A new venture by a legal technology entrepreneur and a former Kirkland & Ellis partner says it can use artificial intelligence to help lawyers understand how individual judges think, allowing them to tailor their arguments and improve their courtroom results.
The Toronto-based legal research startup, Bench IQ, was founded by Jimoh Ovbiagele, the co-founder of now-shuttered legal research company ROSS Intelligence, alongside former ROSS senior software engineer Maxim Isakov and former Kirkland bankruptcy partner Jeffrey Gettleman.
The company said on Thursday that it raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round co-led by venture capital firms Maple and Haystack. Law firms Cooley, Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati or their affiliated investment vehicles were among the investors, which also included Kirkland partners and other individuals and funds, the company said.
Bench IQ said in Thursday’s launch announcement that it uses large language model-based AI technology to offer “comprehensive insights into the decision-making patterns of judges, covering 100% of their rulings” — not just their written opinions.
Ovbiagele, the company’s CEO, said additional details about the technology and the scope of the company’s dataset was confidential, citing pending patents.
In addition to its law firm investors, Bench IQ counts 12 large law firms as “pilot” customers, Ovbiagele said. He said the company will offer both “on-demand,” per-hour pricing and annual subscription plans depending on the size of the firm and their billing rates. He declined to share a cost range or identify customers.
Marty Waters, a San Diego-based partner at Wilson Sonsini, said in an emailed statement that understanding judicial decision-making “is critical for formulating winning strategies.” The firm is a pilot customer.
Cooley did not immediately comment. A Fenwick spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ovbiagele said the company employs him, Gettleman and Isakov for now but plans to hire rapidly.
The trio will be competing in a growing field of artificial intelligence-based companies catering to lawyers. Some have attracted high-profile investors, such as Harvey, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund, and EvenUp, which has raised funds from Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.
Bench IQ is also not alone in marketing research on judges. Ovbiagele said his company differs from others by giving insight into judges’ legal reasoning beyond statistics, describing Bench IQ as “explanatory” rather than “descriptive.”
Gettleman said he thought up the concept for the company at Kirkland. “All attorneys are in the same position: they are forced to use a one-size-fits-all approach with most judges they encounter,” he said in an email.
ROSS, Ovbiagele’s former company, said in December 2020 that it would shut down operations amid litigation with Thomson Reuters, which had accused Ross of unlawfully copying content from its legal-research platform Westlaw to train a competing artificial intelligence-based platform. ROSS denied the claims and the case is set to go to trial as soon as this year.
Thomson Reuters is the parent company of both Reuters and Westlaw.
Ovbiagele said ROSS is “non-operational” but active for the purpose of defending against the Thomson Reuters copyright case and pursuing antitrust counter-claims. Thomson Reuters has denied the counter-claims.
