Robert Ambrogi Blog
PERSUIT, a technology company that specializes in outside counsel management for corporate legal departments, has acquired Apperio, a spend-management platform for corporate legal.
The news comes as the CLOC Global Legal Institute, a conference devoted to legal operations professionals in corporate legal, kicks off today in Las Vegas.
“This strategic acquisition reinforces PERSUIT’s unique ability to deliver an integrated platform that transforms how legal departments scope, price, select and manage outside counsel — transforming legal operations into a strategic driver of business impact,” the company said in an announcement on its website.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York, PERSUIT’s platform is designed to streamline how in-house legal teams engage, select, and manage law firms by enabling a competitive, transparent RFP (Request for Proposal) process and providing tools for benchmarking, rate negotiation, and data-driven insights.
Two years ago, it introduced an AI-powered proposal analyzer to summarize and compare law firm proposals.
Related: In Defense of the Billable Hour: A LawNext Interview with Apperio CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar.
Apperio, founded in London in 2013 by Nicholas d’Adhemar, a former lawyer and the company’s CEO until last year, provides in-house counsel with a comprehensive view of their legal spending on a single dashboard. The platform aggregates and analyzes both historical and current legal spend, including work-in-progress, and provides a streamlined invoice approval workflow.
In 2020, Apperio launched a major drive to expand from the U.K. into the U.S. market, and in 2023, it raised a $7 million growth round to help accelerate that expansion.
Turning Spend Into Performance
“This acquisition accelerates our ability to connect every point in the outside counsel workflow with intelligence,” said Jim Delkousis, CEO of PERSUIT. “We’re not just managing spend — we’re turning it into performance.”
PERSUIT says the acquisition is a “bold step forward in building an end-to-end platform that powers smarter decision-making from intake to invoice approval and payment.”
“Combined with PERSUIT’s strengths in AI-powered firm recommendations, dynamic scoping, and pricing intelligence, the addition of Apperio delivers full transparency into legal spend and real-time invoice validation — ensuring value delivered always matches value paid,” the company says.
Dominic Aelberry, the current CEO of Apperio, said he is thrilled to join forces with PERSUIT. “Together, we’ll give legal teams the actionable data across every step of the workflow needed to manage spend, maximize value, and lead with confidence.”
PERSUIT says that 97% of global 200 law firms are “actively engaging” on its platform, and that it has facilitated over 10,000 legal matters and processed over $17 billion in proposals.
In 2021, PERSUIT raised $20 million in a Series A funding round.