Voting is now open! Help pick the 15 legal tech startups that will get to compete at the eighth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2024. Your votes determine the 15 companies selected to face off in a live pitch competition that will be the opening-night event of this year’s TECHSHOW, which is Feb. 14-17, 2024, in Chicago. They also get to exhibit in a special Startup Alley portion of the exhibit hall.

Below are summaries of the semifinalists, who have been selected by a panel of judges from all applications submitted. Please review them. Once you have done so, you can FIND THE BALLOT HERE.

DEADLINE FOR VOTING IS FRIDAY, DEC. 29, 2023, AT 11:45 P.M. ET.

Note: You will be able to cast your ballot just once, and on each ballot, you will be limited to five votes. As you will see from the ballot, you may vote for your top-five favorites or five times for top favorite, or any other mix of five votes.

The summaries listed below are based on information provided by the startups in their applications. In some cases as noted, startups have not provided information or have asked that information be kept confidential. Most of the startups have also provided a link to a demo video.

Please cast your votes here — and remember that the deadline is Dec. 29!

The companies listed below, in alphabetical order, are:

  • Ai.Law.
  • AltFee.
  • Altumatim.
  • Beagle.
  • Bequest.
  • BriefCatch.
  • Briefpoint.
  • Civille.
  • descrybe.ai.
  • Goodfact.
  • Gretchen.
  • Henchman.
  • INform54.
  • LawDroid Copilot.
  • Lexamica.
  • LexSelect.
  • Lupl.
  • Maxime.
  • Paxton AI.
  • Recital.
  • Resolutn.
  • 2nd Chair.
  • Skribe.ai.
  • Trustate.
  • VoiceScript

Ai.Law

Elevator Pitch: Provides AI-generated litigation documents, from pleadings to discovery.

What makes you unique or innovative? We are the first AI-driven platform to focus specifically on drafting litigation documents.

What problem do you solve? The substantial amount of time lawyers spend drafting documents during litigation. Freeing up time through automated AI drafting means handling more clients while working less hours, generating more revenue (especially for those billing flat fees). It also improves access to justice for society as lawyers can handle more cases, as well as remove some bias from the legal system through fact-first drafting.

Who are your competitors? Casetext, Spellbook, EvenUp, DoNotPay.com, Harvey.ai, Filevine, ailawyer.pro, Lexis, Westlaw, amto.ai, Better Legal, Paxton Legal AI.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/_XsV9TzvRbQ?si=D3BTc2lH3LHBxtEI

Founded: 5/1/2023, Columbus, Ohio

Target customer: Solo, small firm, and legal Aid organizations that are engaged in litigation.

Price: Monthly subscriptions based on usage at $89, $249, and $649.

Traction: We are adding about 25 people a day as registrants, having fully launched in late October 2023, and have begun demos with attorneys.

Plan for growth: We have started a multi-channel marketing effort to reach our target audience and expect growth to compound when attorneys begin to use the platform because it simply does not make sense for attorneys to spend hours drafting when AI can do the same thing in about two minutes. (See the demo video on responding to written discovery requests.)

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: The founder is openly autistic and regularly shares stories of his autism to help others find greater understanding.

Anything else? While we have recently launched, we spent some time on surveying the market and have planned our product development around the biggest pain points of litigators. We expect to grow as the legal industry becomes more comfortable with AI.

AltFee

Elevator Pitch: AltFee revolutionizes law firm pricing by offering a foundation for alternative fee structures. This system empowers firms to precisely assess and assign value to projects, vital in a landscape where AI/efficiency gains drastically shorten task timelines. Ensuring alignment between service prices and delivered value, AltFee encourages teams to share insights, collaborate, and analyze data trends. This collaborative approach enables confident scoping and pricing without the fear of underpricing.

What makes you unique or innovative? At the heart of AltFee lies a relentless pursuit of innovation – our platform is built to empower law firms to achieve unprecedented success through non-hourly pricing. This groundbreaking concept of systemizing and optimizing a firm’s approach to non-hourly pricing through the use of a purpose-built software tool is an incredibly substantial innovation in the legal pricing space.

A more specific example of our innovative approach is the addition of our value-based modifiers feature, which enables our customers to take a consistent and systematic approach to their value-based considerations when pricing. This is exceptionally innovative, as the majority of the firms that we speak to say they consider value when they price, but virtually none have been able to confirm anything more than an ad hoc gut-feel approach to value-based considerations. We knew that a systemized approach to addressing value-based considerations would be far more effective at consistently capturing the full value of the legal work being scoped and we delivered on that need with our innovative solution: Modifiers.

Another example is our Directory of Alternative Fee Providing Law Firms. We took the unprecedented step of building the first alternative fee focused community of law firms globally. In building this community we were able to survey AFA providing firms and collect a unique data set that we’ve turned into a comprehensive Legal Industry Pricing Report.

What problem do you solve? At AltFee, we are addressing one of the most significant challenges law firms are facing worldwide: the inability to depend solely on the billable hour model for pricing services and achieving profitable scalability. This predicament arises from the widespread adoption of advanced technology, which diminishes the time required to accomplish billable tasks. Additionally, clients are increasingly seeking transparency and alternative pricing options, while legal professionals are searching for a workplace environment that places value on more than just the quantity of time they invest in their work.

Who are your competitors? We do not see any other companies approaching the challenge in the same way we are, but a few companies in and around our space include: Intapp Pricing, BigHand Matter Pricing, and Virtual Pricing Director.

Demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/ae5135d3fcca442998f7b153bbd36160?sid=37c94ecc-362e-4012-892b-ce84b7c8df4a

Founded: 10/28/2020, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Target customer: Solos, small and medium size firms.

Price: Core Tier: $129/user/mo (includes 1 user); Elite Tier: $499/mo (includes 6 users); custom pricing for larger teams.

Traction: -The majority of our 35+ customers are located in the U.S. and Canada, but we also have customers in Australia and Mexico.

  • Our customers provide services in a range of different practice areas including corporate & commercial (business law), M&A, IP, family law, employment and labour, commercial lending, commercial and residential real estate, estate planning & trusts, entertainment law, and more.
  • Our users include a variety of roles, from managing partners, to associate lawyers, paralegals and admin/operations team members.
  • As of the date of us submitting this application, our customers have priced over 2,800 projects on AltFee, with the value of those projects exceeding $6.8M.

Plan for growth: Declined to publicly disclose.

Outside funding: Declined to publicly disclose.

Diversity: Over the past two consecutive summers, we have hired a total of three students from the University of Calgary Law School Innovation Program, two of whom identify as coming from an under-represented group (women studying science, technology, engineering and math), indigenous students, visible minorities, new Canadians (within 5 years), and persons with disabilities.

We have developed relationships with organizations like Tech Lady, who are positioned to help tech companies get connected to more diverse candidates for our future hires. We run a gender decoder for all new job postings, and we hired international contract software engineers.

Anything else? N/A.

Altumatim

Elevator Pitch: Altumatim is the story-based eDiscovery platform that fully automates document review and finds the most important evidence by learning the story the attorney wants to tell. Altumatim cuts through the noise in the ever-increasing volume of electronically stored information (ESI) and reduces the cost and time required to find the information that is critical to making informed decisions about whether or how to proceed with a matter and ultimately how to present the most compelling case at trial.

What makes you unique or innovative? Altumatim is the most innovative and effective AI-driven eDiscovery platform and is poised to transform the way the legal profession works with ESI. The core principle of the platform is, “Whoever tells the best story wins.” We exploited how essential story elements fit into any investigation or discovery process and made highly complex analytics fit naturally with the way legal professionals want to find answers in ESI. Our platform is the only one that learns your story (or your opponent’s) and has the power to efficiently deliver the best possible results.

Our latest release, Autonomous Review, is a seismic shift in document review for production. What used to take months can be completed in hours and exceeds human accuracy. We apply an intricate, proprietary decision process to every document and provide a reasoned analysis for each responsive and privilege call. We also automate detecting a variety of confidential information. Altumatim leverages the power of the latest in AI and computer technologies to provide results that others simply cannot provide. The ease of use, efficacy, and efficiency of Altumatim’s software is far beyond what others have been offering.

What problem do you solve? The discovery process has become overly complex and burdensome because the amount and type of ESI continues to grow and the inefficiencies of legacy software systems make matters worse. There are two primary problems – finding the information you need among all the noise and fulfilling your discovery obligations. Previously proposed solutions to each of those are too complicated, too expensive, and leave users and their clients frustrated. Those approaches do not effectively deliver the answers users need, leaving them wondering whether they found the most important information. Typical document review requires the majority of a company’s eDiscovery spend and leaves them questioning how all that expense did anything to advance their case. Altumatim is at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence and the latest technological advances and provides a far superior way to get much better results in less time and use less of a client’s budget.

Who are your competitors? No one is providing exactly what Altumatim offers. The closest competitors include Everlaw, Reveal, Casetext, ediscovery.ai and Beagle.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/@Altumatim_

Founded: 9/1/2017, Birmingham, MI

Target customer: Law firms (all sizes), corporate legal departments, and eDiscovery service providers (our current paying customers are law firms).

Price: The investigation platform is sold on a SaaS basis. Autonomous Review is sold on a per document or per review job basis. We do not publish our pricing.

Traction: We began selling our minimum viable product in 2022. We have small and midsize law firm customers. During 2023 we worked to establish the pipeline for Am Law 200 firms and corporate customers. We are currently working through POCs and contracts with several service providers.

Plan for growth: We are currently in a seed funding round to expand our team and increase our go-to-market spend. We are partnering with service providers, selling directly to law firms and approaching corporate legal departments. Our marketing includes sponsoring and speaking at national conferences, speaking at regional bar association events, strategic partnerships, webinars, and email campaigns. We are constantly innovating and will continue to provide the most cutting-edge technology within the eDiscovery marketplace.

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: One-half of our owners are immigrant people of color. One-quarter of our owners are female. One-third of our outside contractors are people of color or members of a minority group.

Anything else? The consistent reaction to our product is enthusiastically positive with many people saying that “this is the future” of eDiscovery. Just this week, a senior litigator at a large firm said that he felt as if he was “transported to 2050” during our demo. An example customer testimonial sums up the impact of our product on the practice well, “With Altumatim, I efficiently find the evidence I need to put our client in a position for a favorable outcome. It consistently brings relevant documents up to the top.”

