Legaltech start-up TrialView plans to use a recent funding deal to expand in the US, hire staff and further develop its use of AI to automate the laborious paperwork in complex litigation cases.
Earlier this month, Elkstone, an Irish venture capital firm, invested $4.1m (£3.1m) in the litigation software specialist, which has offices in London and Dublin.
Founded in 2018 by Stephen Dowling, a barrister and senior counsel, the London-headquartered company now supplies 15 of the top 20 UK law firms and all of the top 20 law firms in Ireland, helping them to manage vast amounts of information, ranging from case law and court records to SMS text messages and PDF documents.
Sifting through disparate data in multiple formats to find the strongest evidence to present in court is a “massive challenge” says Dowling. "You need to ... put your finger on the precise paragraph or reference that you need to present to the judge or to the witness … during the hearing. That… is a very significant task and requires a huge amount of preparation.”
While litigation, like much of the legal process, is being digitised and automated, helping lawyers work more efficiently, there is plenty of room for progress, according to Dowling.
"On a personal level, I've always simply been driven by a desire to fix things that I think look broken,” he says. “And I felt that in litigation, one of the problems we had was that there were great inefficiencies in how we do things as a profession, and how we manage, for example, things like documentation.”
The cost and difficulty of marshalling information is increasing the cost of going to court and delaying getting access to justice, Dowling adds.
“Litigation costs relate to the document management problem, and that actually is a major issue for litigants and for access to justice, because it means that for them to get to court, they've got a huge cost to pay in literally just getting the documentation organised for court, and it also creates massive delay as well.”
TrialView, which has 18 employees, says its platform supports all stages of the litigation process. Its pricing is based on the quantity of data used, meaning its annual cost for law firms can typically range between £12,000 and £250,000, according to Dowling.
Its customers include DLA Piper, Kennedys, Eversheds Sutherland and Mishcon de Reya. Steven Colgan, a senior associate in Kennedys’ Dublin insurance team, has used TrialView in complex multiparty litigation, before and during the trial. He says the technology makes litigation “more accessible and manageable” and is “generally cost-effective”.
Managing large multiparty litigation is “incredibly complex”, he says, with even ensuring that each legal document is correctly named and readily available posing a significant challenge.
TrialView also allows parties to view each other’s publicly available documents quickly, reducing the time lawyers spend searching for information, he adds.
Profitable start-up
Unlike many start-ups, TrialView makes a profit. According to Dowling, it is due to make $3m in annual revenue this year. But as competition in the legaltech market grows, and larger, more generalist legaltech suppliers include litigation software modules in their products, how will the start-up maintain its rapid growth?
Priorities include expanding its business in the US and improving the product’s AI features − so that lawyers can spend less time “organising their documents” and more time advising clients.
Currently, TrialView’s AI can sift through one million documents. By 2026, Dowling wants it to be able to handle about five million documents. “It’s difficult to know precisely … what limit [AI] will reach,” he says.
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