Saskatoon-based Fidu placed third place at a pitch competition held by the American Bar Association (ABA) for legaltech startups, placing highest amongst five other Canadian startups that were finalists.
Fidu created a platform that is designed to eliminate the need for billable hours by helping firms provide legal services on a subscription basis. It helps firms provide monthly and yearly services to clients, which it claims to be “more sustainable and scalable” than hourly rates.
The competition saw 15 startups pitch their business in front of judges and Techshow attendees.
Other Canadian startups chosen to participate at ABA Techshow’s Startup Alley included CiteRight, Jurisage AI, Haloo, and Wisedocs. The competition saw 15 startups pitch their business in front of judges and Techshow attendees.
Toronto-based Citeright allows lawyers to save case law and automatically cite it inside Microsoft Word. Cireright was founded in 2017 by Ariel Nacson and Aaron Werner.
Ottawa-based Jurisage AI automatically identifies case citations on a website, in Microsoft Word or PDF. It can identify whether a sentence is a fact-statement, issue-statement, legal-statement, analysis-statement or conclusion. It was co-founded in 2022 by Colin Lachance and Juliano Rabelo.
Toronto-based Haloo is an AI-powered search engine that helps small businesses run affordable legal searches and prepare for trademark registration. Co-founded by Julie MacDonell (CEO) and Sarah Ruest (CTO) in 2020, it most recently raised a $2.9 million CAD seed funding round co-led by The W Fund and The51 in May 2022.
Toronto-based Wisedocs is an artificial intelligence platform that uses AI to process and understand medical documents in real-time, enabling organizations in the insurance industry to evaluate medical claims faster and more accurately. It has raised $7.4 million since its founding in 2018.
ABA Techshow was held from March 1-4 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Companies were given three minutes to pitch their product to the judges and an audience of investors at Startup Alley. Judges consisted of multiple ABA associates, like Jeannine Lambert and Sofia Lingos, co-chairs of the event.
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Organizers made an initial call for entries in November 2022. A panel of judges narrowed down the startups to 40, and competition organizers received almost 81,000 votes on over 16,000 ballots to decide who would compete in Chicago. 15 finalists were selected to compete at Startup Alley, five of which were Canadian.
Nebraska-based Universal Migrator won first prize at the competition after voting. ItsTheir platform allows law firms to switch from using one practice or document management platform to another by simplifying and automating data transfer and file backup systems.
Second place went to Decision Vault, a Wyoming-basedX-based client-intake portal designed to streamline the intake process and transfer client data into a case management or document automation system.
Feature image courtesy Pexels. Photo by August de Richelieu.