Beagle

Elevator Pitch: EDiscovery vendor costs for the average commercial litigant average around $240k. Beagle slashes these costs by 3x. Additionally, Beagle significantly reduces the time required to locate and analyze documents and increases the accuracy of such analysis. As the first AI-native platform, Beagle utilizes AI to understand users’ intent and translate it into actions with internal and external tools, paralleling the capabilities of a junior attorney.

What makes you unique or innovative? Unlike other products, Beagle is built with AI capabilities in mind, so they are the core part of the workflow. A few examples:

  • Natural Language is the primary way of communication with the platform.
  • The platform understands natural language requests to search documents or find a particular piece of information within them.
  • The platform understands users’ intent and translates it into actions for internal and external tools (e.g., web-search or a calculator), thereby enabling an infinitely powerful set of capabilities.
  • The tasks can be equally easy assigned to either attorneys or AI, with the smooth process of evaluating the results and modifying the instructions.

At the same time, Beagle enables the verification of all results it returns using links, excerpts, explanations and other ways to backtrack its decision-making process. In this way attorneys can always be confident in the results of their work.”

What problem do you solve? Inefficiencies in processing and analysis of large document sets. Beagle is an end-to-end eDiscovery platform that allows users to efficiently obtain information about individual documents or clusters of documents, locate specific information, view statistics, distribute work among attorneys, share results, or make productions.

Who are your competitors? Current market leaders include Relativity, Nuix, Everlaw, Reveal, and CS Disco.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/pSWXeInagZg

Founded: 12/22/2022, Bellevue, WA

Target customer: Small firms, large firms, and sophisticated in-house law departments are our target customers.

Price: $2/Gb/month; $0.10 per page for document analysis; $1 per natural language query.

Traction: We have an MVP, which is currently used by two customers, and a list of 12 additional customers waiting for release of a fully scalable solution. This release is scheduled for January 2024. We launched our MVP in October 2023, and our expected revenue for this year is under $50k. There is considerable demand for our full-release, and we expect a quick revenue growth upon launch. Our goal is to serve 2-4 cases per month by the end of 2024, with the projected revenue of $2-4M/year.

Plan for growth: We have a three-step plan. Initially, we will focus on selling Beagle to eDiscovery vendors. Then, leveraging feedback from our earliest clients, we will offer subscription plans to law firms. Our goal through this stage will be to become a default service provider for litigants (clients) with no preferred eDiscovery vendor. Finally, we will directly target clients (enterprises and government agencies) with the idea that our track record would help become their preferred partners. Based on Beagle’s unique value proposition of 3x price reduction, 10x document review rate, and powerful feature toolset, we expect annual growth of 3-5x, and 20% of the eDiscovery market by the end of 2028.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: Our founders are first-generation immigrants and LGBTQ+ identifying individuals. Our team includes people of color. Our product helps level the playing field, and our strategy of first targeting smaller firms helps equitably distribute benefits of AI.

Anything else? Litigation can be a long and expensive process, in which not all litigants can afford to fairly compete. The efficiencies and cost-savings Beagle delivers will help expand access to justice. While we are happy to lead an industry disruption, we welcome new competition, which we believe will help accelerate adoption of new AI-powered eDiscovery technologies by courts, law firms, and other stakeholders.

Bequest

Elevator Pitch: Bequest is the first platform for actionable estate planning for digital assets. We are non-custodial, meaning users keep their assets in their account of choice and can use them as usual. It also allows us to work internationally. We securely give fiduciaries access to assets when required with no password-sharing, no court orders, and correct titling.

The status quo expects trust and estate attorneys to be very technical, this just leads to lost digital legacies. We cover all the tech.

What makes you unique or innovative? Currently patent pending for our sharding mechanism. Being non-custodial means we can actually allow fiduciaries to distribute assets directly from a decedent’s wallet or, for an irrevocable trust, we can make sure they don’t steal.

What problem do you solve? Succession and protection planning for digital assets. How do you securely get fiduciaries access without relying on password-sharing and court orders? How do you make any account a PoD? How can you place any account in trust? How do you make fine-grain access controls on things like photos, email accounts, doc sharing accounts, etc.?

We solve all of this with easy and compliant digital asset flows for estate planning attorneys.

 Who are your competitors? We do not have any direct competitors. Here are some groups trying to solve similar problems:

  • My Life + Wishes: Vault for passwords. Does not have any actionable estate planning elements.
  • Trust + Will: Sets a digital asset beneficiary. Does not provide any way to access accounts or hold them in trust, etc.
  • DCS: records ‘instructions’ from grantor and can help send court orders to custodians to try and close out an estate. Slow, not guaranteed to work, and incapable of doing important estate planning like trusts or PoDs.

Demo video: None.

Founded: 2/1/2023.

Target customer: trust companies and trust and estate firms/attorneys (all sizes.) We are about to close our first clients: a couple of solo attorneys and a trust firm in the Cayman Islands.

Price: We currently charge $1,200/year/attorney and 25-75 bps at distribution from the client’s account. We have various referral programs and discounts for attorneys on our advisory board.

We have some institutional clients in our pipeline whom we will charge on an API or client basis. Still undecided on what numbers we will start with.

Traction: Thirteen users on the customer advisory board, currently onboarding our first paying users – MSAs should be signed by the first week of November.

We average two organic calls a month from our website with no marketing. We have been directing those people to the customer advisory board so far.

Plan for growth: Our initial traction will be with small to midsize firms. We then will move into the institutional space: large trust companies, legal tech (WealthCounsel, Clio, etc.), and major trust and estate firms. There are also a plethora of reporting and planning products we can develop depending on market demand.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: In a team of three we have a female CEO + technical co-founder and our senior engineer is Latin American.

Anything else? N/A.

BriefCatch

 Elevator Pitch: Empowers lawyers and judges to edit legal documents to the highest standards while helping their clients win, boosting their writing skills, and enjoying expert explanations, models, and examples.

What makes you unique or innovative? The legal-editing function is designed and backed by a renowned legal-writing expert.

What problem do you solve? How to fine-tune and finesse legal and judicial documents under time pressure and in the face of expanding client and court demands.

Who are your competitors? Grammarly, WordRake, ChatGPT.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rHJ3eNwo3U

Founded: 2/1/2018, Washington DC.

Target customer: Large firms; small and medium firms; boutiques; courts (including the Supreme Court and courts of appeal); individual lawyers.

Price: Individuals: $39/month or $399/year. Enterprise: ranges from $10/year to low six figures.

Traction: Nearly 100% enterprise retention. Profitable before fundraise and still no cash burn. Two hundred enterprise customers and thousands of individuals.

Plan for growth: Multiple AI products, benefits, and features, including unique features nearly impossible to replicate. Expanding the team. Creating offshoot products for different practice areas along with specialized products for nonnative speakers and law students. Outlook compatibility and expanded enterprise product for law firms.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: We have pro bono initiatives making BriefCatch available to organizations such as NAACP.

Anything else? N/A

Briefpoint

Elevator Pitch: Briefpoint is an out-of-the-box document automation platform that litigators use to draft discovery documents within minutes of their first sign-in.

What makes you unique or innovative? Ease of Use: We are obsessed with ease of use (for example, we trained our AI system for a year and a half just to eliminate the need for our users to type in client and case names). Our most prolific user is a paralegal in California who, before becoming a paralegal a few years ago, was a nun in a secluded monastery with no access to the outside world or technology (since the early 2000s). She needed no training to use Briefpoint and has used it to generate hundreds of discovery requests and discovery responses.

First Litigation Document LLM Platform: We were the first out-of-the-box software platform that leveraged hallucination-proof LLM functions that take just seconds to draft perfect pages of litigation documents. We do not have setup times, implementation processes, or requisite training – anyone can use Briefpoint to prepare a document indistinguishable from an attorney’s within minutes of their first sign-in.

Perfect Document Guarantee: We trained our in-house AI system to reliably extract data from uploaded .pdfs of all shapes and sizes – nothing needs to be OCRd – from every U.S. state. This training, which took over a year, ensures that Briefpoint users can trust that the content Briefpoint creates is accurate. We stand by our automation with our perfect document guarantee: if your document isn’t perfect, our engineering team will retrain Briefpoint to make it perfect, and – if that doesn’t work – our CEO will draft your document for you (that’s only happened once).

What problem do you solve? No litigator should have to put their life on hold in the name of busy work.

I started Briefpoint because, as a litigator, I would burn myself out drafting lengthy documents containing pages of rote content that nevertheless must be perfect. With Briefpoint, we automate the routine drafting tasks that comprise a significant portion of litigators’ work life. In so doing, litigators who use Briefpoint will ultimately have more time and energy to focus on tasks that *actually* move the needle for their clients.

Briefpoint aims to create a world where litigation attorneys’ success is tied only to their ability to formulate creative legal arguments and execute thoughtful litigation strategies.

Who are your competitors? Esquiretek, LegalMation.

Demo video: https://vimeo.com/850729654

Founded: 2/9/2021, San Rafael, California [HQ], Chicago, Illinois.

Target customer: Small and solo firms.

Price: We have two pricing models:

  • $55 per Document: our “”pay-as-you-go”” model, where you can buy documents for $55 apiece, or
  • $89 per Month: our subscription model grants you unlimited documents for $89 a month per attorney bill annually (no minimums, no setup fee).

More pricing details can be found here: https://briefpoint.ai/pricing/

Traction: Since we launched in June 2022, California litigators have used Briefpoint to generate 8,640 documents (as of Oct. 18).

On Oct. 5, 2023, Briefpoint expanded its capabilities from just California to every U.S. state.

Since launching, Briefpoint has grown at an average monthly rate of 23% and we have a demo close rate of 47%.

Plan for growth: Discovery Document Automation: Our immediate roadmap sees the construction of modules that will automate every document any litigator might need to draft during the discovery process (including, for example, motions to compel).

Document Agnostic Automation: Our long-term goal is to eliminate typing from litigation document preparation. To meet this goal, we are building a platform that will be able to ingest samples of a litigator’s work product and use those samples to rapidly construct new litigation documents that require no revision/redline. This will be regardless of the jurisdiction or document type – hence the term “Document Agnostic Automation.”

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: Our founding team includes a woman, and we actively seek diverse candidates for our roles.

Anything else? This will be our first ABA Techshow and we couldn’t be more excited! Thank you!

Civille

Elevator Pitch: Civille delivers best in class websites, SEO, digital marketing and online tools. Civille’s AI law forms and chat tool can segment leads by value as well as filter out less-desirable leads. Case management and CRM integrations allow you to customize the digital experience.

What makes you unique or innovative? The Civille team cut their teeth in the automotive industry for over a decade and brought skills from a highly competitive area to legal. We utilize a combination of proven service focused products, with innovative technology such as AI on the website. The integrated platform saves time, money and resources for any firm on the Civille platform.

