Robert Ambrogi Blog
An Australian legal tech startup that has built what it describes as the first fact management system for litigation is announcing a A$7 million seed round and its expansion into the United States, including the opening of a San Francisco office and the launch of a self-serve platform aimed at smaller law firms.
Mary Technology, founded in Sydney in 2023, closed the round led by OIF Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sydney Angels and Empress Capital. The company says it will use the funding to deepen its U.S. presence and extend access to its platform beyond the large enterprise firms it has primarily served.
(Pictured above, from left, are Mary Technology’s cofounders Rowan McNamee, Luke Abagi, Harry Raworth and Daniel Lord-Doyle.)
What Mary Does
The company’s Fact Management System is designed to tackle what it calls “fact chaos” — the manual, time-intensive process of extracting and organizing critical facts and case information from the disorganized mix of documents that litigation teams typically face: discovery materials, emails, reports, transcripts, and other evidence.
The platform automatically converts unstructured, messy, and even handwritten documents into a structured, searchable, and verified fact record. Critically, it links each fact directly back to its source document, enabling lawyers to spot missed facts, case gaps, and inconsistencies in minutes rather than weeks. Firms using the platform report time savings of between 50% and 90%.
In an interview to be published next week for my LawNext podcast, CEO Daniel Lord-Doyle explained the technical philosophy behind the approach. Rather than storing documents as embeddings in a vector database — the approach used by large unified platforms like Harvey or Legora — Mary extracts every individual fact and builds what Lord-Doyle calls a “fact object,” enriched with metadata about who is involved, whether there are conflicts or inconsistencies, what issues the fact relates to, and where it comes from.
“In litigative law or dispute resolution, it’s the nuance that these compression machines remove,” Lord-Doyle said, referring to the embedding-based approach. “We extract every single fact and then attempt to consolidate, enrich, almost apply metadata.”
The distinction matters because of what Lord-Doyle calls the verification problem. When you ask a general-purpose AI tool how it arrived at an answer, it produces another authoritative-sounding response — but there is no traceable chain back to the source documents. Mary’s platform, by contrast, keeps what he describes as “complete tracing”: lawyers can see exactly which facts underpinned a work product, which have been human-verified, and which still need review before they can be relied on.
“If you are working with a colleague and you update or delete a fact, you really want to understand that that’s happened,” Lord-Doyle said. “When you come to a conclusion and produce a work product, you’re going to want to know which facts have actually been relied on here.”
The Origin Story
Mary is named after the aunt of co-founder Rowan McNamee, a barrister described as “ruthlessly efficient” — the idea being that every firm deserves a Mary. McNamee, who was working as a junior lawyer, recognized the problem early. In an interview to be published next week for the LawNext podcast, Lord-Doyle recounted how McNamee posted in a WhatsApp group of about 15 junior lawyers that he believed AI would revolutionize this kind of document work. Of the 15, only one responded — with a single heart emoji.
McNamee teamed up with Harry Raworth, and the two quickly built a prototype and signed their first 10 to 15 customers. Lord-Doyle, a software engineer, saw the value and joined alongside Luke Abagi, a product specialist — forming a four-person founding team that Lord-Doyle says covers all the necessary bases: law, product, sales, and engineering.
The ‘Last Mile’ Gap in Litigation Tech
The problem Mary is tackling sits in a gap that has long existed in litigation technology. E-discovery platforms like Relativity have done a remarkable job of reducing massive document sets — millions of pages down to tens of thousands. But from that point forward, the work of actually understanding what those documents say, extracting the relevant facts, and building a verified factual picture of a case has remained largely manual.
“I still think the biggest time saving will remain what those e-discovery tools have done,” Lord-Doyle said in the LawNext interview. “But I don’t think they’re the best tools to do that last mile work where you are trying to understand the facts of those 10,000 documents.”
It is a gap I noted myself during our conversation: the litigation market has been underserved by technology that goes to the heart of the actual work lawyers do once the document collection is complete. Mary is positioning itself squarely in that space.
Self-Serve for Smaller Firms
Alongside the funding announcement, Mary is launching a self-serve model in the U.S. for the first time, allowing smaller firms to sign up directly without going through a sales process. New users receive 100 free page credits to test the platform with their own documents.
Lord-Doyle said the move was driven in part by what the company was already observing: existing customers were sharing the platform with other firms and clients, and those new users were getting up and running without needing training. “Even the most technophobic lawyer should be able to come onto Mary and enjoy doing this work,” he said.
The self-serve launch is significant because it extends access beyond the large commercial litigation and enterprise clients Mary has primarily worked with — firms like Shine Lawyers, Maurice Blackburn, Hall & Wilcox, and Zaparas Lawyers in Australia. The company reports it has more than 2,000 lawyers globally using the platform, and 10x ARR growth in 2025. It is also in a pilot with one firm it describes only as being among the ten largest in the world.
Why San Francisco
Asked why the company chose San Francisco as its U.S. base, Lord-Doyle noted the practical advantage of time zones — San Francisco aligns better with Australia than New York does — along with California’s large legal market and access to talent. But he made clear it is just a starting point. The company’s strategy is focused on common law jurisdictions, with the U.S. and U.K. as the initial expansion markets.
Mary will be exhibiting at Legalweek in New York, where three of the four co-founders — Luke Abagi, Harry Raworth, and Rowan McNamee — along with the company’s Chief Commercial Officer will be on hand to demonstrate the platform.
Lawyers interested in trying the platform can sign up at marytechnology.com.