Just what we all need — another chance to vote! But this is a fun one. You can help pick the legal technology startups that will be selected for the fifth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2021. Fifteen companies will be selected to face off in a virtual pitch competition that will be the opening event of this year’s TECHSHOW.
In November, we issued a call for entries. From all the entries we received, a panel of judges whittled the applications down to 25. Now your votes will select the final 15. The 15 startups with the most votes will get the opportunity to be featured at TECHSHOW, which will be held virtually March 8-12, 2021.
Below are the contenders, listed in alphabetical order. Read their pitches, check out their websites, then vote. For those that have a demo video, I’ve included the link.
Deadline for voting is Feb. 12, 2021, at 11:45 p.m. Eastern time. Winners will be announced on Feb. 15, 2021.
BALLOT IS HERE. Trouble with the ballot? Go directly to Survey Monkey.
Founded: 9/1/2018.
Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio.
Elevator pitch: ADR Notable is the end-to-end solution that suits all a mediator’s needs throughout the mediation:
– Capture client intake and engagement agreements pre-mediation;
– Keyboard or stylus-to-text notetaking and timers to track plenary and caucus in-session; and
– Bill clients, make a term sheet, and delete confidential materials post-mediation.
ADR Notable is the only tool a mediator needs to keep them organized and efficient throughout their mediation and focus on finding a resolution.
How we’re unique: ADR Notable is the only case management system to go “in the room,” specifically designed to serve mediators before, during, and after the mediation session. It replaces the legal pad with keyboard or stylus-to-text notetaking, and the mediator can capture note content, party, and note type. Manage notes logically, link notes to each other, and even export notes to draft a term sheet. Securely store and delete files used in mediation via a secure cloud-based case management system.
Demo video (if any): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTgdQYdH2z4&t=28s
Target customer: Mediators, neutrals, and ADR professionals.
Pricing: First 90 days free, then either $39.99 per user per month subscription or $34.99 per case opened. We also have a customizable enterprise plan for firms of more than three professionals.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: Our product was evaluated by 30+ mediators in 2019, proving product and market fit and traction sufficient to justify investment in the product. Launched beta in September 2020 with 25 beta testers, and then launched full product in November 2020 (soft launch). As of December 15, we have 50+ users signed up as customers. Full launch scheduled late Q1/early Q2 2021. ADR Notable was selected as one of National Law Journal’s 2020 Emerging Legal Technologies.
Founded: 8/12/2015.
Headquarters: London (HQ) and Singapore.
Elevator pitch: Avvoka is a document automation, negotiation, and analytics tool designed to help law firms, in-house legal teams and businesses draft documents, negotiate them, and leverage data insights to draft better documents, and get to “yes” faster. Avvoka replaces complex coding requirements of legacy tools with an intuitive, no-code approach to document automation. We provide a cloud collaboration and negotiation environment. Our analytics module provides useful insights.
How we’re unique: Our tool is very intuitive and has a truly no-code approach. With Avvoka, everyone can learn to automate. However, Avvoka is very powerful and can handle sophisticated automation. Besides, we are an end-to-end tool that manages the entire life cycle of a contract from drafting to negotiation, execution and analytics. Our features increase contract creation efficiency and reduce negotiation time to reach execution faster.
Demo video (if any): Demo: https://vimeo.com/242070794. Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI3i8aov7g8.
Target customer: Legal and professional service providers of all sizes, legal or operations teams within businesses (in any industry), commercial, sales, or partnerships teams that work with contracts and procurement teams at the front line of vendor onboarding.
Pricing: Subscription based.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: Avvoka has entered into a contract with LMA.Automate (Loan Market Association wholly owned subsidiary) and Allen & Overy to establish a document automation platform. We also have a wide array of clients in different industries and jurisdictions. We will soon be launching a new version of our platform with improved functionality. The newest version of Avvoka is 800 times faster than the previous, bringing a host of new features and an improved user experience.
Founded: 1/1/2019.
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Elevator pitch: In short, we’re like Uber for lawyers. We connect people with vetted attorneys who provide unbundled, limited-scope services based on need and budget. Our technology provides a reverse-auction approach as well as a marketplace to buy packaged services directly from attorneys.