What problem do you solve? Civille solves multiple problems, but the big ones are putting an online presence forward that is impressive, modern and increases leads. Additionally, Civille gets firms better leads by reducing “tire kickers” and segmenting them properly into a CRM.

Who are your competitors? Scorpion, FindLaw, Nifty, website competitors.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/@getciville

Founded: 1/10/2021, Oshkosh, WI.

Target customer: Market: small to medium size firms.

Price: It varies, but generally $399-$2,500/ month with an average of $1,299.

Traction: Most of our customers have a package that includes both services and software. The services being rendered are website management, Google Business Profile management and optimization, content marketing, SEO and PPC management. The website design cost is bundled into the monthly fee. The software products including Civille Success Alerts, Law Forms and AI chat are utilized with all clients. Our products have high adoption rates with the automated tools and alerts that come to the firms. We offer a very affordable monthly fee with the idea to keep customers on for a long time due to the tangible services rendered.

Plan for growth: We’re using a combination of cold calling with BDRs, trade show attendance, networking and online whitepapers with PPC to get into more firms. Our plan over the next few years is to continue to build up our client base by offering affordable services and then introduce new software to our existing firms to make these clients “stickier.” We have partnered with several major players in the legal space as preferred partners including Caret, Clio and Smokeball. With a lean sales team, we’ve been able to invest in operations-mainly account management to keep customers satisfied and happy.

The leadership team is experienced with acquisitions and working with private equity. At this time, we do not plan on taking on PE and have bootstrapped our entire company.

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: We are an inclusive company and focus heavily on hiring women and supporting women clients. Civille is an equal opportunity employer. We focus heavily on diverse areas and providing products to a wide range of customers.

Anything else? Civille was born out of a desire to help. We saw the legal space as a place that needed a revamp when it comes to digital services. We know that by providing quality services, we are able to build software and add that to our happy customers. We’ve done this before in automotive and sold that company and are excited about the potential of the legal space.

descrybe.ai

Elevator Pitch: descrybe.ai is a singular new way to search for, and understand, caselaw. We are laser-focused on easy access to caselaw research by lowering cost (it’s free), increasing ease of use, and employing natural language search and summarization. We currently have more than 1.7M judicial opinions from across the U.S. summarized and searchable. All available state supreme and appellate opinions plus federal district and appellate opinions will be ready by late 2023 with other features in development.

What makes you unique or innovative? If ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, legal tech, and specifically legal research, is it. This is because the market has all the right ingredients for a shakeup – a market dominated by a few powerful players, clunky and expensive current tech solutions, frustrated customers who are trapped by the current models, and high-cost barriers to access. Add to this a huge user base and the nascent game-changing technology, and one can easily see how exciting this moment is for anyone in the legal tech space.

The way we approached building descrybe.ai is so unique that so far nobody else seems to be doing what we are doing. This may be in part because we are new to the legal tech field and approached the problem with completely green-field thinking. This allowed us to come up with an approach and a solution that is completely different.

This project required a lot of grit and perhaps a dash of hubris. It was a massive undertaking to attempt to summarize and make accessible (for free) the vast majority of state and federal legal opinions in the U.S. And yet, that is exactly what we have done. In fact, we are only weeks away (as of the date of filing this application) from actually reaching this audacious goal. This achievement has of course been enabled by others who believe that the law should be accessible. Specifically, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Caselaw Access Project at Harvard University and more recently, the critical CourtListener tool from the Free Law Project.

This approach has also shielded us from potential copyright violations because we are not scraping our data from third parties. Our commercial agreement with CourtListener gives us access to all U.S. caselaw and helps us avoid issues others have run into in trying to use AI for legal research.

What problem do you solve? descrybe.ai solves a few problems that current legal search engines do not. First, since it is free, we are able to circumvent the steep barriers that exist for this type of product. This helps solve access to law issues at least in a small way. Access to law is a big one, but also the fact that attorneys may be missing relevant caselaw during their research because the way they have to search in existing tools may not uncover everything. Second, we are using a novel way of searching using natural language. This means that our tool helps uncover legal concepts and is a completely new way to access the law.

Who are your competitors? We do a lot of what the large monopolistic search engines do, but for free. We are constantly adding features to provide even more overlap.

Demo video: https://descrybe.ai/press.

Founded: 6/23/2023, Newton, MA.

Target customer: Lawyers at firms of all sizes have been using our search engine to kickstart their caselaw research. Also, law students, journalists, and legal researchers who want to dive into specific legal concepts have been using descrybe.ai. As the product develops, we will be able to see where we gain the most traction, but we do see it primarily as a tool for attorneys and other legal researchers.

Price: Free

Traction: Right now, we are measuring success in a few ways. First, we are paying attention to the completeness of our summarization process. As mentioned above, we have over 1.7 million judicial opinions summarized and searchable via natural text. This is in and of itself a data point that illustrates our success. Second, the accuracy of our results is critical. So far, the feedback we have received is that our search results are not only incredibly fast, but very accurate. Third, we are constantly iterating and improving the manner in which we are leveraging AI itself. We have already made huge improvements to our process and continue to fine tune our approach.

We are also measuring traction by industry acceptance and users. Although we are only a few months old we are seeing a lot of interest from the leading minds in legal tech and are seeing many people using our search engine every day.

We are a free tool and do not have paid or registered users. We are measuring our traction in the number of searches and search users. These numbers are growing rapidly every day as awareness of descrybe.ai grows.”

Plan for growth: Our growth strategy is based on capturing new users because once they see what the tool can do they come back. In other words, we have a very sticky product. Word of mouth is critical, as is networking and earned media. We will continue to do outreach and brand-building to get users to utilize our search engine. We have new features upcoming that will allow people to do a lot (and more) with our search that they can do currently only with the giant $$’s per month search engines.

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: One of our founders is a woman and we all know how unusual this is in the legal tech space. But beyond that, our solution is targeted at access to law issues, which we know disproportionately affects marginalized communities. We hope that our search engine can help with access to justice issues by addressing access to law issues. We are concerned that if legal AI is only used to make the already well-served better served, we have missed a huge A2J opportunity. We are also a member of the Justice Technology Association. Their mission is “to democratize the consumer legal experience through the use of technology for the public good. We seek to grow, shape, and organize the emerging Justice Tech market to demonstrate how technology can provide affordable, accessible solutions to people facing everyday legal issues. We also support industry and policy leaders, businesses, and broader initiatives to empower consumers and advance access to, and engagement with, legal help.

Anything else? We have been getting a nice amount of media coverage over the three-ish months we have been around. Here are some recent hits (links available on our website https://descrybe.ai/press).

We also have several exciting features in development that will make our solution more of a direct competitor to the big (expensive) solutions currently on the market. This first is rolling out now. We call this “Opinion Abstracts” and the approach uses AI to pull out the most important at-a-glance information about a judicial opinion. Essentially, this includes things like the involved parties, introduction, procedural history, analysis, holding and conclusion of any judicial opinion that appears on the case details page. We have implemented this for Indiana, Massachusetts, and California so far, and will have all opinions completed within 45-60 days.

Goodfact

Elevator Pitch: Goodfact generates chronologies for document-heavy cases, so litigators don’t need to spend hours building a manual chronology in Excel or Word. By showing who said what when, Goodfact reveals the story behind a pile of long and confusing email threads.

Unlike other tools, Goodfact does the hard work by parsing each email thread, placing each individual email into chronological order, and displaying an AI-generated extractive summary of each document in a sleek and interactive chronology.

What makes you unique or innovative? 1) Goodfact parses email threads and places each individual email into chronological order.

2) Goodfact uses AI to generate a fully customizable extractive summary of the text of each document.

3) Goodfact parses PDF emails and places other PDF documents, including letters and other records, into chronological order.

What problem do you solve? To understand what happened in a correspondence-heavy matter, litigators generally build a detailed chronology of each email or letter in a Microsoft Excel or Word chart.

This task is extremely tedious when it involves reviewing hundreds or thousands of simultaneous long and confusing email threads. By our calculations, it can take about 160 hours to build a manual chronology of 1,000 email threads.

Who are your competitors? There are not currently any tools that can parse email threads, but Everchron and ClearBrief appear to be using ChatGPT to summarize entire threads and place those summaries in chronological order.

This does not help litigators who want to see their evidence in its original form without ChatGPT’s potentially inaccurate abstractive summary. ”

Demo video: https://youtu.be/a0dAFxxLwkk.

Founded: 8/21/2021, Toronto, Ontario.

Target customer: Target customer is mid-sized firms (10-30 lawyers) which can make buying decisions nimbly but has enough volume to warrant purchasing our product on a subscription basis. We currently have a mix of sole practitioner, mid-sized, and in-house customers.

Price: Our pricing is subject to change, but we currently offer 3 options:

  1. Per-matter pricing (one-time payment of $50-$500 depending on the # of documents uploaded to a single matter);
  2. Bucket Upload pricing (one-time payment of $100-$600 depending on the # of total documents uploaded; can be spread among unlimited matters)
  3. Subscription pricing (monthly fee of $400-$1000 depending on the # of total documents uploaded per year).

Outside funding: Less than $1M .

Traction: We launched the paid version of our app in August 2023. Since then, we have been gaining traction and currently have 14 paying customers with growing interest from litigators from across the globe (including Singapore and Malaysia!).

Plan for growth: We plan to accelerate growth by optimizing a scalable sales strategy and deploying it across all English-speaking jurisdictions.

In addition to marketing, we plan to polish the product’s “crown jewel,”, email parsing, to make it work perfectly with a variety of different document types.

Next, we plan to expand the product’s scope to cover more aspects of the litigation process, to improve the machine learning summarization model, and to develop visualizations of evidence based on the data present in the chronology.

Finally, we plan to build integrations with e-discovery and practice management products.

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: Our co-founder is a female, and our most active advisor is an older gentleman. We focus on merits and talent.

Anything else? Goodfact is a new company that is solving a very old problem. We have validated our solution with litigators from firms of all sizes. At each instance we got the same reaction, no matter how advanced the firm’s existing tech stack: litigators from all walks of life all manually build their chronologies and cannot stand having to do so.

Gretchen

Elevator Pitch: Gretchen revolutionizes legal assistance for lawyers, being the first generative AI-powered tool to integrate directly into their email inboxes. With a single click, Gretchen securely accesses relevant client documents and drafts instant email responses, seamlessly blending into existing workflows without compromising document security. Designed specifically for smaller law firms, Gretchen empowers lawyers to provide lightning-fast client responses, enhancing efficiency and service quality.

