This is a presentation on legal technology startups that I gave to Michigan State University law students with the Reinvent Law Program in 2013.

1. Legal Technology Startups
Are still just startups

2. Some General Startup Issues

Founders: compatible and comprehensive

Market: Goldilocks – juuuuust right

Barriers to entry

Inefficiencies, ripe for disruption
− those who pay must see benefit

Focus on customers, not competition

3. Random Points

Google's competitors lost as much as
Google won (Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo!, etc.)

With all factors at 80% good – only ~10%
succeed.

Startups are a LOT of work, and not fun fun
fun (unless you're following your passion).

4. Search

A solution to many (legal) problems: case
law, patents, legal services; statutes?

Information specification (e.g. author,
geographical region, date, cost, etc.)

Single ranked list: from macro to micro

Text search: inverted index, tf/idf, vectors

Automated classification

5. Access

U.S. “Justice Gap”: poor 80% unmet needs

Latent Market: underserved

Comparison with, say, Belgium

CA Bar: “expand, support, and improve”

Technology: leverages orders of magnitude

6. Conclusion

Lots of current and future changes

Legal Technologists: tech-savvy lawyers,
law-aware techies

Not just evolution, but design

Goals: increased efficiency, accuracy,
accessibility, fairness

7. Conclusion

Lots of current and future changes

Legal Technologists: tech-savvy lawyers,
law-aware techies

Not just evolution, but design

Goals: increased efficiency, accuracy,
accessibility, fairness