Vote for your favorite legal tech startup to be part of a special ABA Techshow program
Updated: A first-of-its-kind program at ABA Techshow in March will highlight innovative legal technology startups, and your votes will determine which startups participate.
Voting is underway to select the 12 startups that will be invited to exhibit in Techshow’s inaugural “Startup Alley,” a special portion of its exhibition hall to showcase innovative startups. The 12 startups will also face off on Techshow’s opening night in a March Madness-themed bracketed pitch competition to pick the most innovative of the lot.
A call for applications to participate in the Startup Alley went out in October. A panel of judges—myself among them—then narrowed the applications to 20 finalists. Now your votes will select the final 12.
I am coordinating this competition to pick the 12 startups, with help from Evolve Law and Above the Law. Credit for the concept goes to Techshow Chair Adriana Linares.
Leading the competition as of Nov. 30 are Ping with 485 votes; LawTap with 381 votes; Doxly with 241 votes; Paladin with 232 votes; LegalClick with 207 votes; LawBooth with 145 votes; Court Buddy with 105 votes; Alt Legal with 103 votes; TrustBooks with 86 votes; Aggregate Law with 75 votes; Legalinc Corporate Services with 70 votes; and NextChapter with 68 votes.
Below are all 20 contenders. Here is the ballot to vote. Deadline for voting is Friday, Dec. 2, 2016, at midnight Eastern time. ABA Techshow will be held from March 15 to 18 in Chicago.
Aggregate Law
Elevator Pitch: “Aggregate Law quickly and efficiently connects skilled project attorneys to legal work. It’s an automated matching service where solos and small firms looking to grow can find the help they need. We are not traditional staffers; we eliminate the hiring process and put a vetted and experienced attorney to work for you right away. For the project attorney, this means access to great work on your own schedule. For the solo or small firm, it offers the ability to scale up and down as needs arise.”
How we’re unique: “Aggregate Law’s job is to connect smart lawyers and entrepreneurial firms looking to grow their practice with independent attorneys working in a way that suits their skills and lifestyle.”
Alt Legal
Elevator Pitch: “Alt Legal’s software helps companies and law firms create, track, and analyze intellectual property filings. Our software reviews millions of IP filings from government databases and automatically updates filings, identifies key deadlines, and creates new filings without manual effort. Our customers are paying us monthly subscription fees and handling thousands of filings daily with our software.”
How we’re unique: “Unlike competitors, our tech focuses on analyzing IP office data to automate administrative work and provide valuable insights. Our tech can detect very granular changes in filings and correct for anomalies in the data.”
Atticus
Elevator Pitch: “Atticus is a mobile app that connects ticketed drivers with defense attorneys for a flat fee of $249. Clients can summon a lawyer to show up with them, on their behalf or while they are already in court.”
How we’re unique: “We are able to deliver traffic cases right to attorneys’ phones. It allows them the flexibility to take Atticus cases at their leisure.”
ClariLegal
Elevator Pitch: “ClariLegal enhances client relationships for legal teams and their vendors bringing control to the procurement and management of litigation support services. These projects can often be complex and unpredictable, potentially damaging client relationships and a firm’s reputation. With ClariLegal, legal teams effortlessly bid lit. support work to a vetted network of vendors, receive normalized proposals, quickly select with confidence, and easily manage progress against budget.”
How we’re unique: “We are the first and only firm so far, to recognize, develop and strategize how best to launch the ‘Angie’s List of legal services’ platform.”
Cognate
Elevator Pitch: “Cognate is the first step in trademark protection. Common law trademark rights in the U.S. are earned simply through use in commerce. These rights can supersede federally registered trademarks in certain situations. Cognate is a common-law trademark registry and certification system that leverages blockchain technology to allow users to publicly document proof of their rights, and a watch service that utilizes a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to detect potential trademark conflicts.”
How we’re unique: “Cognate’s common law trademark registry and CM certification mark are first of their kind. We give lawyers and trademark professionals the ability to proactively protect their trademark rights without the USPTO.”
Court Buddy
Elevator Pitch: “Court Buddy is a wholly automated platform that matches solo and small firm attorneys with small businesses based on pre-selected a-la-carte flat rates. Attorneys can create fee agreements, get their legal fees paid instantly through its integrated payment portal, and chat with clients instantly through its integrated app. Court Buddy has been named ‘The Priceline of Legal’ by the Huffington Post.”
How we’re unique: “Our patent-pending wholly-automated legal matching platform.”
Doxly
Elevator Pitch: “Doxly is a cloud-based platform that transforms the chaotic process of managing legal transactions into a singular tool. Transaction management is a high-stakes, labor-intensive, and largely opaque process filled with multiple points of potential risk and very little margin for error. Companies and their legal teams are still managing diligence checklists and closing worksheets in email, word document checklists and file folders. We are an end-to-end solution to manage the entire process.”
How we’re unique: “Built by attorneys for attorneys, Doxly engages all parties to a transaction—attorneys and clients—on a single platform and is uniquely positioned to allow parties to complete diligence and closing obligations in one place with organization and collaboration tools.”
eBrevia
Elevator Pitch: “eBrevia uses industry-leading artificial intelligence based on technology developed in partnership with Columbia University to analyze contracts bringing unprecedented accuracy and speed to contract review, due diligence, and lease abstraction. The company’s clients include global and corporate boutique law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and auditing firms. Clients are even able to train the system completely on their own to extract custom terms to meet their specific needs.”