What makes you unique or innovative? Our company stands out by democratizing advanced generative AI tools for solo practitioners and small law firms, leveling the playing field against larger competitors. We uniquely tailor our solutions to seamlessly integrate with existing legal systems, emphasizing data privacy by ensuring client documents remain within the firm’s established management systems. This approach not only alleviates privacy concerns but also makes generative AI instantly beneficial and accessible to legal professionals regardless of their firm’s size, empowering them to focus on expanding their practices.

What problem do you solve? The 2024 Small & Mid-sized Law Firm Report by PracticePanther highlights a critical issue: law firms are struggling with increased client demands, stagnant staffing, a tough labor market, and rising competition. They urgently need tools to enhance efficiency and streamline operations. This is precisely where Gretchen comes in. Tailored for smaller firms and solo practitioners, Gretchen functions as an AI-powered sidekick, significantly cutting down time spent on client inquiries about past work. This efficiency boost allows lawyers to concentrate on higher-value new client work and practice growth.

Who are your competitors? Our main competitor, Harvey AI, offers access to client documents but lacks seamless integration with lawyers’ current workflows, requiring the use of a third-party application. Additionally, Harvey AI primarily targets larger firms with enterprise contracts, making it less accessible for smaller practices. In contrast, Gretchen is the only generative AI-powered solution uniquely designed for solo practitioners and smaller firms. It directly integrates into lawyers’ email inboxes and their existing document management systems, offering a simple, highly relevant use case. This ensures immediate utility without disrupting established workflows. While starting with this focused approach, we plan to gradually broaden our offerings, equipping our clients with an expanding suite of generative AI tools to further enhance their practice productivity.

Demo video: https://www.gretchenapp.com/#demo-video.

Founded: 7/27/2023, Vancouver, Canada.

Target customer: We are targeting solo-practitioners and small firms as our customers, as well as in-house counsel.

Price: We have three pricing tiers (all USD, priced per lawyer): Free Trial; Standard Plan: $69/month; Premium Plan: $119/month.

Traction: Declined to publicly disclose.

Plan for growth: Declined to publicly disclose.

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: Declined to publicly disclose.

Anything else? Declined to publicly disclose.

Henchman

Elevator Pitch: Legal professionals rarely start from scratch when drafting contracts or negotiating details. They spend at least 60 minutes searching through old contracts or consulting colleagues for relevant precedents.

Henchman automatically centralizes past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database and delivers them intelligently in lawyers’ familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments. This eliminates time-consuming tasks and allows lawyers to focus on adding value and expertise.

What makes you unique or innovative? Within the competitive landscape, Henchman has the most effortless contract drafting experience with the highest adoption, ensuring quick time to value for its customers among any team, in any region.

We believe technology should work for the user, and not the other way around. Henchman differentiates itself by:

  • Delivering dynamic knowledge management, without requiring manual set up and maintenance.
  • Being language-agnostic, making the solution equally performant in all languages.
  • Having the most secure and user-friendly interface, being ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 compliant, and designed for GDPR.
  • Working with an all-star team of individuals, all with previous experience in Software-as-a-Service they can apply to deliver the best possible customer experience.
  • A dedicated customer success organization partnering with you from day one. Frequent check-ins will make sure you’re on track with your business goals, and our continuous feedback loops will make sure we focus on what matters most.

One of Henchman’s four company values is “Be user-obsessed,” always keep an eye on user behavior and data and be passionate about every touchpoint with the customer. Strive for efficiency while making the user as happy as possible. This is why it is developed with continuous feedback loops from its end-users. Feedback is organized in various formats (user workshops, user tests, customer advisory boards, and ongoing qualitative and quantitative research).

We work in agile design and engineering sprints of two weeks. Once we have new UI/UX concepts for our solution, we contact key users for user testing.

Our approach has been well-received: In the past year and a half Henchman grew 1,300% in revenue, welcoming hundreds of customers across five continents. This year, we’ve raised a Series A with international VCs, have been focused on expanding our footprint, driving innovation through a series of releases (ranging from AI capabilities to a dedicated negotiation and review use case), and strengthening our security protocols by expanding our ISO 27001 certification and GDPR compliance with a SOC 2 compliance.

What problem do you solve? Henchman centralizes past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database and delivers them intelligently in lawyers’ familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments. This eliminates time-consuming tasks and allows lawyers to focus on adding value and expertise.

Key Benefits:

  • Make your entire firm’s database and collective knowledge actionable.
  • Increased drafting quality.
  • Better drafting consistency across the entire organization.
  • Attract and retain legal talent.

The problem: In the past years we have spoken to over 7,000 legal teams, identifying three major forces at play in today’s legal environment: clients are more demanding, talent expects to be enabled, and large volumes of data need structuring.

Further pain points included:

  1. On a full drafting day, respondents spend at least 60 minutes browsing through contract repositories or bothering colleagues for precedents, inspiration, or advice.
  2. When consulting previously written contracts, workflows are interrupted. Lawyers tend to consult 5-12 previously written contracts to help with editing and reviewing. With Henchman, we avoid having to open multiple files and having to scroll through them (often 50+ page contracts).
  3. On a company level, a lot of redundant work is being done and there is a general fear of choosing the ‘wrong’ wording in a precedent. No tool provides the right context and insights to support drafting decisions (e.g., is this clause according to company standard, is this variation the most used by my peers when working on a Share Purchase Agreement, what options do I have when US Law is applicable…)
  4. There’s a huge blind spot: no tool provides insights as to how many bad leaver clauses have been written, and which one is the most used? Or indicate if there are any gaps in the firm’s database, or clauses that should never see the daylight again and should thus be avoided?

Who are your competitors? Within the “smart contract drafting” category, we consider Draftwise (US) as our core competitor.

Demo video: https://vimeo.com/henchmanio/explained?share=copy.

Founded: 8/1/2020, Ghent, Belgium (HQ).

Target customer: Our ideal customers are legal professionals that draft and negotiate complex and bespoke contracts. These are found in law firms’ transactional teams (such as M&A teams, commercial & corporate law teams, IP lawyer, real estate departments), as well as in-house corporate legal departments – all around the world. In terms of technographics, it’s helpful if the legal teams already have a document management system in place. We typically see in law firms that sit in our ICP that about 30-50% of legal professionals within a law firm are dealing with complex contracts.

Our sales team has a strong focus on law firms with 50+ lawyers. Henchman has a proven “land and expand strategy.” Additionally, we’ve seen an increase in success running bespoke pilot programs for large law firms, allowing them to measure the ROI of Henchman with a limited group of power users for a limited time (typically four weeks). So far, 100% of pilots converted to a paid customer. Additionally, we’re currently speaking with 50% of the Top 100 law firms, which experience longer sales cycles but are actively looking to invest.

Price: Declined to publicly disclose.

Traction: This past year, Henchman grew 580% in bookings, welcoming hundreds of clients across five continents (in 30+ countries). Further, we grew 1,300% in revenue just this past year and a half.

Our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) in the EU and US alone totals €1 billion annual recurring revenue. (Estimated TAM = €5.2 billion).

In terms of scalability, Henchman is 100% built for scale. From day one, Henchman was engineered to be plug and play for the end user, requiring almost no setup and maintenance. Additionally, Henchman is system agnostic, meaning it integrates with any DMS, and is language agnostic, meaning it processes contracts in any language without any required engineering.

With already +80% of our revenue coming from outside of Belgium, and with a “no physical sales meeting” policy, Henchman proves it is solving a global problem with massive scale potential.

Plan for growth: Henchman’s goal is to enable 30,000 lawyers to draft contracts faster by 2026. We’ll do this by focusing on a lot of initiatives, from generating brand awareness through physical presence at events to working with a knowledgeable partner network to drive indirect sales. The core drivers behind our revenue growth will be the classic sales channels, combined with a product led growth strategy for the smaller customers and a high focus on partnerships with DMS providers (more information available upon request).

Some highlights about our drive for innovation and partnerships:

  • Innovation: Henchman is a technological marvel that consists of four complex pillars that integrate seamlessly: (1) Database connection: Henchman connects with its customers’ databases, such as iManage, NetDocuments, Sharepoint, OpenText, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc., and filters out contracts, no matter how unstructured the database is. (2) Clause extraction: Clauses and definitions get extracted from the contracts by our ‘virtual shredder,’ metadata and intelligence are added, and clauses and definitions get categorized automatically. (3) Google-like search within a legal professional’s trusted Microsoft Office environment (Word & Outlook): All clauses and definitions at our users’ fingertips with a context aware ‘first page result’ search experience. (4) An AI-enabled suite of functionalities: A suite of functionalities designed to securely apply AI to any legal team’s own data. It allows users to save countless hours in understanding any contract’s terms and conditions, highlighting risks or relevant information, and reworking what’s necessary to ensure all parties are treated fairly.
  • Partnerships: We have formal technical partnerships and integrations with Microsoft, Google, NetDocuments, iManage, OpenText and Epona, covering 85% of the legal document management systems globally. Win-win: A lot of their customers are still on premise. For our technical partners we are the perfect driver to push their customers in the cloud. Henchman is a very relevant addition, as we bring the DMS to life on a clause level, increasing the value and stickiness. Secondly, all IT partners of law firms are becoming partners of Henchman. Guiding the Henchman integration from an IT perspective creates new projects for them they can bill. Lastly, of course all other complementary legal tech solutions and resellers such as Morae Global, Advania, Titans Legal, IT Consulting, Hyperscale Group, IRIS, and many more! All of the abovementioned partners have formal partnership agreements in place with Henchman.

Outside funding: More than $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: Henchman employs experienced SaaS professionals from various professional/educational backgrounds and nationalities. Some examples:

  • We employ professionals from countries such as Brazil, Slovenia, Belgium, and more.
  • Our employees are about 50-50% split male/female.
  • Both our employee demographic and management team consist of members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Anything else? We have a strong brand presence globally through our company friend, Steve Lit https://henchman.io/steve-lit.

INform54

Elevator Pitch: INform54 is the new way of driving revenue and business development growth in the legal industry. More than just project management, INform54 is a game-changing software redefining the way legal professionals work. Using gamification strategies, the technology helps create accountability, provides intuitive reminders for follow-up and gathers data to demonstrate return on investment through a fun and competitive online teaming platform.

What makes you unique or innovative? Our team has more than 100 years of collective experience within the legal industry. And our turn-key solution provides key metrics, status of projects, and built-in accountability at your fingertips and is accessible out-of-the-box to everyone in your firm without having to build it from scratch.

