Legal Tech Firm ILS Raises $3M to Modernize Private Funds Workflows

CHICAGO, IL – March 09, 2026 – Intelligent Legal Solutions (ILS), a legal technology company targeting the complex world of private investment funds, today announced it has raised over $3 million in a Seed funding round. The round was led by Chicago Ventures, an early-stage venture firm known for backing companies that use technology to transform traditional industries.

Launched in 2024, ILS is rapidly gaining traction with its flagship platform, ProVision, which automates high-stakes post-close legal workflows that have long been a source of inefficiency and risk for law firms. This new capital infusion is earmarked to expand the ProVision platform and accelerate the company’s ambitious global growth strategy.

“We are thrilled to partner with Chicago Ventures, whose deep expertise assisting companies like ours to empower traditional businesses with technology will allow us to take our already substantial growth to another level,” said Fergus Plant, Co-Founder at ILS.

The High Stakes of Manual Workflows

For decades, the post-close phase of fund formation—particularly the management of side letters and Most Favored Nation (MFN) clauses—has been a stubbornly manual process. Investment funds lawyers at top-tier firms have traditionally relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email chains, and Word documents to track thousands of unique obligations made to investors. This method is not only labor-intensive but also fraught with risk, as a single missed obligation can lead to significant financial and reputational damage for a fund manager.

The complexity has only grown as side letters, which grant specific investors unique terms, have become more common and intricate. Tracking these bespoke terms and ensuring compliance with MFN clauses, which promise certain investors the benefit of more favorable terms given to others, becomes a monumental administrative challenge. The process often involves countless non-billable hours spent on administrative tracking, creating a significant drain on law firm resources and a point of friction with clients who demand both speed and accuracy.

From Practitioner Pain to Platform Solution

ILS was born directly from this industry pain point. Co-founders Fergus Plant and Jack McCarthy experienced these challenges firsthand while working in the investment funds teams at leading law firms like Goodwin and Proskauer. Recognizing a critical gap in the market for a purpose-built tool, they partnered with software expert and co-founder Stefano Benigni to create ProVision.

ProVision is designed to be a centralized workflow system for private funds legal teams. The platform ingests every side letter associated with a fund, creating a single, searchable system of record. It then uses what the company calls “surgically applied AI” to extract and structure negotiated terms into a database of obligations and elections. This transforms static legal documents into dynamic, queryable data, allowing legal teams to manage commitments with greater speed and control.

Adoption among elite law firms has been swift, with ILS counting over 10 of the world’s largest firms as customers, including Ropes & Gray, Fried Frank, Goodwin, and Paul, Weiss. Theresa Spartichino, Director of Practice Technology at Ropes & Gray LLP, commented on its impact: "ProVision is an important component of our asset management technology at Ropes & Gray. Our teams adopted it quickly, and ILS incorporated attorney feedback to develop features tailored to our needs. We look forward to collaborating on additional workflows in the future."

The platform's design also emphasizes security and compliance, adhering to strict SOC 2 Type 2 protocols and maintaining GDPR compliance—critical requirements for handling the sensitive data involved in global fundraises. For users, the result is less time spent on manual tracking, fewer errors, and a more consistent process across different matters.

Conan Hines, Director of Practice Innovation at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, highlighted the platform's operational benefits. "What’s been most valuable for us is the operational clarity ProVision brings to a high-volume, high-stakes workflow," he said. "It helps us translate side letter negotiations into a structured record we can use across the matter, which improves consistency for our asset management team and creates cleaner visibility when clients need updates fast."

Venture Capital Bets on Verticalized Legal Tech

The investment from Chicago Ventures signals strong investor confidence in specialized, or “vertical,” technology solutions that target specific industry niches. The broader legal tech market is experiencing a surge in funding, with investors increasingly drawn to platforms that solve tangible business problems with a clear return on investment. ILS’s focus on a high-value, underserved segment of the legal market makes it a prime example of this trend.

Eric Duboe, Partner at Chicago Ventures, articulated the firm’s thesis. "ILS is building the workflow system for private funds lawyers, starting with MFN and side-letter automation and expanding into a unified platform for fund formation teams," Duboe stated. "ProVision’s rapid adoption across leading AmLaw firms, combined with the team’s lawyer-led and highly disciplined approach to AI, uniquely positions the company to define this category. We’re proud to lead this round and partner with the team as they scale globally."

Charting a Course for Global Expansion

Despite its recent launch, ILS has already demonstrated significant market impact. In 2025 alone, its ProVision platform processed over 5,000 side letters across more than 450 matters, supporting fundraises that collectively represent over $150 billion in capital across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.

With the new funding, ILS plans to aggressively pursue an ambitious roadmap for 2026. The company intends to expand the ProVision platform’s capabilities to include automated comment memo management and co-investment tracking. It also plans to build tighter integrations with key fund administration platforms and CRM systems, further embedding itself into the private funds ecosystem. This investment will also fuel the growth of its team and support its entry into new international markets, with jurisdictions like Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands on the horizon. The company's long-term vision is to establish itself as the essential data layer for private funds' legal teams, creating powerful network effects as its structured database of obligations becomes an industry standard.