Robert Ambrogi Blog
Trellis Research, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform, has raised $14.1 million in a Series A round that it will use to expand its coverage into additional states and its customer base into additional industries.
Launched in 2018 as a judicial analytics platform for California state courts, Trellis has now broadened into a searchable database of state trial court data, covering courts in 12 states.
It offers two products: Smart Search, through which users are able to find court dockets, rulings and filed documents, and Judge Analytics, where users can find information about judges’ caseloads and ruling tendencies, including grant rates for specific types of motions and anticipated timing to reach certain milestones.
Trellis was founded by Nicole Clark, a lawyer who initially began collecting data on judges for her own use while a litigation associate in Los Angeles. “Every time someone would go before a new judge, an email would go around the firm asking for information on the judge,” Clark told me in a 2019 interview.
This latest funding round brings the company’s total funding to $20 million. It was led by venture capital firm Headline, with participation from Calibrate Ventures, Craft Ventures, and Revel Partners.
Several individuals from the legal industry also participated, including Colin Stretch, former general counsel of Facebook; Julius Genachowski, former FCC chairman; David Hantman, former head of public policy at Airbnb; Eddie Lazarus, EVP at Sonos; and Matt Mazza, general counsel at Appfolio.
The latest funding will be used to fuel product expansion and hiring efforts as the company seeks to extend its reach across all 50 states. Trellis will also use the financing to expand its customer base beyond the legal vertical into adjacent industries that need court data — including real estate and property management, financial services and insurance.
“The opacity of the state court system is unacceptable,” Clark said in a statement announcing the round. “By creating a way to aggregate data, and providing legal teams with a streamlined way to access critical case-making insights, we are modernizing the world’s largest court system.”
Trellis says that it currently aggregates data from 362 trial courts across 12 states (which does not include all courts for each state). For every county it covers, it includes 15 years of historical trial case data, verdict analysis, visualizations, and searchable filed documents. Trellis’ database contains over 90 million documents.