What problem do you solve? Provides at your fingertips reporting for in-house marketing/business development teams to prove value and return on efforts. Additionally, many attorneys face difficulties in tracking non-billable hours related to developing business and our technology provides an engaging platform to help them remain intentional and focused on these efforts.

Who are your competitors? Asana, Basecamp, Monday, Pipeline Plus

Demo video: https://society54.com/inform

Founded: 5/13/2021, Charlotte, NC.

Target customer: Law firm marketing/business development departments; mid-sized law firms – all attorneys, practice groups, other small group within firm.

Price: Base Pricing: $1,140/user/year; Enterprise Pricing: from $28,500.

Traction: INform underwent a complete redesign in 2021-2022 for better user experience and features (and we created a new technology company at that time).

Plan for growth: We are currently participating in industry conferences across the United States by serving on panels, providing demos, sponsoring and meeting with clients and prospects. Additionally, we actively promote INform through social media and other outlets. We recently engaged a marketing professional to help create a standalone website for INform and we are meeting with potential CTOs to help us continue to improve our software.

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: We are a female founded and female run organization. We strive to bring more awareness to the lack of females in leadership roles in law firms as well as in the tech industry (not to mention how little funding goes to organizations owned by women – less than 2%).

Anything else? We love the legal industry and want to continue to find ways to make it better – both for attorneys as well as the business professionals who work in firms. We have worked within law firms in marketing and business development roles and now use our technology along with our consulting to inspire individuals and firms to continue to improve.

LawDroid Copilot

Elevator Pitch: Being a lawyer is a highly stressful job: 92% of lawyers have experienced stress or burnout, with more than 25% experiencing it daily due to the volume of work. LawDroid leverages AI to help lawyers get their jobs done faster. LawDroid accomplishes this by: creating custom, AI-powered workflows to perform aspects of their job; and converting attorney work product into digital knowledge bases to scale their expertise. LawDroid transforms stress into success with AI superpowers.

What makes you unique or innovative? More than just prompts and chatbots, LawDroid empowers lawyers to take control of AI and use it to create custom, multi-step workflows to get the job done quickly, securely and reliably.

What problem do you solve? Attorney overwork, burnout, and lack of work-life balance.

Who are your competitors? Harvey, Casetext, Spellbook, Clio, vLex, and Jurisage.

Demo video: Here is a demo of one skill: https://www.loom.com/share/9e7c986aee0d414d97fde32014a476d9.

Founded: 10/11/2016, Vancouver, Canada.

Target customer: solo, small and medium law firms.

Price: $20 per month for LawDroid Copilot.

Traction: Since launching LawDroid Copilot in January 2023, we have gained 800+ users, including lawyers, law firms, law students and faculty across the United States and Canada.

Plan for growth: Our plan for growth is to educate lawyers about AI and how they can practically use it, to learn from their feedback, and to grow the product to meet their needs.

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: The CEO is diverse and so are a majority of those working for the company.

Anything else? LawDroid is bootstrapped and profitable.

Lexamica

Elevator Pitch: Unlock new revenue with Lexamica, the go-to platform for curated case referrals. Whether you’re looking to hand off a case or take one on, our exclusive network of law firms has you covered. It’s simple to connect great cases with great attorneys, optimizing your practice and growing revenue. Lexamica places cases with the best firm, automatically tracks statuses, and ensures timely payment. All so you can focus on what you do best—winning cases and satisfying clients.

What makes you unique or innovative? Lexamica is a tech-enabled community of the top lawyers in the plaintiffs’ field. We bring together the best marketing firms (Lerner and Rowe, Eagle Team) and the best litigators (Keches, Rob Levine, TorkLaw) and create massive value as everyone does exactly what they are best at.

What problem do you solve? While law firms have made massive strides in managing their internal case information through systems like Litify, Filevine, and Clio, referrals have been stuck in the ‘90s. A referred case required phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets to get status updates and most originating firms are left in the dark. This leads to lost trust, lost trust leads to lost business, and lost business is lost money.

Who are your competitors? Overture Law is our main competitor in the space.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn2cJ–_gX4.

Founded: 12/31/2021, Little Rock, AR.

Target customer: Lexamica works with all sizes of law firms from large plaintiff firms in single event mass torts to solos who need access to a trustworthy network of peers to refer cases to.

Price: Pricing depends on the type of service. It can be priced at a per-placed retainer basis or a monthly fee to become the referral manager for a law firm.

Traction: As of today, Lexamica has three originating firms and 127 litigating law firms.

Plan for growth: Lexamica will be the go-to platform.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: Our platform levels the playing field for all lawyers. We are destroying the old boys club of referrals and putting the best professional network in legal in the hands of everyone for free. This is going to totally empower minority lawyers, female lawyers, and any else historically kept out of the insanely expensive conference/mastermind circuit.

Anything else? N/A.

LexSelect

Elevator Pitch: LexSelect streamlines trial prep by automating workflows associated with reviewing transcript evidence, turning 50 hours of work into 4 — a 92% reduction. We aim to become an essential interface between legal professionals and their various knowledge repositories, enabling them to unlock overlooked productivity opportunities in their everyday workflows.

What makes you unique or innovative? LexSelect sets itself apart by focusing on the practical needs of legal professionals. Unlike many legal tech offerings that are powerful but complex solutions, we ensure accessibility for the end-user. Our AI/ML-powered platform is designed with an exceptional user experience in mind, integrating effortlessly into existing legal workflows. This approach positions LexSelect for rapid adoption and significant impact across the legal community.

What problem do you solve? LexSelect targets the inefficiencies in daily legal practice by eliminating time-consuming, low-value administrative tasks. Our solution addresses three problems: it helps prevent revenue loss from fee write-downs on administrative work, reduces operational costs by optimizing capacity, and minimizes the risk of human errors inherent in manual tasks. With LexSelect, legal professionals can focus on the high-value work they love while enhancing value for clients, and by extension, society as a whole.

Who are your competitors? LexSelect operates alongside eDiscovery platforms like Relativity and Everlaw, and specialized tools such as ClearBrief and CiteRite. The former offer comprehensive solutions for large-scale litigation, requiring extensive training and often delegating their use to litigation support teams due to their complexity. The latter, while adept at addressing specialized workflows for niche segments of the market, do not offer solutions to the broad range of inefficient workflows faced by legal professionals.

Set apart by our user-centric design and document parsing technology that can be applied to a broad array of unstructured data, LexSelect provides a solution that has the potential to be applied across a wide range of use cases and improve the productivity of legal professionals across a broad range of daily workflows.”

Demo video: Prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWNPrt74mTU.

Founded: 12/22/2022, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Target customer: Our target customers are litigation legal professionals across English-speaking common law jurisdictions. Our initial target market will focus on small to mid-sized firms in the United States and Canada. We are developing a go-to-market strategy that targets end-users (legal professionals) as customers, which is more effectively suited for the small to mid-sized market.

Currently, LexSelect is in the beta phase of product development, and while we do not have paying customers, we are actively engaging with potential customers to refine our offerings and ensure that we are positioned to meet the needs of our target market upon launch.

Price: We are offering LexSelect at an introductory subscription rate of $50 per user per month. As we continue to gather customer feedback and understand usage patterns, we will be exploring a variety of pricing structures, including usage-based and enterprise pricing models, to best meet the needs of our customers.

Traction: Our current focus is on finalizing LexSelect’s development and refining our go-to-market strategy. As a pre-launch startup, our efforts are concentrated on ensuring that the product is fully optimized to meet the needs of our target market. While we have not yet begun generating revenue, we are actively engaging with potential customers to gather valuable feedback and build relationships.

Our potential launch at the ABA Startup Alley and pitch competition marks a significant milestone for us. This event will serve as our official introduction to the market and a pivotal moment to demonstrate LexSelect’s capabilities to an audience of potential customers. We’re leveraging this opportunity to establish our presence in the legal tech community and begin building our customer base.

Plan for growth: Over the next five years, LexSelect is committed to evolving our product in response to the needs of legal professionals. Our initial focus is on solving problems associated with reviewing transcript evidence, with plans to introduce and validate additional use cases based on customer feedback. We will strategically broaden our market presence, starting with small to mid-sized firms in the United States and Canada, and then expand into other markets and segments, including large firms and in-house counsel through targeted collaboration with industry partners and legal knowledge repository stakeholders.

As our customer base grows and our product expands, we will seek further venture financing to fuel our growth. This will enable us to scale our operations, enhance our technological infrastructure, and attract top talent to our team. Our ultimate goal is to solidify LexSelect as an indispensable tool for legal professionals to facilitate the delivery of efficient and effective legal services to clients and society as a whole.

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: At LexSelect, we’re dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture that is woven into our values and operational ethos. A diverse team drives innovation, enriches our customer empathy, and sharpens our competitive edge as trendsetters. Diversity isn’t just a statistic; it’s a dynamic force that enables our data-driven decisions and accelerates our high-velocity environment. By building a diverse team where every member’s voice is heard, we empower them to contribute to our mission of improving legal workflow productivity, broadening access to justice, and creating an impactful, community-oriented workplace.

Anything else? Thank you for considering LexSelect. We appreciate the opportunity to showcase our solution to streamline legal workflows and make meaningful improvements to the legal profession. Our team is eager and prepared to drive meaningful change, and we’re grateful for the chance to share our vision with you.

Lupl

Elevator Pitch: Lupl is a task and project management platform that empowers lawyers to close deals, win cases and complete projects faster and with better outcomes. It streamlines and automates the scoping, planning and delivery of any legal process using a combination of AI, integrated knowledge and task management tools – accelerating progress, improving visibility, and minimizing risk.

What makes you unique or innovative? Simplicity, automation, and co-development.

  1. Simplicity: Legal project management tools have historically low adoption. Lupl is changing this with same-day setup, cross-practice focus, and a UI described as “the most beautiful in legal tech”.
  2. Automation: Lupl’s unique implementation of generative AI automates the scoping, planning, and delivery of legal work. Lupl is the only solution leveraging generative AI for task management.
  3. Co-Development: Lupl was co-developed with the support of a global community of law firms. In Singapore, APAC’s digital hub, it has a world-first partnership with the Ministry of Law as the exclusive and official Legal Technology Platform for every law firm – representing the first time a Government has directly partnered with a legal tech solution in this way anywhere in the world.

