Australian legaltech Xakia Technologies – which has developed a matter management platform for in-house teams – has appointed a UK-based legaltech entrepreneur as its first-ever vice president to support the company's expansion across the EMEA region.

Dan Wales is joining the company to lead sales and strategic development in the newly-created role, reporting to CEO Jodie Baker, and will continue to be based in London. 

Wales is best-known as the founder of DW Reporting, a data-driven pricing technology for the legal sector that was acquired by software giant BigHand for an undisclosed sum in 2018. 

Founded in 2016, Xakia Technologies’ flagship product, Xakia, centres on legal matter management, legal intake and triage, legal spend and external counsel management and legal data analytics and reporting. 

The platform also claims to be the only multilingual one on the market, with options to configure Xakia in English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Danish, Dutch and Portuguese. 

“When lawyers go from private practice to in-house, the tech they have there doesn’t necessarily go with them,” Wales said. “I see this role as an opportunity to play a part in the democratisation of tech in the legal sector, which tends to involve more visibility than transparency. Xakia has incredible traction in the US and Asia Pacific, and we are now looking to build up our operations in Europe to a similar standard.” 

Baker, who is based in Australia, said Wales’ appointment will play a “critical role” in growing the company’s reach in the EMEA region. It currently has bases in Melbourne and in Kansas City, Missouri. 

“The growth of our client base in EMEA over the past 12 months demonstrates the need for a seriously simple in-house legal matter management platform,” Baker said. “Legaltech need not be costly and complex to deploy. Xakia removes adoption barriers and is democratising the technology, making it available to everyone, with ease of scalability, usability, and affordability.”

Before setting up DW Reporting, Wales had held finance, projects and reporting manager roles at a number of law firms, including Mayer Brown, Hogan Lovells and Howard Kennedy. Following the sale of his company to BigHand, he founded and ran Oliella Partners, a legal consultancy based in London.

Earlier this month, BigHand purchased US business intelligence and financial analytics provider Iridium Technology in a bid to boost its analytics offering. Iridium’s 100-strong team moved across to BigHand as part of the deal, taking its overall headcount to more than 350.