Legal Tech Startups Bringing Law, Order To Fragmented Industry
TECHDIGEST – It’s long known that the legal profession has not embraced technology as quickly as other industries.
As a result, there are a number of legal tech startups eager to not only help lawyers, but automate some of the processes bogged down by pen and paper. Here, we take a look at two companies that recently secured funding, Justpoint and New Era ADR, to see their approaches.
Victor Bornstein, founder and CEO of Justpoint, told TechCrunch that his company is leveraging artificial intelligence to create efficiencies for both prospective plaintiffs and attorneys, initially in personal injury. It is currently working with over 1,000 law firms.
Personal injury lawyers rely heavily on ads and easy-to-memorize 800 numbers to attract clients, but Justpoint believes that using data is a better tool.
Here’s why: The Boulder, Colorado-based company has collected over 300,000 historical claims and uses data extraction models to plug into a law firm to provide a score on how good the firm is at winning cases, like sexual assault, medical malpractice and product liability.
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That’s one side. The second is equipping the firm with information on whether a certain claim is worth the law firm’s time to take, mainly because of the time involved in diving into a case, plus the fact that firms often put up their own money initially to file lawsuits and obtain expert witnesses. Justpoint also brings medical expertise in-house to process the data and train the model.
“Lawyers have an incentive,” Bornstein said. “A claim could receive $2 million, but if they settle quickly, it will save a lot of effort, though they will receive much less. We’ve looked at how to make claims more efficient so lawyers can take a claim to the end instead of settling.”
The company recently raised $6.9 million in a seed extension co-led by Divergent Capital and Charge Ventures. Additional investments came from Crossbeam Venture Partners, Honeystone Ventures, Interplay.vc, Weekend Fund, Turing co-founder Vijay Krishnan, Mainstreet co-founder Jackson Moses and Stonks founder Ali Moiz. It brings the total amount raised to $7.9 million.
Justpoint makes money when the lawyer wins their case, which explains the company’s incentive to send claims worth spending the lawyer’s time on, Bornstein said.
“That puts a lot of work on us validating the claims,” he added. “It’s also why we are seeing an uptick in legal technology. Many firms are not interested in using technology, but this allows us to do the work for them. The way we see it is in 10 years, the legal tech space will bloom in a way we have not seen.”
