US enterprise resource planning (ERP) company Carta has agreed to buy UK alternative legal services provider Avantia as part of its plan to launch Carta Law – an AI-native law firm for the private capital industry.
Carta Law aims to allow private capital firms to manage their legal and compliance work within a single platform, thereby reducing the need to hire traditional law firms for routine legal tasks.
It is envisaged that the legal platform will integrate with Carta’s ERP offering, streamlining fund administration and deal activity and providing a robust system of record that can inform future deal work.
This is beneficial for firms that would traditionally have to manage this using fragmented infrastructure across disparate administration, legal and compliance systems, which can often delay transaction times, Carta says.
London-based Avantia Law is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as an alternative business structure and has 13 practising solicitors on its books. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Henry Ward, CEO at Carta, said: “Avantia built the best legal and compliance product for private capital and now we’re making it foundational infrastructure. The largest PE firms in the world are paying top-tier law firms for high-volume, ultimately routine legal work, and they shouldn’t have to. Carta Law changes that by connecting Avantia’s AI-native delivery, outcome-based pricing and lawyer-backed review directly to Carta’s system of record for private capital.”
Avantia is already used by more than 200 asset managers globally, including 30% of the world’s largest funds and supporting transactions across more than $15trn in assets under management, Carta says.
James Sutton, CEO at Avantia, said: “We founded Avantia in 2019 on a contrarian bet – that AI could deliver legal and compliance outcomes, not just assist with them. Pioneering that outcome-as-a-service model drove rapid growth across some of the world’s largest asset managers, and ultimately brought us here. Now, as part of Carta, we are excited to take it to the whole ecosystem.”
Cooley advised Avantia on the transaction, led by London-based Ben Shribman, Harry Calkin and Aaron Archer.
The deal follows Carta’s acquisition earlier this year of ListAlpha, which integrates deal team and investor relations workflows into Carta’s ERP system.
Carta says it has embedded AI throughout its platform using Claude plugins and other AI models that connect deal sourcing for investment teams, portfolio analytics for limited partners, fund insights for CFOs and limited partner engagement for general partners.
Last month, LexisNexis-owner RELX agreed to buy French legal AI platform Doctrine, while in March Swedish legaltech business Legora acquired Canadian legal AI platform Walter AI.
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