How we’re unique: Three things: lead generation, case management platform, client acquisition techniques and selling methodology. We’re bringing unlimited, qualified leads to attorneys with the most competitive pricing in the industry. Our online platform provides complimentary case management, communication, and billing tools including free payment processing. We’ve developed a selling methodology for delivering unbundled legal services that we’ve synthesized into our technology.
Demo video (if any): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUjhmqhTl1E.
Target customer: People with civil matters such as business, estate, family law, immigration, and personal injury, to name a few.
Pricing: Subscription.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: For 2020, we’ve generated $138,655 gross revenue. Eighty-two clients have hired one of our 107 attorneys. We’ve generated 1,013 client leads and 107 attorneys have applied to be on our platform.
Founded: 7/17/2017.
Headquarters: Scottsdale, Ariz., and Austin, Texas.
Elevator pitch: Bigfork’s ALOE was developed by in-house lawyers to provide a single platform that allows in-house lawyers to collaborate within their organizations, implement process and controls, and free up lawyers to be lawyers and business partners instead of administrators.
How we’re unique: Our solution was developed by in-house counsel who have felt the pain personally. Which is why we’ve included things like email integration, mobile approvals, Docusign integration, and focused on collaboration and end to end process for contracts, matters, and all things that come across the desk of an in-house lawyer.
Demo video (if any): https://www.bigforktech.com/aloe-tutorials/.
Target customer: In-house legal teams and the departments they work with.
Pricing: Per user/annual license, minimum of five users.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We launched ALOE a little over a year ago and have gained customers primarily by word of mouth, going from zero to five customers in less than a year, with each customer that has come to an annual renewal choosing to renew. We are a women-owned small business dedicated to making in-house practice more efficient and balanced to improve the lives of in-house lawyers and the bottom line of their employers.
Founded: 11/22/18.
Headquarters: Moscow, Russia.
Elevator pitch: Visual constructor allows to create legal software without programming.
How we’re unique: Our tool allows users to create legal expert systems, document generators, calculators, educational platforms, tests, etc.
Demo video (if any): https://yadi.sk/i/TCTWWoJpIUs2Gg.
Target customer: Banks, legal firms, legal departments of big companies.
Pricing: Monthly payments.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: Crowd investment company, 2nd bank of Russia: VTB, Sberbank factoring company.
Founded: 10/1/2018.
Headquarters: Leuven (HQ) and Antwerp, Belgium.
Elevator pitch: ClauseBase is a contract drafting platform that allows lawyers to turn their clauses into intelligent and reusable clauses and manage them in a clause library. From there, they can build contracts by stacking clauses on top of each other like building blocks, with ClauseBase ensuring internal consistency in terminology, grammar, styling, cross-referencing, and much more. The software also allows users to transform intelligent templates into a Q&A-style interview for easy contract generation.
How we’re unique: Instead of automating entire templates, as traditional document automation software does, ClauseBase looks at the individual building blocks that make up a document. This approach allows you to not only build templates for automation in a traditional Q&A format, but also to create bespoke documents by stacking clauses on top of each other. ClauseBase also lets you upload your house style to the platform so that every document’s styling is consistent, eliminating the typical battle with MS Word.
Demo video (if any): https://vimeo.com/398581600.
Target customer: Law firms and in-house legal departments.
Pricing: License subscription.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: On organic growth alone, ClauseBase has managed to onboard a significant amount of law firms and in-house legal departments across the globe. This has resulted in ClauseBase already reaching profitability by the end of its first year in business. Our customers are using the tool to generate new sources of revenue, such as building self-service document generation platforms for their clients, as well as making their own clauses available to other users.
Founded: 6/1/2018.
Headquarters: Della has offices in London (HQ) and Paris.
Elevator pitch: Simple to set up and easy to use, Della is supplanting established contract analysis and review tools, by offering lawyers an intuitive way to review contracts. Using proprietary AI, Della allows lawyers to ask questions about their contracts, in plain English (and other languages), and get clear answers. Della learns every time you use it and recognizes that lawyers don’t think about contracts in terms of “extracting clause X or Y,” they just want to find the answer to a query. Quickly.
How we’re unique: Traditional contract review focuses on clause detection and data extraction. Della focuses on the questions we want to ask of our contracts, allowing users to focus on legal work, not paperwork or tech. It takes 10 minutes for a new user to start using Della. Our models learn directly from any interactions, allowing users to review docs faster every time. Powered by massive language models, Della reduces time-to-value, while ensuring the use of a sophisticated tool is achievable for smaller firms.
