AI-powered bill collector program takes top spot at ABA Techshow's Startup Alley
Legal tech startups once again descended on Chicago’s McCormick Place, where they competed in the annual Startup Alley pitch competition at ABA Techshow on Wednesday.
CollBox captured first place during the 10th annual competition, which gave 15 startups the chance to present their products and services to Techshow attendees in three minutes or less. Founded in 2015, CollBox helps lawyers collect on unpaid invoices.
Citing data from Clio, CollBox co-founder Matt Darner noted that it takes an average of 97 days for law firms to get paid for their work. The primary reason? He said it’s because no lawyer went to law school or joined a law firm to be a bill collector.
“There is no one owning the accounts receivable process inside law firms,” Darner said. “There is no one in the market helping law firms chase those bills and get paid for them once they go past due.”
Enter CollBox, which integrates with leading practice management systems and automatically detects unpaid bills, Darner said. Among its tools, the company uses email reminders and phone calls from trained accounts receivable experts to recover payments for firms.
“That’s the star of the show right now, because no one wants to call on past due bills,” said Darner, adding that CollBox has recovered more than $100 million for law firms in the past year.
Candle AI was this year’s second-place finisher. A legal email assistant, it helps small and midsize firms free up hours they spend sorting through and responding to emails.
“Lawyers get a lot of emails, and it affects the client experience,” said Carl Davidson, the co-founder of Candle AI. “But email volume isn’t the biggest problem—it’s what we call the email scavenger hunt.”
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Candle AI is embedded directly into attorneys’ Outlook or Gmail and automatically pulls in client and case details from their practice management systems, Davidson said. It also offers smart email templates and can draft context-aware responses.
“The result is that lawyers and paralegals save one to two hours every day per user on email, and they respond to clients 75% faster,” Davidson added.
Lawdify, which provides AI-native evidence analysis and claims preparation for construction disputes, rounded out the top three in the competition.
Generative AI dominated this year’s offerings. For instance, LegalBridge is an AI-powered case management system built for immigration law firms. Another company, Litmas, provides an AI-powered tool that helps digitize the workflows litigators use to move a case along.
Two others, EstateMin and EstateScribe, aim to automate the estate planning process.
“These are exciting times,” Damien Riehl, a lawyer and technologist with Clio, the sponsor of Startup Alley, said during the event’s introduction. “I think you’re going to be hearing about AI a lot. Whether it’s for the business of law or the practice of law, you’re going to be hearing great pitches.”
Bob Ambrogi, a lawyer and journalist specializing in legal tech who has hosted every Startup Alley since its inception in 2017, also told attendees that the pitch competition has produced a long line of successful legal tech companies. Notable alumni include Paladin, a pro bono platform that competed in 2017 and is the subject of a docuseries that premiered on Wednesday night and 2024 third-place finisher Paxton AI, whose founder, Tanguy Chau, was named an ABA Journal/Center for Innovation Legal Rebel this year.
Techshow runs through Saturday.
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