Robert Ambrogi Blog
As regular readers know by now, I recently started building a list of legal startups, in an attempt to develop a more-accurate list of these startups than was then available. Today, another such effort — and a much more sophisticated one than mine — is being unveiled at the CodeX FutureLaw Conference hosted by the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
This new list, at tech.law.stanford.edu, describes itself as “a curated list of 450 companies changing the way legal is done.”
The effort to build the list was spearheaded by Pieter Gunst, president and COO of Legal.io and a fellow at CodeX. It evolved out of an introduction to computer science class he taught for law students at Stanford, where he began to collect the names of innovative legal tech companies.
Eventually he began to build a database of legal tech companies. CodeX became involved in the project. Data was contributed by Thomson Reuters, Legalzoom, and others. The end result is being unveiled today.
Compared to my humble spreadsheet, this is a much more robust platform. The list can be browsed by categories such as document automation, practice management, legal research and the like, and it can also be browsed by tags. Company listings are all geotagged so you can see a world map of where they are located.
Gunst told me recently that he also plans to build a timeline into the site, showing when companies started and when they closed (for those that do not survive).
The site allows anyone to suggest updates to any listing. The site is also entirely open source.