Demo video (if any): Multilingual demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdT6anQM8iU&feature=youtu.be; teaser video: https://youtu.be/W-WgvZnUTs0.
Target customer: Law firms and in-house legal departments, who need to speed up the manual review of contracts, either historically during an audit or pre-signature. That includes law firms of any size, as our AI can be used by anyone to help them save time. The smallest law firm currently using Della has 12 lawyers.
Pricing: Della operates on a SaaS model basis for most customers. Law firms can buy Della for one-off projects, but after trying Della, many want to benefit from the way that our system learns, so tend to buy a flexible subscription for a given number of documents a month. Corporates can buy the system on a per-user basis.
Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.
Traction: Our platform only launched in January 2020, but we are already being used by small and large law firms across multiple countries and several large multinational corporations. Those partners range in size from top UK and European law firms to smaller boutique providers and enterprise organizations. Earlier this year (2020), we launched a partnership with Wolters Kluwer to provide Della to their contract management platform customers.
Founded: 10/1/2020.
Headquarters: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Elevator pitch: The first product of its kind, Depositions.com is a secured app that empowers lawyers and legal professionals to stream, playback, clip and share video on their mobile device or computer anytime, anywhere with just a tap. Files and exhibits can also be uploaded for viewing and sharing within the team. Saving firms time and money, Depositions.com simplifies video depo and document management for improved collaboration and productivity whether at the office, in mediation, or at the courthouse.
How we’re unique: Video depositions are exploding in popularity, but the tools of today have not been built for easily transferring, clipping, or collaborating on those videos. Our mission is to have every video, in the cloud, in a secure app that has a familiar YouTube-like interface.
Demo video (if any): http://www.depositions.com/video/.
Target customer: Any law firm, large and small, and insurance companies, large and small.
Pricing: 1. Monthly seat license, with business accounts starting at $19.95/mo. with the first 30 days free. 2. Per-upload fee, which includes all the related files and exhibits associated with video depositions, starting at $9.95/upload, first upload is free.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: We started with a soft launch on October 1, 2020, controlling the rollout to law firms and lawyers we are already connected to, allowing them to use the platform for free and provide valuable real-world feedback and use cases for us to review and refine. Without any marketing or advertising or social postings, we have 38 customers who account for 76 active users and who have loaded 84 video depositions to date on the platform. We plan to start charging customers –- and launch our marketing and advertising program –- after the first of the new year, 2021. Our app was awarded “Best Legal Mobile Application” by the Mobile Web Awards this month.
Founded: 5/1/2019.
Headquarters: San Francisco, Calif.
Elevator pitch: Docket is a simple, easy-to-use matter management platform for legal teams. Docket automatically ingests matters ensuring work doesn’t slip through the cracks, creates a centralized hub for teams to collaborate on the work, and generates insightful analytics to showcase the value legal brings the enterprise.
How we’re unique: We are starting our focus by creating a product completely catered to in-house legal teams. Having a deep understanding of the work processes from small to large departments, we have designed a product that allows teams to create a system of record with minimal change in their day-to-day process. By becoming the platform used by in house legal teams, we will create a series of applications and leverage our way into selling to law firms.
Demo video (if any): N/A.
Target customer: In-house counsel.
Pricing: SaaS subscription. Pricing is per user, per month.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: In May 2019, we got accepted to 500 Startups as solely a pitch deck. In the short 16 months with a very lean team we were able to build version one of the product, trial a series of companies, and find paid traction from those trials. We have currently published a case study with our customer in the cryptocurrency space.
Founded: 6/7/2018.
Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Penn.
Elevator pitch: DorothyAI applies an ensemble of advanced natural language processing, machine learning, and traditional keyword-based search models to a query in your own words to quickly identify the most relevant results, filter results, and refine searches. Patent practitioners using DorothyAI can perform their own searches in less time than patent search firms, eliminating the need for patent search outsourcers and the disclosure risks associated with outsourcing, while turning outsource fees to revenue.
How we’re unique: 1. Connection: Our team has almost 80 combined years of patent practice experience, and we leverage our network to ensure our solutions solve problems. 2. Technology: We are redefining how technical documents are searched with advanced AI while recycling existing methods to make the search efficient. 3. Focus: DorothyAI will identify the best references no matter the technology quickly. 4. Experience: Our tools produce professional results with the look and feel of consumer tech.
