On June 15, IE and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, in collaboration with the Law Schools Global League and Ontier, launched the first Global Legaltech Venture Day in Chicago.

This cutting-edge, highly competitive program is designed to identify and support start-ups that have the ability to have a positive impact on major challenges faced by legal operators—whether private or public—as well as legal systems, so as to improve their operations thereby furthering the cause of justice. In the event, a group of selected Legaltech startups pitched short presentations before a panel of judges, innovators, legaltech experts and leading law firm partners who analyzed the viability of the projects and selected a winner.

This year’s finalists were Esquify, Bite Size Legal, Determinator, Doxly, HAKA, and Paladin. Yan Wang, a recent graduate of the MSL program, made us proud by pitching Determinator and was one of several women representing startups at the event. In fact, the majority of startups competing were led by women, hopefully a sign that Legal tech is becoming more inclusive.

Esquify won the big prize and qualified for the final round in Madrid. The company is focused on making human document review teams more efficient by using ‘proprietary machine learning technology with real-time analytics to improve the management of review teams and lower the cost of document review projects by 25% to 40%’. 

Congratulations to all the teams!