INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
McCarthyFinch sounds a bit like a law firm — and with good reason
The startup has developed an AI as a Service platform aimed at the legal profession
This week, it competing in the 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco.
The company began life as a project at a leading New
Zealand law firm, MinterEllisonRuddWatts
They wanted to look at how they could take advantage of AI to automate legal processes to make them more efficient, cost-effective and
faster, according to company president Richard DeFrancisco.
They were working on leveraging technology to become the law firm of the future,
and they realized there were some pretty tremendous gaps,& he explained
They found a bunch of Ph.Ds working on artificial intelligence who worked with more than 30 lawyers over time to address those gaps by
leveraging AI technology.
That internal project was spun out as a startup last year, emerging as an AI platform with 18 services
MinterEllison, along with New Zealand VC Goat Ventures, gave the fledgling company US$2.5 million in pre-seed money to get started.
The
company looked at automating a lot of labor-intensive tasks related to legal document review and discovery such as document tagging
&Lawyers spend a lot of time tagging things with regards to what relevant and not relevant, and it not a good use of their time
We can go through millions of documents very quickly,& DeFrancisco said
He claims they can lower the time it takes to tag a set of documents in a lawsuit from weeks to minutes.
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He says that one of their key
differentiators is their use of natural language processing (NLP), which he says allows the company to understand language and nuance to
interpret documents with a high level of accuracy, even when there are small data sets
Instead of requiring thousands of documents to train their models, which he says law firms don''t have time to do, they can begin to
understand the gist of a case in as little as two or three documents with 90 percent accuracy, based on their tests.
They don''t actually
want to sell their platform directly to law firms
Instead, they hope to market their artificial intelligence skills as a service to other software vendors with a legal bent who are looking
to get smarter without building their own AI from scratch.
What we are doing is going to technology service providers and talking to them
We have restful APIs to integrate into their technology and do a Powered By-model,& DeFrancisco explained.
The startup currently has 10
While he couldn''t name them, he did say that they include the largest law firm in Europe, largest global provider of legal information and
the fastest growing SaaS company in history
They are also working on agreements with large systems integrators including Deloitte and Accenture to act as resellers of their
solution.
While they are based in New Zealand, they plan to open a United States office in the Los Angeles area shortly after Disrupt
The engineering team will remain in New Zealand, and DeFrancisco will build the rest of the company in the U.S as it seeks to expand its
They also plan to start raising their next round of funding.