Demo video (if any): https://www.dorothyai.com/video-demo.
Target customer: Patent agents/lawyers, in-house patent counsel, licensing managers in technology transfer offices.
Pricing: Monthly subscription ($200/user).
Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.
Traction: Our commercial offering was launched in October 2020. Despite much interest, we have not closed any big deals yet. We expect sales to increase dramatically in 2021.
Founded: 10/1/2017.
Headquarters: New York City.
Elevator pitch: The way attorneys work has changed forever. We offer a hybrid of technology and brick-and-mortar office space. They are fused together to save law firms 90% or more on base rent and occupancy expenses. We offer a virtual office under one platform and in compliance with the ABA and state bar associations virtual office ethic model rules (for example, compliance with New York’s Judiciary Law § 470).
How we’re unique: FirmVO is the first legal tech start up to compete with the physical office and its landlord. As the historical “corner attorney office” loses its luster, we are helping our clients save on their #2 expense after staff. We help our members increase profits and pass on the savings to their clients. We have been meaningfully helping our members keep safe during the pandemic by them not having to venture out to stop by the office to pick up essential mail.
Demo video (if any): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU-jVaGINqs.
Target customer: Mini law firms (2-12 attorneys) and solo practitioners. We also serve larger firms and our team is dedicated to building out our enterprise solution for the larger law firms in the nation.
Pricing: Monthly recurring subscription model (SaaS).
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: We have 150+ recurring law firms subscriptions. We have grown our total revenue and members by 120% since March.
Founded: 2/20/19.
Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.
Elevator pitch: We save time and reduce costly mistakes for legal professionals by providing insights into document relationships to help them easily find and make sense of all their documents.
How we’re unique: We are the only company able to determine document lineage across all the user’s folders and email accounts, allowing them to easily find and understand the full history of any document from within Microsoft Office, even without an expensive document management system.
Demo video (if any): https://youtu.be/CxdkXNZ4Fys.
Target customer: Solo and small law firms. Also applicable to midsize law firms and legal departments.
Pricing: Annual subscription, per seat.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: Lane Powell has been our partner from the start, and they are deploying the system across all their locations.
Founded: 8/10/2017.
Headquarters: Chicago, Ill.
Elevator pitch: 44th Street helps lawyers understand their cases more thoroughly starting on day one. Built by trial lawyers for trial lawyers, our case analysis software accelerates your investigation, delivering compelling data visualizations that reveal your case story faster. Instantly identify data patterns and relationships with communication mapping, timelines, topic clustering, sentiment analysis, chronologies and email thread analysis. Develop your winning argument from discovery to trial.
How we’re unique: 44th Street speeds up the discovery process to give users a competitive advantage in the courtroom. With its intuitive interface that includes e-discovery capabilities, 44th Street transforms data into digestible visualizations that save you countless hours. Utilizing natural language capabilities and artificial Intelligence, our case analysis software instantly identifies data patterns and relationships. Empower your team to collaborate, discover new questions, and deliver actionable insights.
Demo video (if any): https://44thstreettech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/44th-Street-Brochure-Law-Firms.pdf.
Target customer: Small to midsized litigation-focused law firms, litigation departments of any size law firm, legal service providers, general counsel or corporate legal, regulatory and governance departments, and legal and forensic consultants.
Pricing: Subscription based, SaaS (software as a service), tiered model plan.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We continue to build a user community in the legal market. Current users include: small law firms using the system on multiple cases for case analysis, document review and ediscovery; proof of concept with an expert forensic data collection, electronic discovery and comprehensive document and managed review legal service provider serving corporate legal departments and law firms looking for better ways to navigate complex data matters; case analysis focused on review of 35,000 plus emails by an independent non lawyer cybersecurity specialist currently investigating a legal matter.
We are currently in our launch phase and actively building our customer base. We continue to listen to our legal user community to develop future functionalities to add that will further enhance and empower the needs of target users.
Founded: 7/1/2020.
Headquarters: New York, N.Y.
Elevator pitch: Freelance For Law is a marketplace that connects law firms with freelance legal professionals. Busy attorneys simply post a project (short- or long-term) including the type of freelancer, skills required, due date, and budget. Then they can review profiles, hire, securely exchange documents, monitor project status, and pay all on our user-friendly platform.
