Section News

by mark i unger

Before big events, I like to look for the ‘feel good’ get-together. Back in the day when going to Newport Jazzfest there was the Friday night concert by the headliner at the International Tennis Center. Ask me sometime about how Diana Krall sang to me (and maybe 999 others) and stopped time in my world.

At ABA Techshow, it’s the startup pitch competition, hosted by none other than Bob Ambrogi and sponsored by Clio.

Startup Alley is occupied by the is the top 15 startups after massive voting, seeking to garner attention, mass-clapping, and excitedness from those first to have arrived at Techshow. It’s quite literally like the ‘Shark Tank/AG/American Idol’ of legal tech. I’ve always be something of a Mark-Cuban-wannabe, searching for my lost youth and still somewhat rubber-bandy agility of the reinvent-the-wheel mentality. I’ve met many really great people on their way up. Previous years’ offerings were impressive, and this year looked to be no exception. In hindsight, they didn’t disappoint.

Ambrogi wrote about the top 15 here: Your votes are in: here are the 15 finalists you chose to be in the 2023 start up Ally at ABA TechShow.  They include a few that have been making waves over the last couple of years while we’ve been in pseudo-exile and a number of which are fresh out of the box.

Listed in order of votes cast, they are:

1. Calloquy Platform.

   Calloquy Platform is a remote litigation platform that proffers to be safe, secure, and efficient for meetings, mediations, depositions, and arbitrations; and boasts to be coupled with licensed court reporting providers.  I haven’t drilled down yet on their platform, but given the number of zoom mediations I’ve done for others, there is an actual need for the siloing of offers/counteroffers/and evidentiary documents.

2. LegalEase Citations

   LegalEase Citations is a data entry platform that touts itself as a bluebook citation generator for easy legal citations.

3. Parrot

   Parrot is an all-in-one platform for depositions, specifically remote depositions, and claims a “90-in-90” mantra– that being that after deposition, within 90 minutes, you’ll have a deposition transcript that has a 90% accuracy rate (though the actual rate has appeared at closer to 94%); they sync audio and video and while this has been done before and continues to be done, Parrot telegraphs future focus on keyword search, exhibit sharing, and collaboration.

4. Docgility

   Docgility is an AI-powered contract acceleration platform that claims to have an 80% faster contract execution. That’s a pretty significant claim and supports contract review in all of the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It supports Word and PDF formats, redlines, and document edits. 

5. Catylex Contract Analytics

   Catylex Contract Analytics is another contract review tool designed as described to get through the “trough of disillusionment” with reviewing contracts. This description alone in a presentation was enough to make me wonder if this would be scalable into other legal practice spaces.

6. Jurisage

   Jurisage, a Canadian offering, offers several claimed key functionalities in an attempt to solve the age-old problem of legal research stress —

   1. Browser extension add-on to pull data into the platform;
   2. Dashboard for case consolidation details; and
   3. A Chat function (introduced 2 weeks ago) to help lawyers crowd-source their research among trusted colleagues.

7. EsquireTek

   EsquireTek attacks the very real-time and money suck of discovery with the tagline “Discovery Sucks Donut” (and they’re offering killer swag to prove it). This was one of my top 4 players as I believe this is a significant access to justice issue potentially, at least in Texas, where, since 1.1.21 there have been mandatory certain disclosures, but that has not slowed the post-covid launching of additional discovery. In essence, all discovery questions go into their platform for true collaboration between attorneys, staff, and clients. I’ve played with various ways and manual workflows for this, but this claims to solve some of the lack of efficiency problems. There are checkboxes and objections that can be inserted via a few clicks and it allows for the upload of customizable objections etc. While it’s unclear how often these objections are checked or updated, the solution is a strong promise. My workarounds have included fill-able forms, google forms, and text-expander for standard objections, though these require more manual work. Interested to see a real use case on this one.

8. Universal Migrator

   Universal Migrator was the first-place winner and promises to migrate a firm’s data in our out of over 60 platforms/ case management system. While this is not a problem as ubiquitous as discovery as mentioned above, a firm’s data is the blood in the law office’s veins. How it flows is significant. How it’s used and usable is life itself oftentimes. This massive claimed ability made it one of my top four.

9. CiteRight

   CitRight claims that it “helps you save cases from online legal databases and makes them available right where you are — inside Microsoft Word.” This is a nice concept and takes advantage of being a conduit from your legal research platform to your legal document, pleading brief of otherwise.

10. Fidu

    Fidu was co-created and pitched by the very impressive Kimberly Bennett (also a speaker this year at Techshow) and provides a platform for the automation of workflows by creating a very usable client portal so that an attorney or firm can leverage flat fee billing by massively increased efficiencies. This was one of my top 4 without question, given the very real and actual need for alternatives to the billable hour. In Texas, unless the Courts allow for Attorney’s Fees to be measured other than by the hour, there will still be the need (when Attorney’s Fees are being argued) to contemporaneously record the time. However, this potentially makes efficiency the benchmark to getting people help with legal representation, thus I think overall it is the greatest objective need in our current environment. Fidu came in third place out of the fifteen offerings and was easily one of my top four.

11. DecisionVault

    DecisionVault — Also one of my top 4, and coming in second place, Decision Vault claims to take information much better than the existing apps for collecting information into a firm’s CRM database in order to “Simplify intake for your clients & automate the data flow in your practice” and also offers a client portal for seamless use.

12. CaseYak

    CaseYak is a case estimator platform, currently in four states and will be in four more by next month with further expansion planned. Limited to personal injury law for case value estimations, I’m unclear how this provides the claimed ‘access to justice’ it did but is impressive to be able to collect state judgment data and then evaluate over 53 data points to then apply within a machine learning model (AI) to give attorneys an estimate of what the case may be worth.

13. Truve

    Truve is a data platform to take the pain out of an average law firm’s management of spreadsheets in order to evaluate firm performance (KPI’s) etc., of which the average number of spreadsheets is estimated by them to be 14, an average number of KPI’s to be 120 and average amount of time spent maintaining these spreadsheets to be between 8 and 10% of the time.

14. Case Chronology

    Case Chronology, led by board-certified orthopedic/spine surgeon John Shim, this is a medical platform that focuses on the chronology of a patient/client’s medical problems while being tested in litigation. Dr. Shim, from Florida, currently built this out in custom form and is now moving towards standardization of timelining the patient, with the immense ability to link to all source documents necessary to support the conclusion. This includes medical records of all kinds and is essentially a chronology creation software with records integration. In my time of creating timelines for litigation, smart documents, and indexes with links to all supporting documents, this to me is very significant. It is limited to case types like medical malpractice or personal injury and the like, but the ability to create “dynamic timelines” is something that is truly compelling.

15. 10BE5

    10BE5 claims to maximize efficiency and automate substantive legal work in capital markets. While this application is somewhat limited to my space, its implications are certainly impressive, if it is scalable.