How we’re unique: “eBrevia’s contract analytics software accelerates contract review by automatically extracting and summarizing content from contracts. The software saves users 30-90 percent of review time while improving accuracy by 10 percent. The software is able to recognize concepts in contracts regardless of the vocabulary used to express them.”
Intraspexion
Elevator Pitch: “Intraspexion enables companies to preserve assets and protect leadership. We surface the risks of”liability” to enable in-house counsel to avoid lawsuits. The system finds risks before the damage is done. If a client avoids three average civil litigation matters, it preserves over $1 million. When a regulatory investigation becomes a criminal matter, the government must prove a specific intent to do harm. Our system, used in good faith, is evidence of the opposite, a specific intent to avoid harm.”
How we’re unique: “Intraspexion’s mission (less litigation), technology (deep learning), and product (an early warning system) are inventive and new for the profession.”
LawBooth
Elevator Pitch: “We connect people and attorneys online. We make it easy for consumers to find the right attorney and schedule a free initial consultation. By fusing SaaS, intelligent-matchmaking, a proven SEO strategy, and a marketplace, LawBooth provides the optimal experience to people searching for attorneys online.”
How we’re unique: “The best search, scheduling, and video conferencing all in one place.”
LawTap
Elevator Pitch: “LawTap is the booking engine for attorneys. With LawTap, attorneys can start accepting online client bookings via LawTap.com, their website or email signature in less than 10 minutes.”
How we’re unique: “Like ZocDoc for doctors and dentists, LawTap is the booking engine for attorneys.”
LegalClick
Elevator Pitch: “LegalClick is a SaaS Platform for lawyers to sell their legal services direct to clients with our document assembly shopping cart in our app or online.”
How we’re unique: “LegalClick allows small local law firms to sell their legal services directly to consumers by uploading their own fixed fee service contracts or retainer agreements into our platform for consumers to find a lawyer near them that offers the service they desire.”
Legalinc Corporate Services
Elevator Pitch: “Legalinc is a Dallas-based B2B SaaS company with a straightforward mission: To simplify the process of business formations and registered agent service while automating state regulatory compliance needs. Legalinc is the only true offering in this space powering corporations, lawyers and tax professionals with a simple-to-use platform.”
How we’re unique: “Legalinc brings technology to a space where only ink and paper have dominated for centuries.”
NextChapter
Elevator Pitch: “TurboTax for Bankruptcy Attorneys. NextChapter is a web application for attorneys to prepare, manage and file their bankruptcy cases online. Our unique web workflow guides attorneys through the bankruptcy process making it easier and faster to prepare cases.”
How we’re unique: “We are the first cloud-based bankruptcy software that can be used on any browser, any device, any time.”
Paladin
Elevator Pitch: “Paladin helps law firms, companies and law schools manage their pro bono with streamlined sourcing, tracking and outcome reporting on a modern, tech-forward platform.”
How we’re unique: “Existing processes are manual.”
Ping
Elevator Pitch: “Automated timekeeping for lawyers. Ping will automatically track, categorize and describe all of a lawyer’s billable actions. Work your day as you normally would and let ping do the rest.”
How we’re unique: “We are the only automated timekeeping company that’s solely focused on law.”
Sapling
Elevator Pitch: “We ingest open gov and client data and provide analytics tools that allow attorneys to interrogate data in an open and collaborative way. The tools and approach help the attorney develop deep knowledge of the client (through understanding their information), and develop strong facts in support of their case, compliance program, etc.”
How we’re unique: “Attorneys often outsource client data analysis to external consultants whose work is performed in a ‘black box’ manner. Sapling provides tools and services that are designed to put the attorney back in the driver’s seat—giving them direct visibility into the information, working in a collaborative way, and producing beautiful, interactive data visualizations to support their case.”
TrustBooks
Elevator Pitch: “We take a scary thing like accounting and make it drop dead simple. We specialize on helping attorneys maintain their trust account in compliance with their local state bar. With our product, they get to spend their time practicing law and not worrying about account.”
How we’re unique: “We are the only product on the market that focuses on the trust accounting niche.”
UniCourt
Elevator Pitch: “UniCourt is a nationwide case research, tracking, management, and analytics platform that integrates court data from federal and state courts into a cloud-based application. Our solution allows organizations to reduce costs, increase productivity, make data-driven decisions, and identify marketing opportunities. By leveraging big data methodologies to acquire, analyze, and correlate disparate legal data, UniCourt makes legal data more widely accessible, manageable, and insightful.”
How we’re unique: “Our application allows users to crowd source and interact with legal data from federal and state courts from one application for case research, tracking, management or analytics.”
Valcu Inc.
Elevator Pitch: “Corporate maintenance platform with a self-serve document automation engine that allows the complexity lawyers work into documents. Docs are hashed, can be e-signed and pushed to the blockchain. A capitalization table management tool (beta) includes an events-based data structure allowing transfers, vesting, repricings, splits, etc. to flow through the model, javascript-based architecture allowing analysis within the browser and built in modelling (Black-Scholes, Backsolve).”
How we’re unique: “Deep focus on technology, scalability and data structure to address hard problems.”
Updated Nov. 30 to note the voting standings.