How we’re unique: Unlike the very few existing law firm outsourcing marketplaces, our freelancers include attorneys and support staff (paralegals, law clerks, legal assistants, and more).
Our goal at its very core is to drive law firm efficiency, which is why we recently launched our free practice management service allowing users to create matters, upload documents, set reminders, collaborate with team members, and more.
Demo video (if any): https://vimeo.com/417775012.
Target customer: Solo attorneys and law firms size 2-9 attorneys.
Pricing: Law Firm Fee – 6%. Freelancer Fee – 15%.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We have completed more than $10,000 in projects. More than 500 legal freelancers have signed up, 100% growth over the last 90 days, and $500,000 in funding. We recently launched our free practice management service.
Founded: 12/1/2015.
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Elevator pitch: JDoe is an anonymous, encrypted platform for sexual misconduct reporting and client outreach.
How we’re unique: JDoe is the world’s first, end-to-end encrypted platform for reporting sexual misconduct and is available for free to consumers worldwide. Our industry agnostic platform was designed for law firms first and generates a tremendous amount of strength for consumers and marketing efficiency for law firms. Our core technology identifies repeat offenders exponentially faster than was previously possible and enables individuals to pursue collective actions against bad actors and institutions.
Demo video (if any): https://www.instagram.com/p/CHiTkzPDQxW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.
Target customer: Law firms (Am Law 100 firms to sole practitioners), federal and state law enforcement (police, DoJ, FBI), schools, corporate HR, rideshare, dating apps, and more.
Pricing: We charge between $10,000 and $500,000 per client depending on the specific use case. For law firms looking to simply join the JDoe ecosystem and be listed as a resource for survivors we charge an annual subscription per state and per attorney. We also are in the business of licensing APIs, SDKs, and white-labeling our technology for businesses that are looking to address underreporting of these types of incidents in a trauma-informed manner.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: We launched JDoe for law firms less than a year ago, and we are already working with nearly 100 firms around the world, ranging from sole practitioners to Am Law 100 firms. We help tens of thousands of survivors connect with world-class civil litigators annually. Despite COVID-19, we have witnessed firsthand a rapid digital transformation and adoption of our technology by law firms around the world.
Organizations such as Lyft, UNHCR, the FBI, DoJ, state attorneys, and more have piled into our pipeline to leverage our technology to address underreporting of sexual misconduct in various community-like environments. Recently, at a college campus in Connecticut, JDoe went from having 0 reports on the campus to 75 within a week and immediately identified 12 repeat offenders. This represents more data than the university had over the course of 10 years combined regarding sexual misconduct on its campus.
JDoe generates over $250,000 annually from law firms.
Founded: 1/4/20.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil.
Elevator pitch: Juridoc is the most complete and easy-to-use contract lifecycle management platform in the world that allows an efficient process, with reduced time and costs. Our cloud-based software facilitates the entire contract life cycle, streamlines workflow and improves compliance.
How we’re unique: We are the most complete and easy to use contract lIfecycle management software on the market, and we are using machine learning to help our customers to become better negotiators.
Demo video (if any): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vb_lowvHJY&feature=emb_logo.
Target customer: Small and medium companies and especially legal, HR, and sales departments.
Pricing: We are a BtoB SaaS solution working with monthly or annual plans per user.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: We launched in July and have more than 500 users already.
Founded: 2/26/2020.
Headquarters: Austin, Texas.
Elevator pitch: Legal Karma accelerates law firms’ most important client interactions. We build client portals that allow lawyers to assign tasks/build work flows for clients, provides a “case tracker” for clients to stay in the loop on their matter, and automate any document or form like a TurboTax for law. Plus, law firms can sell their legal services online with a menu of options. We are a client-centric portal. This isn’t your place to manage your matter internally.
How we’re unique: Most folks focus on client interaction from the perspective of CRM or how best they can manage their matter internally. Legal Karma is a client-centric tool that sits on top of any law practice, litigation-centric or contract-centric.
Demo video (if any): N/A.
Target customer: Law firm owners or support staff at a firm sized 1-50 for now. We have enterprise visions, but are targeting these folks now.
Pricing: $99 a month for a law firm membership. Unlimited attorneys/staff seats.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We officially launched in October 2020. We have a dozen folks in the app with a line of 30 other folks waiting to be onboarded. We’re moving slowly as the app is new, and we want to provide an elegant user experience. The competitive pricing and app value are clear. Another proof point: Our users want to be investors in our tool.
