Wednesday, August 3, 2016

CS Disco Receives Additional Funding for "By Lawyers, For Lawyers" E-discovery Platform

 , Legaltech News

The startup's DISCO platform uses machine learning and automation to simplify e-discovery and lower the legal tech learning curve.


Tapping into demand for a seamless user experience and ease of use in e-discovery tools, start-up CS Disco has announced it has closed $18.75 million in Series C funding from long-time investors Bessemer Venture Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $35 million.


The startup is the creator of DISCO, an e-discovery platform “developed by lawyers for lawyers,” that automates e-discovery processes and tasks, according to a company statement announcing the funding.

Neil Etheridge, vice president of marketing at CS Disco, noted the platform was created to fill the gap in the market for “software and tech that was designed firsthand for legal professionals.”

In an age of iPads, mobile apps, and social media, many legal tech platforms stand out as “very slow and cumbersome, [with] confusing user interfaces,” he said. “And most of the time we found the people who used them recently didn’t find the experience pleasurable.”

While Etheridge noted that CS Disco will use the funding to “accelerate the continue development of our e-discovery platform,” he added that the funding will also allow the company “to begin investment into other areas or other use cases beyond e-discovery that we want DISCO to be at the front at. [It will] allow us to begin working on other applications and other modules that will make up the next generation of legal technology platforms above and beyond e-discovery.”

Etheridge explained that DISCO was designed based on two core principles. “One is ease of use to make something really simple in the same way as the consumer software that you and I use every day like Facebook or LinkedIn … where no one has to read the training manual for it. It just implicitly makes sense, and they know how to use it.”

The other core principle is to “use technology to automate different steps along [legal] processes—in this instance e-discovery— that other tools would not, automatically processing data [and] automatically enabling it to set up different parts of the system for you.”

Towards that goal, “CS Disco is currently doing a lot of work right now around machine learning, [specifically] neural network-based deep-learning algorithms, to allow the software to begin to start understanding the makeup of documents and which documents are likely to be relevant for which issues or topics,” he said.

Focusing on automation, he added, can not only simplify legal tech tools, but also make legal processes most cost effective.


CS Disco moves to expand its platform against the background of a swell in client demand, with the company noting that the platform is currently used by over 400 law firms. The start-up’s growth, Etheridge said, “is fueled by the fact that customers really embrace the platform, really give us great feedback, and continue to put more and more cases on it. We’ve seen huge organic growth just through referrals alone.”

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