What happens if a lawyer can read the judge's mind?
Startups say their AI can get closer. That's what investors are buying from the Legal Tech Startup Bench IQ, and it raised $5 million to bring the idea to the market.
Jimoh Ovbiagele, the company's co-founder and CEO, said Bench IQ built its own dataset and layered it on a large-scale language model to predict how judges tend to do. Think and control. He did not disclose the source citing competitive reasons, but the company's terms of service suggest that the data includes federal court transcripts.
The lawyer starts with a simple query: How has this judge handled emergency actions in the past? Behind the scenes, Bench IQ says it will spin thousands of virtual assistants or “agents” to close the data on judges. Within minutes, the lawyer will receive a report answering the questions, citing the judge's past judgment.
The purpose of this tool is to become a bench cheat sheet, and the team behind Bench IQ, including Jeffrey Gettleman, who spent 17 years as an attorney for Powerhouse law firm Kirkland & Ellis, believes that all litigators want it.
Ovbiagele said the users include four of the top five AM Law 200 companies, the country's second largest law firm. Wilson Sonsini, the three best law firms of Cooley, Fenwick & West and Tech Companies, are also early investors.
The idea of selling lawyers is not new to Crystal Ball. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are the owners of the legal research platform Westlaw and already provide tools to chart domination patterns, priorities, and cases before a particular judge. New participants, Theo AI will pitch software as a way to predict settlement outcomes for large law firms and businesses, building custom engines trained with case history and unique data.
Ovbiagele argues that incumbents can only show how often a judge controls a particular way. Bench IQ is trying to reveal why The judges make decisions and how lawyers influence them. To explain the difference, ovbiagele provided an analogy.
“To know how often a judge controls in a certain way is to know how often wildfires occur in the area,” he said. “It's useful, but limited. Using a bench IQ is about understanding why those wildfires happen and how to avoid them.”
Investors bet there is a big market for such intelligence. Bench IQ told Business Insider that battery ventures and Canadian venture capital firm Inovia have jointly closed a $5.3 million seed round. Existing backers Haystack and Maple, led by Andre Charoo, also increased their shares after leading a $2.1 million pre-seed in early 2024.
Today, Bench IQ focuses on federal courts. Ovbiagele said he would like to use fresh funds to expand the dataset to cover state courts and hire more engineers and customer support personnel.
“Unfinished business”
Bench IQ is in a busy area of startups chasing law firm budgets. You need to fight for the customer For platforms like Harvey and Hebbia, who promised to remove the sleazy people of legal work, and for startups that target perennial issues such as timekeeping and billing.
ovbiagele is used to him or has a notoriety depending on who you ask. Thomson Reuters appealed to forgetting his last company, Ross Intelligence.
Ten years ago, Ross tried to speed up legal research using artificial intelligence. In 2020, Thomson Reuters sued the company, accusing them of using Westlaw content to train rival tools without permission. A federal judge later ruled that the use of the principal of Westrow in Ross was not “fair use” under copyright law.
Ross was soon closed. Ovbiagele says the lawsuit has dried up and made it impossible to attract new investors. Since then, the company has appealed the ruling.
A Thomson Reuters spokesperson declined to comment.
The shutdown left Ovbiagele with a “fire sensation of unfinished business.” Using a bench IQ will give him another chance.
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