See news in: English Español Français Català

vLex closes € 4m investment round led by La Caixa and aims to become the online legal information leader in Latin America

Barcelona, January 25th, 2012.– vLex has closed a 4 million euros investment round with La Caixa (through Caixa Capital TIC fund) as the lead investor. Current partners and public investment from the Avanza Plan and ENISA have also joined the round. The round will allow vLex to strengthen its presence in the Latin American market with the aim of becoming the leader for online legal information in Spanish-speaking countries,

vLex provides an online legal research platform (http://vlex.com) serving the professional (lawyers and paralegals), government, academic and corporate markets.

vLex.com offers simple and effective search and information management tools. Through a powerful self-learning search engine, the customer can quickly research more than 62 million documents and find the answer to their information needs. vLex also provides access to the service through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).

Over 40,000 paid users worldwide are subscribed to its online platform, which gives access to one of the most comprehensive publisher catalogues on the market. The company has agreements with over 1,000 publishers worldwide, such as the World Bank, Gale, Proquest or the European Union.

vLex, founded in Barcelona, employs over 120 professionals in its Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Bogota and Mexico FD offices. vLex’s business model is based on subscription payment.

Among the distinguished clients of vLex are Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, Petrobas, the Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico, the Federal House of Representatives in Brazil, Garrigues and Cuatrecasas in Spain. Founders Lluís and Àngel Faus have led the project since 1999. Other vLex projects are Diariojuridico.com (an online legal newspaper) and Lexdir.com (a lawyers’ directory).

The online legal information market

At a global level, the online information market business was valued at 15 billion US dollars in 2009 and is forecasted to grow to 16 billion dollars this year. (Source: Simba Information ).

Latin America market will show great business opportunities based on its size, strong economic growth and potential technological development.

About Caixa Capital Risc

Caixa Capital Risc is the venture capital arm of La Caixa and invests in Spanish companies with high growth potential, accompanying them in their different stages of development. Caixa Capital Risc invests in innovative companies through three pilars: Caixa Capital Biomed, Caixa Capital TIC and Caixa Capital Micro.

Caixa Capital TIC, funded with a 20 million contribution from “la Caixa” and a minority participation by ICF and ENISA, invests in the information and internet technology sectors. At present its portfolio includes Privalia, Groupalia, Zyncro, Goodeal, i-neumáticos, Apesoft and Genasys.

vLex signs a strategic agreement with LLMC consortium which marks a step forward in the global spreading of unique and historical legal information.

The Barcelona-based company vLex (www.vlex.com) has signed an strategic agreement with the LLMC consortium to integrate into vLex's platform more than 780.000 legal documents from different countries around the world. Some of the licensed contents by vLex include unique Iraqui Legislation which is not available by any other commercial vendor, not even those in Iraq.

According to Lluis Faus, vLex's CEO, "this agreement means a major spread of legal documents to a large group of professionals and students from all around the world. Thus, we are delighted to allow users by having access to unique titles which were only available by researchers in American libraries, but now they are available by any subscriber globally". For Kathleen Richman, LLMC Director, "vLex responds perfectly to our expectations as the company integrates the content by respecting the initial format of the document such as index or footnotes; but also by providing an added value (relating the content with other documents, facilitating the search or using translations tools). Our main goals are preserving and spreading those contents and vLex is therefore the most indicated partner as it is growing internationally in a very quick way in terms of content and customers".

LLMC is a nonprofit law library consortium created by more than 90 law libraries whose main purpose is to preserve legal contents that may otherwise erode and deteriorate due to age and transferring them into either microfiche or digital format. All of the images captured in our scanning program are written to Silver Halide preservation-quality film. This film is stored, along with the original paper blocks of the books, in dark-archive conditions in space leased by LLMC in Kansas salt mines.

LLMC and vLex have found their complementarity as LLMC consortium preserves the unique and historical legal content and vLex spreads these unique titles globally.

About LLMC

LLMC is a non-profit cooperative of law libraries dedicated to the twing goals of preserving legal titles and government documents making this valuable content accessible.

LLMC provides libraries with a reliable a source of digital or film replacement as their older, physically deteriorating books become too burdensome to store. Coverage includes: Native American constitutions, corporate charters, the Yale Law Library Blackstone Collection, Canon Law, Civil Laws from European countries and an impressive Common Law Abroad collection related to the colonial dependencies of Great Britain held by 12 great law libraries, etc.

LLMC adopted digital online delivery in order to provide a higher quality of access to its data than was previously possible with film formats.

About vLex.com

vLex (www.vlex.com) is the most advanced provider of global legal information, giving access to contents from 96 countries in 10 different languages. vLex has agreements with global publishers, such as World Bank Publications Office, European Union, Commonwealth Secretariat, and more than 60 independent publishers all over the world. vLex serves customers in over 40 countries whom access daily more than 20 million legal documents avalaible in its advanced online platform. vLex has more than 150 employees from more than 30 nationalities. vLex is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain.

See all