Founded: 3/15/2019.
Headquarters: Denver, Colo., and Coimbatore, India.
Elevator pitch: We build software for investigations, discovery, and compliance, combining the power of AI and cloud computing with our own digital magic to make search smarter, review easier, and discovery more affordable. Our software helps people easily find the information they need — without mastering complex search syntax. We created Sherlock, the world’s first AI-powered digital document bloodhound. It works like Pandora, only when you click thumbs up, it finds great documents rather than great music.
How we’re unique: Our software, Merlin Integrated Search, is the first to combine keyword and investigative (Sherlock) search in a secure cloud platform and offer True Cloud Pricing allowing users to pay by the day, the week, the month, or longer with discounts for one- and three-year resource engagements.
Demo video (if any): https://youtu.be/j0ce9NkuOi0.
Target customer: Investigators, lawyers, legal departments, government agencies, and companies with large document populations.
Pricing: We plan to be the first to offer True Cloud Pricing, allowing clients to use our investigations and discovery platform on their own terms, e.g., by the day, week, month, or longer, choosing the resources needed for their purposes.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: Merlin has grown substantially in size in its second year. We expect sales will take off with the release of Sherlock and Merlin Integrated Search, which will be the first AI-powered search and investigations platform delivered securely via the cloud on a pay for what you need basis.
Founded: 8/16/2019.
Headquarters: New York; Omaha, Neb.
Elevator pitch: Motionize’s intuitive design and navigation leads you through the document automation and creation process seamlessly. We help lawyer’s save up to 80% of their nonbillable time.
How we’re unique: Our intuitive system takes your existing documents, and our AI programs them for you. Also, unlike any other system, we have complete compatibility with Microsoft word documents and allow users to edit them with full end-to-end encryption in the cloud.
Demo video (if any): https://youtu.be/WIlxxtO0Z9U.
Target customer: Law firms under 50 attorneys.
Pricing: $60 per seat, plus optional consulting fees for document set up.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We have been in beta/stealth for the past year and have just finished the LexisNexis accelerator program. We are currently in discussions with them about moving their legacy HotDocs content onto our platform.
Founded: 5/1/2019.
Headquarters: Edmonton.
Elevator pitch: Painworth helps people calculate, manage, and settle personal injury cases.
How we’re unique: We serve end users directly and broker fast settlements and arbitration that cut through unnecessary legal hoops.
Demo video (if any): N/A.
Target customer: Consumers with a personal injury case, law firms, and insurance companies.
Pricing: SaaS licensing.
Outside funding: Less than $1M in outside funding.
Traction: Within one year, we have already been approached about acquisition. We have become the world’s largest tool of our kind despite only having bootstrapped growth. Provisional patents filed, and we were awarded some financial grants which allowed us to grow and gain the attention of LexisNexis, several national insurers, the nation’s largest litigation financer, a major international candy company, and the UK government.
Founded: 7/1/2019.
Headquarters: Arlington, Va.
Elevator pitch: Prelimine builds products that liberate litigators from procedural, formulaic, and repetitive tasks. Our first product, LitKit, targets tasks that waste litigators’ time while drafting briefs and other legal documents –- exhibit numbering, transferring redactions, or copy-pasting form language for discovery responses and complaints.
How we’re unique: Prelimine focuses on litigators and the tasks that pull them away from their substantive work. We are not trying to disrupt or reinvent legal practice, but meet litigators where they work (in Microsoft Word) and offer small solutions to make their lives easier. The experience of our co-founder, a big law senior litigation associate, and her colleagues led to the building of Prelimine –- as the solutions for their daily annoyances were not being addressed by the legal tech market.
Demo video (if any): N/A.
Target customer: Law firms of all sizes are our target customer; our users will likely be junior and midlevel attorneys, paralegals, and word processing.
Pricing: Enterprise-wide licensing based on law firm size.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: LitKit just wrapped up beta testing and will launch in January 2021. Since our testers’ feedback usually concluded in, “Can I keep it?” we extended the beta licenses for many of our testers through January when their law firms will be able to purchase a license to the release version of the application. Some of our testers already convinced their firms to complete the purchase in January.
Founded: 4/3/2019.
Headquarters: Bloomfield, N.J.
