Robert Ambrogi Blog
Elevator Pitch: CiteRight helps litigation teams save, organize, share, cite, and assemble case law — so they can draft faster and spend more time on what matters.
What makes you unique or innovative? CiteRight is the only tool that allows lawyers to save case law and automatically cite it inside Microsoft Word. Our insight is that legal citations are themselves a form of knowledge that can be reused up and down the legal research workflow. By leveraging the data our users generate, we help them build long-term value out of their work product, making it more useful for more people across the firm.
What problem do you solve? When drafting a piece of written advocacy, lawyers and their teams rely on a complex, messy web of legal research. Legal research is difficult to keep organized (lawyers typically email cases to themselves or each other, or create one-off organizational schemas on their desktops); it’s difficult to cite (paralegals and junior lawyers spend hours Bluebooking cases and checking for citation accuracy); and it’s difficult to assemble (whether in the form of a formal book of authorities, or an informal set of materials for preparing an oral argument). Finally, legal research deliverables are difficult to reuse. Making use of a precedent requires recreating the original research trail that went into it — a time consuming process of looking up the same sources that the original author found when they were writing it.
By cutting down the “overhead” spent in organizing, citing, and assembling legal research, CiteRight gives users more time for higher-order writing and analysis. In turn, those efficiencies translate into more time spent doing meaningful, high-quality work for clients, while giving junior lawyers more time to spend on meaningful work earlier in their careers.
Your competitors? Briefcatch, LItera Litigation Companion, Zotero.
Demo video: https://www.citeright.net?#citeright_video
Founded: 1/13/2017, Toronto, Canada
Target customer. CiteRight’s target customers are lawyers who practice complex commercial litigation, both in larger firms and in smaller or solo practices.
Price. Enterprise: $150/user/month; Teams: $99/user/month; Solo: $50/user/month
Expected 2022/2023 gross revenue? Less than $1M/$1M – $5M
Number of users/paying customers? 1,001 – 10,000/21 – 50
Traction to date. CiteRight has grown rapidly since its founding. In late 2019, CiteRight brought on its first paying (non-pilot) customers, but the Covid-19 crisis, beginning in March 2020, was the real catalyst for CiteRight’s growth. As courts pivoted to online hearings and submission platforms, and as firms scrambled to adjust to remote work, it became clear that firms needed technology that could help lawyers coordinate their legal research, and assemble it into PDFs that met with court requirements. CiteRight’s revenue has grown 130% annually, and today CiteRight counts Canada’s largest law firms among its customers.
Plan for growth: CiteRight’s next major move — and the reason we’re applying for a spot in Startup Alley at Tech Show — is our upcoming launch in the United States. We have just closed a $1.5M funding round, we will be releasing a version of CiteRight for the US market in Q2 2023, and we are currently recruiting a select cohort of 3-5 US law firms to be early adopters of our product.
We have built our long-term product roadmap around a viable and ready market for drafting and knowledge tools based around legal citation. Our next products, currently in development, will extend CiteRight’s citation ability to include evidentiary materials stored on document management and e-discovery platforms, allowing CiteRight to assemble motion records and affidavits. As well, CiteRight will leverage the knowledge graph its users generate to provide real-time, predictive insights and recommendations into the additional materials that should be included in a draft submission.
Outside funding. $1M – $5M in outside funding
Describe any ways in which your company is diverse or promotes diversity. As our team page shows (https://www.citeright.net/company/citeright-team), our company is highly diverse.