Dutch-based Sdu, a supplier of legal content in the Netherlands and part of the European leader Lefebvre Sarrut, announced that it has acquired Amsterdam-based Bluetick, an AI-based online search engine for tax and legal professionals, as of January 5, 2023.
With this deal, lawyers, tax specialists and other legal professionals get the option to search better and faster for judgments, comments, literature, and other legal content in all databases and legal sources of Sdu, such as OpMaat and NDFR, as well as Rechtsorde.
How Bluetick’s AI search technology will help professionals
Lawyers and tax experts spend a lot of time searching databases and sources of legal knowledge. These days, there is so much digital content available that they are unsure if they have covered everything.
“A lawyer’s greatest fear is that the counterparty substantiates an argument in court with case law unknown to them, as a result of which their case collapses,” say Sander de Groot, CEO of Sdu, and Koen Aarns, founder and CEO of Bluetick. “Thanks to this acquisition, we can improve the research processes of lawyers across the whole of Europe together.”
With this acquisition, Bluetick’s AI search technology will help professionals to increase their productivity by cutting the time it takes to do searches from weeks to minutes and finding all relevant decisions and other important material fast. The technology will also be used across the board in Sdu’s research solutions and, eventually, in other Lefebvre Sarrut products across Europe.
Bluetick was founded in 2019 by data scientists Koen Aarns, Kasper Kooijman and Thijs Kranenburg, who specialise in AI and apply that in the legal market. Along with seven law firms, the startup claims to have created the first search engine that made it easier for attorneys to access case law. Bluetick, however, could only search open databases like rechtspraak.nl. Only 4 per cent of all rulings are contained in it.
To find more legal content, Bluetick and Sdu joined forces to search for judgements, commentary, Dutch and European legislation and regulations, case law, the decisions of complaints and dispute bodies, and the blogs of top attorneys. In addition to Sdu’s legal databases, users soon will be able to search their own sources using the same technology.
The technology is said to be more advanced than a straightforward search engine. Even when words and search keywords do not exactly match, Bluetick looks for context and related search terms to find similarities between verdicts. This will help legal professionals and tax experts to locate all relevant rulings and legal information easily. “That’s why we refer more to a digital assistant than a search engine,” two CEOs mention.
According to Sander de Groot and Koen Aarns, in the coming years, the percentage of public rulings published will rise from 4 per cent to basically all rulings. Bluetick will make it easier to search that huge mountain of data. This also applies to tax cases, where tax specialists search for similar rulings.
Aarns says, “We believe technology is better at some tasks than people are. We implement this technology in existing products, so that lawyers can use it themselves.” De Groot adds, “This way, the work of legal users is simplified, while the quality improves. Our goal is to ensure that within five years, lawyers will not have any problems conducting legal research anymore.”
ASIF Ventures makes an exit from Bluetick
In April 2020, Bluetick raised €210K in a pre-Seed funding round from Amsterdam-based ASIF Ventures and henQ Capital. On January 11, ASIF Ventures announced in a post that it has made an exit from Bluetick.
The firm says, “Today we are celebrating our first exit! The European market leader in creating legal content, Sdu, has acquired our portfolio company Bluetick.”
“We started ASIF with the goal of funding and supporting student startups five years ago. Since then, we’ve shared our knowledge, forged connections, and assisted founders in navigating the difficulties of scaling their businesses. After five years, we have made investments in 15 different businesses across numerous industries. With today’s achievement of obtaining our first exit, we have reached a new milestone and proved once again how well the concept of a student-focused venture capital fund works.”
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