What problem do you solve? 75% of legal work is “work about work” – email status updates, Excel trackers, Word lists. Lupl tackles the chaotic, fragmented nature of an attorney’s day by centralizing task management, documentation, access to knowledge, and communication, simplifying collaboration, and ensuring security and compliance with standards like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2.

Who are your competitors? 1. Excel, Outlook, or Word tables. 75% of lawyers use these tools to manage their projects.

  1. Clickup, Monday, Smartsheets. Too complex for most legal workflows; lack legal-specific features and integrations; lack security and compliance aspects required by law firms.
  2. HighQ. Great for highly-complex matters, custom reporting and extranets – but too complex for the other 95% of legal matters.

Demo video: https://lupl.com.

Founded: 11/1/2021, VA (HQ), California, UK, Singapore.

Target customer: Law firms of all sizes utilize Lupl on a daily basis. Lupl is used by large global firms, as well as by small firms with 2-10 attorneys.

Price: Lupl is provided on a subscription basis, priced annually based on the number of seats purchased. The pricing starts at $59/user/month.

Traction: Since Lupl’s inception, we’ve captured the interest of global law firms, partnering with over 30 customers, including prestigious AmLaw100 and Global 25 firms across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. Our user base actively engages with our platform for a variety of practices, such as real estate, litigation, and transactional work, demonstrating Lupl’s versatility and value in the legal market.

Plan for growth: Our growth strategy is multi-faceted, focusing on penetrating further into our target market, including AmLaw 200 firms, the UK top 200, and large European firms. We aim to broaden the diversity of use cases among existing clients and inspire new customers by showcasing successful applications. Our commitment to continuous product enhancement will ensure we provide unmatched value and the best experience to our clients. Our agile and capable team is dedicated to maintaining Lupl’s position as a leader and legal tech category creator.

Outside funding: Declined to publicly disclose.

Diversity: We offer flexible working to all employees, allowing them to balance work, childcare and other demands. We are remote-first – we allow people to work in whatever environment enables them to do their best work. Our platform and our people are distributed across four continents. We are one of the only legal tech startups with global reach – we have users in more than 50 countries.

Anything else? Lupl is at the forefront of legal technology innovation, dedicated to redefining how legal work is done. Our platform’s quick onboarding process, requiring zero training, demonstrates our commitment to user-friendly solutions. Recognized by Singapore’s Ministry of Law and backed by prominent law firms, we are set to globalize this success. Our platform’s design for scalability and adaptability signifies our readiness to meet the evolving demands of the legal profession. As we continue to grow, we’re not just enhancing legal workflows; we’re building a community committed to excellence and diversity in the legal profession.

Maxime

Elevator Pitch: We give your collective legal knowledge a clear voice. Maxime is a secure AI designed to provide actionable insights and responses, sourced directly from your firm’s legal documents. Trained with high-trust public legal data, Maxime has been meticulously vetted for accuracy and reliability by a range of experienced legal professionals. Maxime’s internal structure treats your data with a strictly legal touch. Plain language in, high-level results out.

What makes you unique or innovative? Maxime is a proprietary large language model that was built and trained from scratch, strictly on high-trust legal data. Our model emulates the actual legal reasoning, evaluative, and analytical skills taught to attorneys. For legal professionals using Maxime with their own data, it’s tantamount to having access to yourself on your best day, on-demand.

We deliver this unique, integration-ready product to firms, to provide an elegant solution for knowledge management. We also partner with firms interested in building their own internal models.

What problem do you solve? Maxime provides an accessible way to resolve legal operational gaps, break strategic holding patterns, and significantly reduce turnaround time for dealmaking. Executive legal summaries for hundreds of pages in seconds, conversational queries into their agreements, all with enough depth and salience to satisfy the real need for decision-making intelligence. Maxime is a proactive way to engage with your legal data and get the most value from your collective legal knowledge.

Who are your competitors? Harvey, midpage, Henchman, and TrueLaw.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joj5eCpjtbs&ab_channel=MaximeTools.

Founded: 5/8/2023, San Francisco Bay, Chicago, and remote.

Target customer: Small to medium size firms, legal ops professionals, and corporate legal departments.

Price: Individual: $50 per user/per month; Organizational: $100 per admin/per month; Enterprise is a dramatic step up in service and capabilities, please contact us to learn more!

Traction: We have engaged with corporate M&A departments, private financial institutions, global legal operations departments, and solo practitioners who finally have the chance to expand their practice. We crossed the threshold of 1,000 unique users within a month of going live, are top of mind on several trusted vendor lists, have produced award winning research, and have a customer waitlist extending into 2024.

Our current offering is building strong traction with small to medium size firms who are hoping to implement AI or ML strategies to increase their dexterity and strategic positioning. We offer ongoing learning and development opportunities and actively onboard our customers at their pace.”

Plan for growth: We will be opening up to investors in 2024, expanding into national metropolitan areas coast-to-coast, and expanding internally to scale. Continued R&D, public interest programs, and sustainable innovation will drive our efforts to increase equitable access to justice, break down legalese barriers, and change the reputation of legal departments from the “No Department” to the “Go Department.”

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: Our company is inclusive of different backgrounds, circumstances, national origins, and ages. We encourage each employee to express themselves, share the way they celebrate their culture, and have committed ourselves to equitable representation.

Anything else? N/A.

Paxton AI

Elevator Pitch: Paxton AI develops advanced legal research tools powered by artificial intelligence, providing legal professionals with swift and accurate access to a comprehensive database of laws, regulations, and case law to streamline the legal research and drafting process.

What makes you unique or innovative? Paxton AI is a generative AI to quickly source, analyze, and summarize relevant legal content. While adopting new technologies can be daunting, Paxton AI is user-friendly, offering a seamless way for legal professionals to harness the power of AI without the need for technical expertise. Paxton AI offers a unique blend of AI-driven analysis, a vast knowledge base, and the ability to craft custom-tailored responses to unique legal queries. This makes it not just another research tool, but a comprehensive legal assistant.

What problem do you solve? The complexity and ever-changing nature of the legal landscape necessitate the need for specialized tools that can rapidly and accurately access and analyze vast amounts of legal data. While generic search engines can provide some level of information, the depth, precision, and customization needed for legal work often demand a dedicated solution. Traditional legal research can be lengthy and tedious, requiring attorneys to sift through countless documents, case laws, and articles.

Who are your competitors? Harvey, Casetext.

Demo video: N/A.

Founded: 6/1/2023, Portland, Oregon.

Target customer: Legal professionals: This includes individual attorneys, law firms (from boutique to large multinational firms), in-house legal teams in corporations, and public defenders.

Price: Base price estimation: $100 per user, per month. Custom pricing available

Traction: Paxton AI has raised $6M seed round. We have a growing user base, ranging from solo practitioners to Am Law 100 firms. We have multiple proof of concept trials with large firms and general counsel offices.

Plan for growth: Over the next five years, Paxton AI is poised for product led growth, focusing on technological advancement, market expansion, user base diversification, and sustainable scaling.

We’ll focus on continuous investment in R&D to enhance the capabilities of Paxton AI. This includes refining our natural language processing, expanding our database to include more international laws and languages, and incorporating user feedback to improve functionality.

Attracting and retaining top talent in AI, legal tech, and customer experience to ensure that our team remains at the cutting edge of innovation.

We plan to deepen our market penetration in existing markets while also expanding into new regions. This includes targeting legal markets with high potential for AI adoption.

Outside funding: More than $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: At Paxton AI, diversity is integral to our identity and operations. We understand that diverse teams bring a wealth of perspectives, foster innovation, and drive better business outcomes. We are committed to creating a workplace where all employees feel valued and respected, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, or cultural background.

Our policies accommodate different lifestyles and cultural practices, ensuring that all employees can balance their work with their personal commitments and cultural traditions. We have received funding support from Gaingels and Identify Ventures, prominent LGBTQ+ Funds.

Anything else? N/A.

Recital 

Elevator Pitch: Recital provides legal teams with the most delightful contract negotiation experience, ever. Recital automatically gathers files and messages from email and storage, to provide auto-organized in-flight and historical contracts and one-click comparisons from email. It unlocks your prior work to create your clause library and playbook and makes that knowledge available directly in Word.

Recital works in Word and email, for fast adoption without changing how lawyers work. No implementation needed!

What makes you unique or innovative?

Recital supports every phase of contract management maturity

  1. Don’t need a CLM
  2. Getting ready for a CLM
  3. Already have a CLM
  • Works in the tools that lawyers already use (Word and email), so doesn’t require them to change how they work.
  • Adopt in one day – no upfront implementation needed.
  • Harnesses your trusted prior work product, by organizing & processing all historical and in-flight contracts, to provide clause suggestions, a clause library and playbook directly in Word.

What problem do you solve?

  • Historical contracts and knowledge are disorganized and trapped in multiple silos.
  • Wasted time: 25% of in-house counsel is spent looking for stuff like document versions, redlines, past clause language. That 25% is about $75k of wasted time per in-house counsel, assuming fully loaded comp of $300k.
  • Risk and costly mistakes from missed edits, using the wrong clause, signing the wrong version of a contract.
  • Traditional contract software (CLM) implementations are slow and costly: 6-12+ months (depending on company size and other factors).

Who are your competitors?

  • Existing tools, including Word and email to negotiate contracts; storage for contract docs in cloud storage, shared file server and local storage; and a spreadsheet to track contracts.
  • End-to-end CLMs.
  • Cobble together various tools.
  • Word Compare or Litera Compare for comparisons.
  • Favorite clauses: in a Word doc, Gdoc or spreadsheet.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtRvbWf1yxM.

Founded: 1/1/2021, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Target customer: Legal departments of 1-10 people, though we are getting traction in larger orgs as well; small law firms (<10 attorneys).

We have recently made the product generally available and are starting to generate revenue. Our largest customer is a healthcare network with a legal department of approximately 25 attorneys.

Price: Pricing currently starts at $3,600 per user per year. For customers who want to go back more than three years in gathering and organizing, the pricing is higher. We also have a lower priced plan for small customers with limited needs.

Traction: Declined to disclose.

Plan for growth: Declined to disclose.

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: We have and are building an inclusive team of staff, board members and advisors, that is diverse in multiple ways: gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and geography.

Anything else? The Recital founders previously built and sold Contractually, a contract automation and collaboration product, to Coupa Software.

Resolutn

Elevator Pitch: Resolutn streamlines settlements with AI, turning protracted disputes into quick, fair outcomes. It cuts costs, boosts law firm efficiency, and satisfies clients by resolving cases faster.