Elevator pitch: Spectacles patent-pending technology displays all terms defined in a document in an interactive side-panel so you can see what matters while you read. No flipping pages, no multiple document windows, no searching for definitions. Spectacles brings the definition to you. Just highlight the word and click, Spectacles will handle the rest.
How we’re unique: Our patent-pending technology makes reviewing even the most sophisticated and complex legal and finance documents a breeze. Never hunt through indexes or multiple pages of a contract again. Just highlight and click, Spectacles will bring the definition to you.
Demo video (if any): https://youtu.be/QBHS–Je06c.
Target customer: Big law (multi-national AmLaw law firms); investment banks, private equity funds, private credit funds; small/medium sized law firms; and regulatory agencies.
Pricing: Software-as-a-service: Basic: $25 per month per user. Premium: $40 per month per user. Sell both bulk subscriptions to enterprises and individual subscriptions to individual consumers.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We are currently in discussions with large multinational law firms.
Founded: 5/22/2018.
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia (HQ), and New York, N.Y.
Elevator pitch: Syntheia is a knowledge platform for lawyers. We make it easy for lawyers to do their best work by providing them with useful information at the right time and in the right place.
Our software turns legal expertise and long documents into bite-sized and reusable machine learning models and text. These models and text plug into multiple use-case specific applications — including for AI-assisted document review, automating clause bank creation, and recommending drafting in Microsoft.
How we’re unique: There are five key differentiators:
- Our natural language processing technology is capable of learning new legal concepts from 3 to 5 examples;
- Our machine analyzes documents at a granular level, starting with document layout analysis;
- Our software is deployed privately to law firms, so data is never shared;
- Our applications are designed to fit existing workflows, but share learnings across them; and
- We aim to fill the gaps left by incumbents, rather than challenge them head-on.
Demo video (if any): https://youtu.be/6TLHFypFnMc.
Target customer: Our target customers are primarily medium to large law firms. However, our software is also suitable for in-house legal teams and small law firms.
Pricing: We charge an annual license fee for our software. Our pricing model depends on the number of applications and seats desired by a customer.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: We came out of stealth in July 2020. As of November 2020, we have commenced pilots with one EU company, one US law firm, and two AU law firms.
Founded: 5/18/2018.
Headquarters: Denver, Colo.
Elevator pitch: TermScout reviews, rates, and compares B2B software contracts based on customer favorability so that software buyers can quickly understand what they’re being asked to sign and so software vendors can better understand how their contracts compare.
How we’re unique: We are the world’s first objective contract rating agency. While we’re building our initial business in the B2B software contract space, our model is applicable to any contracts that are used on a one-to-many basis (e.g. privacy policies, employment agreements, leases, insurance contracts, and more). Our model produces high-quality contract reviews, comparisons, and ratings at extremely competitive pricing.
Demo video (if any): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3cvOPQALMg&feature=youtu.be.
Target customer: Commercial lawyers at large companies and law firms.
Pricing: Ridiculously affordable access to all of our data on a subscription basis (i.e., content as a service).
Outside funding: $1M – $5M in outside funding.
Traction: We work with a handful of Fortune 500 companies, have raised $1.9 million in outside investment, won the Global Legal Hackathon 2018 (then called LexLucid), and went through the LexisNexis Legal Tech Accelerator and Techstars Boulder accelerator.
Founded: 1/1/2013.
Headquarters: Des Moines, Iowa.
Elevator pitch: Thumbprinter protects vital files from fakes, forgeries, or fraud by instantly validating any file’s digital originality. As files continue to rapidly move from place to place — and cyber attacks accelerate — Trokt Thumbprints provide “anchors of truth” that prove a file’s validity even if its chain of custody is lost. Our Thumbprinter app can help anyone from sole practitioners to large firms, offering third-party file validation that holds up in any court across the developed world.
How we’re unique: We are unique because our focus has been on creating world class security built for the “80-year-old lawyer test” — any lawyer can download, setup, and protect their files in less than five minutes.
Demo video (if any): Quick Overview: https://youtu.be/VjR5D1dwGq8. Demo: https://youtu.be/J62V8TsJL0g.
Target customer: Compliance lawyers, city governments, law firms, and local governments looking to protect official documents
Pricing: $1 per file for lifetime.
Outside funding: No outside funding.
Traction: Our average customer pays a monthly minimum model of between $50 to $1,000 a month with discounts for monthly/annual models.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of 
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of 
Jordan Rothman is a partner of 
