Ian Lopez, Legaltech News
In LTWC's second "Lightning Round" session, startups pitched their newest gadgets.
Given the increasing rate of legal tech's evolution, it can be difficult to stand out among the plethora of tools flooding the market. In an effort to help would-be innovators set their products apart from the pack, Legaltech West Coast's "Legal Innovation Lightning Round" sessions gave entrepreneurs a platform to present their tools and an audience of industry insiders to help them tweak their presentations.
In "Round Two" of the innovation sessions, moderator Nicole Shanahan, founder/CEO of ClearAccessIP and fellow at Stanford's CodeX legal informatics center, explained, "There's a lot to be gained with empowering people to use technology to answer legal questions; to help lawyers be more valuable."
"Over the years, the [legal tech] community has really blossomed," she added. "It started with two Goliaths, and now we have quite a few David's in the space."
Startups for Startups: Legal Services Goes Tech
The first "David" to take the stage was Leila Banijamali to present Startup Documents, an automated legal document processing company aimed at startup companies. Described as a "serial legal business founder" by Shanahan, Banijamali previously founded Bedrock, a law firm for technology licensing.
According to Banijamali, her company wanted "to create a clear path" for company founders to launch "sustainable companies in the long run." However, traditional legal services do not "properly align" with small-business needs, and many cannot "compete with the efficiency of technology." Additionally, she asked, "Why should a small business pay exorbitant fees to law firms that are not set up in a way to serve small business interests?"
Yet Banijamali noted her technology aims to augment rather than replace legal services, and that she isn't "claiming that it's very innovative," but believes "it's very important."
Users are provided with a questionnaire, which determines needed documents that can be previewed before purchase, then shared with team members and lawyers. Additionally, the platform provides a dashboard that displays percentage of completion for each document in process, along with user's payment histories.
In reviewing the presentation, panel judge Monica Bay, fellow at Stanford CodeX, noted, "What it immediately made me think of is … [it] seems like this could be partnershipped" with a company like LegalZoom.
However, Jay Mandal, founder of LawPivot and Stanford CodeX fellow, said, "There's enough space for enough players in the field."
Erin Harrison, editor-in-chief of Legaltech News, added that the idea was "innovative in the sense that it's very simple."
LegalSifter's Artificially Intelligent Document Management
Most lawyers dread having a tall stack of documents placed on their desk last minute. The same could be said of "data dumps." Now, however, machine learning—a technology that has revolutionized everything from music (Pandora) to ad rankings (Facebook)—has greatly reduced the time and effort needed for document management and review.
New to the AI/document review space is LegalSifter, a Pittsburgh-based startup with the slogan, "We protect people from paperwork fatigue." The platform was presented to the panel by Kevin Miller, LegalSifter's CEO and founder, who in previous roles used machine learning technology that predicted workplace injuries before they occurred.
Contracts, Miller said, are "inaccessible to most people," and "they make peoples' brains hurt and eyes bleed a little bit. And they're no fun to deal with."
With LegalSifter, machine learning employs "natural language processing to sift out terms and conditions from contracts and make these documents a little more accessible to the average person," he explained. "Our goal is to help people not miss stuff and help people interpret what's in [their] contracts."
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