tag.
Soxton, Brown’s new venture, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
“I didn’t have a deck. I didn’t have a team,” Brown said.
Instead, she told investors, “I am building the solution for founders. That is not the billable hour.”
Cooley hired Brown straight out of Harvard Law School. She spent about two and a half years working with emerging companies and helping open the firm’s Miami office. In May, she took a risk and left a secure Big Law job to launch her own startup.
Two weeks after her last day, she flew to New York City and dropped in on an event hosted by a fund she had pitched.
There, she met Katie Jacobs Stanton, a venture capitalist who founded Moxxie Ventures and who has held executive roles at Twitter, Google, and Yahoo. Brown gave her the quick version of Soxton on the spot. Moxxie Ventures sent over a term sheet within a week.
“I’ve never moved so fast to invest,” Jacobs Stanton told Business Insider.
Moxxie led the round, with participation from Coalition, Strobe Ventures, Flex, Park Rangers Capital, and Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake.
Unlike the legal software vendor Harvey, Soxton doesn’t sell software to law firms. It offers legal services directly to startups. Brown said the company helps founders tick the boxes at the top of their checklists: incorporation, fundraising, equity issuance, and compliance checks.
Brown said Soxton does not replace a law firm when it comes to nuanced legal work. What it can replace, she says, is the shaky legal advice founders might pull from ChatGPT or another chatbot.
For $20 a month, clients can grab a contract template from Soxton’s library and tweak the language. Most clients request a custom contract reviewed by an attorney, Brown said, with Soxton turning it around in four hours for $100.
While Soxton has been operating in stealth, with only a waitlist on its website, Brown said more than 270 companies — mostly pre-seed startups — have used it so far. Many clients are founders who wouldn’t hire a lawyer so early and would otherwise turn to ChatGPT to ask questions.
“People put their contracts into ChatGPT, and they say, ‘What does this mean?’ It’s often very wrong,” Brown said. “I think it’s designed to sound correct. Founders really rely on that, and so we’re working on retraining founders.”
A smaller slice of clients are startups that have raised funding and are already working with a Big Law firm, though they still route low-stakes work such as advisor agreements and influencer contracts through Soxton.
The legal tech industry has undergone major shifts this year. The first wave of startups developed tools for law firms, aiming to make legal services faster and cheaper. The newer wave handles the work itself, hiring lawyers on contract and arming them with software that can chew through documents and spit out summaries and drafts.
Crosby, backed by Sequoia Capital, handles the unglamorous but essential chore of contract review. Covenant helps private-market investors parse dense fund documents. Manifest Law and Casium use AI to file and track visa applications for employers.
Brown shrugged off comparisons to Crosby. That startup, which announced a $20 million Series A in October, largely serves more established companies than Soxton’s typical day-one clients. Brown casts Soxton as more of an outside general counsel for founders, while Crosby focuses on contract review.
Ashley Mayer, cofounder and general partner of Coalition, says while other companies focus on “bigger-ticket” mid-market and business customers, Brown makes a smart bet on young companies.
“By offering a better, more affordable product, Soxton actually expands the market, making it possible for a broader set of startups to access foundational legal services and for those moving away from big law firms to increase their consumption,” Mayer said.
“If your mission is to end the billable hour,” she added, “this is the place to start.”
Jacobs Stanton described Brown as a high-energy founder with “a history of winning.” While at Harvard, Brown also started a pantsuit company after a frustrating search for something to wear to an interview.
Zooming out, Brown is part of a broader reshuffling in the legal profession.
At conferences and in online forums, talk of a Big Law exodus has gotten louder. More associates are stepping off the partner track to build the next generation of legal software. Startups such as Harvey, Norm Ai, and Legora are hiring “legal engineers,” with JDs preferred.
Soxton plans to start snapping up attorneys. For now, it has three software engineers on payroll and a roster of contracted attorneys working through a separate Massachusetts law firm. Brown said she’s about to make her first full-time offer to a Big Law attorney.
“She is just a force of nature,” Jacobs Stanton said.
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