What makes you unique or innovative? Resolutn is unique in the legal tech landscape because, while the current trend in technology emphasizes amplifying dispute and leveraging data for adversarial advantage, we focus on innovation for resolution. We have taken the path less traveled by using technology not to wage legal battles, but to end them equitably and efficiently. Our platform represents a pivot from prolonging conflict to pioneering a collaborative approach where resolution is not just the goal, but the method itself. This contrarian vision positions us as innovators in creating peace, not perpetuating legal standoffs.

What problem do you solve? Resolutn stands out as a full-spectrum technology solution that automates the dispute resolution process, removing the need for human mediators from most disputes. This innovation democratizes access to justice, making it as applicable and economical for low-value disputes as for high-value cases. By leveraging advanced algorithms, the platform ensures equitable and swift settlements across the board, overcoming the traditional barriers of cost and scale that can hinder the resolution of smaller claims.

In addition, Resolutn simplifies the settlement process for law firms. It provides a clear dashboard to track settlement progress, a secure system to exchange documents directly with insurers, and instant messaging to cut through email clutter. Our platform tackles the scattered and inefficient communication head-on, making case management straightforward and settlements faster.

Who are your competitors? Our competitors primarily consist of traditional dispute resolution services such as mediation and arbitration firms, as well as emerging legal tech startups that offer settlement negotiation tools. Traditional competitors include large-scale mediation companies like JAMS or the American Arbitration Association, which provide human-centered mediation services. In the legal tech space, we see competition from platforms like NewEraADR and Fairclaims, which offer online dispute resolution tools, but still rely on a human to guide the settlement discussions.

Resolutn sets itself apart by being a fully automated platform that not only streamlines the negotiation process but also makes it accessible and efficient for a wider range of cases, without the need for direct human intervention in the mediation process.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5E_EMYjBKI.

Founded: 9/16/2021, Portland, Oregon.

Target customer: Our target customers are varied within the legal sector, aiming to cater to a broad spectrum to maximize our platform’s utility and reach:

  • Small to Medium Law Firms: These firms may not have the resources to purchase robust matter management software or the financial flexibility to engage in prolonged negotiations. Resolutn offers them an efficient and cost-effective way to settle disputes.
  • Large Law Firms: Even with ample resources, large firms are always looking for ways to optimize case resolution and reduce overhead. Resolutn can complement their existing practices by adding efficiency and data-driven insights.
  • Legal Departments: Corporate legal departments can utilize Resolutn to handle resolve disputes.
  • Solo Practitioners: Individual attorneys can leverage the platform to handle cases more effectively, allowing them to take on more clients due to the time saved through automated processes.
  • Insurance Companies: Resolutn is a two-sided marketplace and insurance adjusters would be on the other side of the platform.

Price: Resolutn operates on a success-based pricing model akin to a mediator’s fee structure. Each party involved in a settlement is charged 2% of the settlement amount, with a cap of $500 per party. This approach aligns our interests with those of our users, as fees are only incurred when a settlement is successfully reached through our platform.

Traction: We have found that starting a two-sided marketplace is challenging, akin to the early days of pioneering platforms like Uber and Airbnb. We’ve had promising feedback from both plaintiff attorneys and insurance companies, which validates our solution’s potential. However, scaling a marketplace from the ground up requires overcoming initial inertia; it’s about building trust and proving value to encourage early adoption.

Our journey so far has seen us secure a handful of cases to demonstrate our platform’s capabilities, yet we’ve encountered the classic chicken-and-egg problem that many marketplace startups face: getting sufficient volume on both sides to enable the platform to show its full value. We’ve concentrated our efforts initially on the insurance side but have had trouble obtaining more than a few cases due to the long selling process with insurance companies.

Nonetheless, the feedback has been positive in proving the concept, refining our technology, and establishing key partnerships. It’s about persistence and iterating our approach based on real-world feedback. At this point we are pre-revenue, but it is only because we are pre-revolution. Once we have initial traction, we believe we will become the preferred method to resolve disputes.

Plan for growth: Over the next five years, Resolutn is set to redefine conflict resolution across various sectors by executing a multi-phased growth strategy. Initially, our focus will be on perfecting our digital AI mediator within the insurance dispute space, providing a neutral, cost-effective alternative to traditional human mediators.

As we refine our AI’s capabilities, we plan to expand our service to encompass multi-party disputes, leveraging our AI to manage the increased complexity these cases present. Beyond insurance, we see vast potential in applying our technology to a range of sectors where mediation is key, including business disputes, landlord-tenant and family law, offering an innovative resolution platform wherever traditional mediation is employed.

Scalability is at the heart of our operational model. We’ve engineered Resolutn with network effects in mind, anticipating that each successfully mediated case will amplify our credibility and attract new users. After crossing the initial adoption ‘chasm,’ we expect growth to accelerate rapidly, leveraging the inherent scalability of our AI system to potentially achieve viral or hyper-scale expansion as users experience and share the effectiveness and efficiency of Resolutn’s digital mediation.

Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.

Diversity: Resolutn is committed to promoting diversity through the very nature of its service, as it directly empowers those in financially precarious positions. By streamlining the dispute resolution process, our platform aims to provide quicker settlements for individuals who are often living paycheck to paycheck, a situation disproportionately affecting diverse communities. This quicker resolution means that those who cannot afford prolonged legal battles have faster access to justice and financial relief.

Additionally, by making dispute resolution more accessible and affordable, we are removing barriers to legal support that many underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals face. In the broader scope, as we grow, we plan to build a diverse team and foster an inclusive culture that reflects the wide range of clients we serve. We believe that drawing from a broad spectrum of perspectives will not only enrich our company culture but will also enable us to better understand and address the needs of all parties using our platform.

Anything else? Our passion is rooted in the transformative potential of Resolutn. We are not just building a platform; we’re striving to change the culture of conflict resolution. By harnessing the power of technology, we aim to turn adversarial encounters into collaborative resolutions. We believe our tool has the power to reduce legal costs, save time, and ultimately bring peace of mind to parties on both sides of a dispute.

We’re committed to innovation, not just in the development of our platform, but also in its application, aiming to expand beyond the current markets into any arena where dispute resolution is needed. We see Resolutn not just as a product but as a movement towards a more amicable, efficient, and just society. Our goal is to create a world where the stress and uncertainty of disputes are significantly reduced, thanks to the predictability and fairness our platform provides.

2nd Chair 

Elevator Pitch: You are a lawyer. You’re preparing a case for a client. You have thousands of pages of material to read. So, you boot up 2nd Chair. You upload your documents. You type, “What are the top 10 best/worst facts for my client in these docs?” In seconds, you have a ChatGPT-style answer. It includes precise links to the relevant parts of the source docs. You can follow the links yourself to guarantee no hallucinations.

What makes you unique or innovative? There are many legal-tech products in the gen-AI category, but none do what we do. Our D-series product is the first GPT-style tool that can securely read, analyze, and discuss an attorney’s own client files, notes, and emails — and can provide precise links to key locations in those documents. Providing those links is crucial, because it allows lawyers to meet their duty of competence by manually verifying the AI’s output in seconds instead of hours. All it takes is a click.

What problem do you solve? In effect: every attorney can have a junior attorney working for them, very cheaply. 2nd Chair compresses hours of mind-numbing document review down to seconds. The product doesn’t ask the user to trust its output; it just saves them hours of time. After plopping down thousands of pages of text and typing a query, users see an X-ray view of the needles in the haystack, allowing them to jump to the relevant text and read it themselves. This works securely on the user’s own private case files, notes, and emails. The combination of generative AI, users’ own documents, and hyperlinked annotations is unique in the market.

Who are your competitors? Indirect competitors exist in companies like: fileread.com, casetext.com, Lexis+ AI, Thompson Reuters’ Westlaw, and clearbrief.com.

None of these indirect competitors copy our “auditable” functionality — our precise links to key locations in source documents. Instead, they indirectly compete with us by providing tools for document review, which is a limited portion of our product offering.

Some of the other companies have generative or analysis capabilities, but only in limited domains, such as contracts.

Demo video: NA – no product video as of filing.

Founded: 5/1/2023, Seattle, Wash.

Target customer: Small and midsized law firms – existing MOU ready. Legal departments for both of our products, especially for the export control tool.

Price: $150 a month per head. Custom pricing for firms.

Traction: – Patents pending

-50 person closed beta to launch in December.

-$100,000 in contracts in negotiations subject to patent filing completion.

– Handshake agreements with legal tech names to review our products.

– Cultivated relationships with potential purchasers of the patents, strong demonstrated interest from would merger targets.

Plan for growth: We have a land-and-expand strategy among users. Through a referral system, we incentivize attorneys to market 2nd Chair by word-of-mouth to their own professional networks. Our D1 product, with its capabilities in output auditing, also lends itself to organic marketing.

Our exit strategy is to license our D1 technology or sell our patents. We do not aim to grow this business to the 5-year mark. Most of the companies we identified as indirect competitors would benefit from licensing or buying our IP.

Our A1 product, the export classification tool, has a first-mover advantage. Our costs of goods sold is low, and we can abundantly meet the technical challenge of creating the tool. This creates high margins and fast movement on an “unsexy” tool, leveraging the moat that Paul Graham has named the “schlep factor.”

Outside funding: No outside funding.

Diversity: Our founding team already draws from multiple socioeconomic backgrounds, neurotypes, gender identities, educational histories, and social viewpoints. A common thread connects us through these differences: we agree that corporate and social interests align on building a heterogeneous, integrated, radically thriving team. We share common language, value, and expectations around DEIB, including a culture of nonviolent communication, emotional literacy, process dialogue, and explicit discourse around DEIB topics. Through these practices and more, we aim to co-create a place of true belonging for people with wisdoms beyond the limits of our own.

Anything else? Our team is uniquely positioned to create and productize this novel technology. One of our founders, who builds the core tech, became an academic ML nerd years before generative AI blew up. He is more fluent in Python than his native English. Another, who writes code to productize the core tech, is a repeat founder and ex-Googler. They learned to code at age 8 and has spent over a decade building products at companies of every size and stage. The third is a philosopher-lawyer who has already filled our business pipeline with customers awaiting completion of the product. He has worked across startups and corporate technology, and is closing out his third year of law school.

Together, we’re hungry to execute a real value proposition as swiftly as possible. Our eyes are fixed firmly on the customer’s pain point, on user-obsessed lean startup iteration, and on the subtle art of hearing people ask for faster horses and building them a car.

Skribe.ai

Elevator Pitch: Skribe empowers attorneys to capture legal testimony with software which dramatically lowers costs by 50%, speeds up the process 10x, and makes attorneys awesome.

