Pandektes raises €13.5M Series A to replace Europe's incumbent legal research publishers

Pandektes's first customer was an organisation whose juniors kept taking procedural questions to its seniors. It "spent a lot of time researching procedural matters and had a heavy burden of knowledge sharing between seniors and juniors," Casper Laursen, the company's CEO and co-founder, told TNW ^[15]. "They're still a customer with us to this day, more than 3 years later," he said ^[16].

The product pulls legal documents together from scattered sources and helps lawyers find the right one quickly ^[17]. The pitch built on it is bigger. "From that initial headstart we knew that we could keep outpacing them on product development and that we could eventually begin replacing them, which is what's happening now," Laursen told TNW ^[10]. Andreas Schenk, managing partner at lead investor Alstin Capital, said his firm's interest came from pent-up demand, according to the same report ^[2][14].

So the replacement claim depends on what buyers do once the trial ends. Buying and cancelling are two separate acts ^[13]. A firm can pay for Pandektes, keep its Karnov or Beck licence, and still count among the two in three who bought ^[6][13]. Only a cancellation is the replacement Laursen describes, and the company describes how often that happens with one word, "many". The company also reported that revenue grew six times over the past year ^[12].

The customer count is more solid. Going from just over 100 organisations at the seed round ^[11] to more than 500 is roughly a fivefold rise ^[1].

Lawyers have had reasons not to switch. In most European countries a single provider has long been the standard way to get at the law, whether that is LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck or Karnov ^[6]. Pandektes argues this has made leaving expensive even as prices kept rising ^[7]. Most law is public. The cost was in collecting it from thousands of sources and keeping it reliable enough to use in court. That work needed large editorial teams, and the founders bet that AI could do much of it ^[8].

For a knowledge manager weighing a trial, I'd put the decision on two axes. The first is coverage: does the tool include the jurisdictions and practice areas the firm's lawyers search each week? For now that means the three countries Pandektes already serves ^[5]. The second is whether the incumbent can be dropped at renewal. Where both hold, the trial is a replacement test and the saving is the old subscription. If coverage holds but the incumbent stays, the firm is buying a second research tool. That tool then has to pay for itself in senior hours no longer spent answering juniors, the problem the first customer bought it to fix ^[15]. Without coverage there is nothing to test yet.

The forcing function I'd use is a short list written before the trial starts. It says what the incumbent would have to fail at for the firm to cancel it, and it gets checked against last month's real research questions. A firm that buys and keeps its old licence counts toward the two-in-three figure but not toward the cancellations ^[13].