What makes you unique or innovative? We believe the future of capturing legal testimony is software powered by AI, and not humans typing words on a stenography machine. The well documented shortage of court reporters paired with the broad acceptance and advancement of virtual and AI technologies, opens a lane for the digitization of the capture of all legal testimony.

Our business model is anchored in a non-stenographic approach that is allowed by long standing federal and state (40+ of the states) code, and by dramatically decreasing costs by 50%, improving efficiency 10x, and providing access to justice for so many smaller cases with smaller budgets (case value). Additionally, the complex workflows surrounding depositions are taken into account with Skribe and it has created a deposition purposed platform, as opposed to a general-purpose software for the public.

What problem do you solve? There is a well-documented court reporter shortage, 35% shortage by the end of 2023, that is restricting the taking of depositions. The resulting run-away costs incurred have resulted in testimony not being captured for economic reasons, i.e., smaller cases/budgets. Skribe also injects speed of delivery to attorneys to work on cases, instead of waiting weeks to work on testimony you just took, you only wait hours. Resulting in faster case resolution and increased throughput for legal teams.

Who are your competitors? Old guard court reporting firms are the status quo own 90%+ of the market. Firms like Veritext, Esquire, Lexitas. More technology focused firms who are still anchored to stenography, but are offering a digital solution are: Parrot, Steno, Calloquy, Verbit.

Demo video: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/m2gjRB2CXHuEgKosabDisr?autoplay=1.

Founded: 1/9/2022, Austin Texas.

Target customer: Small to medium size litigation law firms.

Price: Usage model at $349 per record hour.

Traction:

  • 100+ depositions completed to date.
  • 50+ depositions on the calendar.
  • 700+ hours of video taken..
  • Partner program launched – first 2.
  • Former state bar president’s firm.
  • 27 Attorney investors.
  • Long View Technology Ventures invests.

Note – Late April 2023 Launch

Plan for growth: The business plans to achieve significant growth over the next five years through a well-defined and systematic approach. The growth strategy consists of several key components:

  • Establish a Clear MVP and Solid Code Base: The company’s first step is to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and develop a robust code base to underpin the product’s functionality.
  • Build an Initial A+ Core Team: Assemble a highly committed and energetic core team with the necessary skills and expertise to drive the company’s vision forward.
  • Continuous Discovery Calls: Conduct ongoing discovery calls to engage with potential customers and partners. This process aims to validate and refine the product offering before launch.
  • Establish Early Adopters: Identify and engage with early adopters who are willing to try the product. Ensure outstanding customer service and actively learn from their experiences.
  • Obtain Fundraising: Secure funding to support team expansion and further product development, moving the company closer to achieving product-market fit.
  • Develop a Go-To-Market Strategy: Create a comprehensive strategy for entering the market. This strategy should include a state-by-state approach, with a focus on populous states and those with a high demand for solutions in the field (non-steno code friendly states).
  • Establish Profitability: Work towards achieving profitability as an important milestone, ensuring that the company’s revenue exceeds its costs.
  • Pursue Series A Funding: After establishing a solid foundation and proving the concept, pursue Series A funding to fuel commercialization efforts.
  • Scale the Organization: As the company gains momentum, scale the organization to support the plan and execute the go-to-market strategy effectively. This may include hiring additional team members, expanding operations, and enhancing infrastructure.
  • Aggressively Pursue All Opportunities: Be proactive in seeking out legal testimony, integrating with strategic LegalTech applications, targeting enterprise entities such as insurance companies and in-house counsel of Fortune 500 companies, and driving innovation in AI and intellectual property (IP).

This growth plan outlines a well-structured approach to developing the company’s product, expanding its customer base, securing funding, and ultimately scaling the business. The focus on innovation and partnerships with legal and tech entities positions the company for long-term success in the industry.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: Being a startup, our initial diversity position to date has been more informal with hiring based purely on merit without any bias on gender or race. As we move forward our goal is to develop a thoughtful diversity plan we can utilize as we grow.

Anything else? At Skribe, we don’t just see the world as it is; we envision what it could be. Our mission is to disrupt and reshape how the spoken word is captured, analyzed and shared in the legal and insurance industries. We’re combining video and AI in a way that’s never been seen. We’re scrapping outdated methods, like human-typed transcripts. Instead, we’re ushering in the era of dynamic, interactive video transcripts. It’s not just innovation—it’s a game changer.

We’re cutting costs, accelerating processes and tearing down barriers to justice. Join us as we redefine the future of how the business world captures the spoken word.

Trustate 

Elevator Pitch: Trustate has automated estate and trust administration and trust funding to save teams hours of unbillable time allowing lawyers to have more bandwidth so they can focus on what matters most – their clients.

What makes you unique or innovative? Trustate’s solution is a breath of fresh air. Our digital tools not only focus on efficiency but ensure a level of accuracy and transparency previously unseen in the industry. We are taking on the mammoth task of simplifying estate settlements and operations for trusts and estates in a way others are not. Trustate has introduced a platform that makes accessible and comprehensible what were once daunting tasks. Beyond task completion, Trustate’s collaborative workflows means firms are reducing duplicate efforts and now can see in a snapshot the progress they are making on each matter. Trustate’s software is the only system dedicated to completing tasks on behalf of the T&E professional.

What problem do you solve? Having experienced estate administration personally and professionally, we recognized two key problems that need to be addressed. 1. Trusts and estates settlement is a pain point at every level of wealth, and 2. Law firms do not often have the bandwidth to help all of their clients – many have to direct an executor to do the majority of the work, and often the executor does not complete it correctly, creating a larger problem. However, due to the man hours it takes to settle an estate, attorneys can often only serve higher net worth estates. Trustate addresses that problem head-on and creates software that is applicable for both taxable and non-taxable estates and keeps the attorney in the driver’s seat so they can direct and advise the estate without having to take their time or their paralegal’s time to work on hundreds of tedious tasks.

Who are your competitors? While we do not have any direct competitors in this space, there are some systems that have some features (such as workflows within Wealthtrax) that overlap. As far as we have explored, there is no system that currently completes the tasks associated with trust and estate administration.

Demo video: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/3Du3C6bKajXb7NuLbhisZ8?

Founded: 7/1/2020, Tampa, FL.

Target customer: We have a range of law firms that work with Trustate, but the majority of our customer base is made up of small to mid-size law firms. Beyond law firms, Trust companies that have an estate settlement department are paying customers.

Price: Pricing ranges based on the volume needs of the client. Our pricing can be viewed here: https://www.trustate.com/pricing.

Traction: Our revenue is rapidly growing on an average of 30% MOM. We recently switched to a subscription model from an a la carte model and that has been met with so much enthusiasm and growth. Our ideal customer is who we call the “modernized estate lawyer,” that is a lawyer that has embraced technology in their practice (often uses drafting software, etc.) and sees the value technology can bring to growing their practice. We have found that those lawyers often work at small to mid-sized law firms. Our goals for 2024 is to expand our reach into larger firms with a dedicated estate settlement practice, as well as trust companies that currently do this work in-house.

Plan for growth: In the next five years, we plan to completely disrupt the estate settlement market. We have a strategic growth plan that includes realistic projections based on our current growth thus far. Our projections include revenue projections and the resources needed to make that plan a reality.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: We are 100% female-founded company. Our employee base is diverse, and we feel strongly that a diverse team cultivates an amazing company culture. Each person is able to bring ideas and insights that are unique, which makes our team stronger and more innovative.

Anything else? N/A.

VoiceScript

Elevator Pitch: VoiceScript is a legal technology leader, delivering innovative SaaS solutions for court reporting firms, courts, and legal services providers. Our revolutionary AI-powered digital software platform integrates state-of-the-art speech recognition and NLU technologies with automated transcript production tools to better serve attorneys and other legal services providers.

What makes you unique or innovative? VoiceScript AI and automated speech-to-text based point solutions for court reporters, transcribers and attorneys are best in the industry. However, what gives VoiceScript a huge market advantage is that our point solutions are part of a single technology architecture/platform that integrates a highly secure end-to-end repository, workforce and workflow automation and management tools, business reporting and analytics, and much more.

Courts and court reporting firms are now able to manage the entire reporting service delivery and transcript production process from start to finish through one platform. This also gives the courts and reporting firms the opportunity to deliver synchronized transcripts within advanced productivity tools designed for attorneys and other legal services providers.

What problem do you solve? VoiceScript solutions are designed to modernize the delivery of court reporting services and dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of producing legal transcripts (for both independent court reporting professionals and firms). In addition, Attorneys and legal professionals benefit from more efficient productivity tools when managing  transcripts from depositions, trails, etc.

Who are your competitors? Stenograph, Advantage Software (Eclipse), ProCat, ParrotASR, For The Record (FTR), Soni-Clear.

Demo video: Can provide video or live demo upon request.

Founded: 2/1/2020, Cocoa, Florida.

Target customer: VoiceScript has several target customers in the legal market, however all roads ultimately lead to the final client – specifically attorneys and law firms. Our products are designed for each of the following target customers. 1. Court Reporting firms – from the largest to smallest court reporting firms as well as independent court reporting professionals; 2. Courts – our platform is currently being piloted by several state and federal courts for digital recording and transcript production and management; 3. Attorneys / Law firms – Realtime streaming and post-proceeding synchronized transcript and case management tools for attorneys, paralegals, etc.

Price: VoiceScript products are sold through monthly software subscription as well as on a per processed job basis.

Traction: VoiceScript 2023 SaaS product sales have grown by over 600% compared to 2022. Today, 4 out of the top 10 largest court reporting firms are clients, with several other large reporting firms currently piloting our products. We are also experiencing significant growth with mid-market and smaller reporting firms as well as independent reporting professionals.

Plan for growth: We expect to grow by over 400% 2024 vs. 2023 and we have several new products in beta which will begin generating revenue in early 2024.

Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.

Diversity: Our founding team includes several women, and The Court Reporting Academy (a wholly owned subsidiary) actively recruits and provides scholarships and free placement services to candidates from veteran and underserved communities, as well as adult education and career centers. As of today, the Academy has successfully recruited and placed over 500 students in above average income jobs throughout the court reporting industry.

Anything else? The court reporting industry is in rapid transformation. What was once a stenography centric court reporting world only a few years ago, will be fully transformed into AI enhanced product and services over the next five years. And the tools and options for attorneys will also quickly evolve into better productivity solutions. VoiceScript is the leader in this industry-wide transformation, and we are in an excellent position to help inform and educate the legal community as to what is coming at them hard and fast.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.