Toronto-based legaltech startup Bench IQ has raised $5.3 million USD ($7.3 million CAD) in seed financing to help expand its artificial intelligence (AI) platform that says it can analyze judicial rulings for lawyers.
Bench IQ said it plans to expand its coverage to US state judges and Canadian judges.
The round closed earlier this year, led by Inovia Capital and Battery Ventures, and included $1 million USD of debt. Other backers included CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC, and Haystack VC. The startup said this brings its total funding to $7.4 million USD.
Bench IQ’s platform claims to help lawyers prepare for litigation by providing reports and intelligence on judges’ past rulings. CEO Jimoh Ovbiagele told BetaKit that the software compiles information into a “proprietary dataset” made up of legal rulings without written decisions. Ovbiagele said the platform’s intelligence reports highlight patterns in judges’ past ways of approaching cases.
The platform analyzes data from federal court judges in the United States (US). Bench IQ said it plans to expand its coverage to US state judges and Canadian judges, and that it has global ambitions.
Ovbiagele did not divulge Bench IQ’s data sources, saying it’s part of the company’s “secret formula.” However, the company said in a press release that its dataset captures the reasoning behind the significant portion of US judicial rulings that don’t result in a written opinion.
The CEO claimed that this dataset had never before been analyzed and, therefore, its insights cannot be gleaned by commercially available large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT series or Google’s Gemini.
RELATED: Clio to acquire Spanish-American legaltech vLex for $1 billion USD
Ovbiagele also said he could not disclose the names of his clients, but claimed his product is used by four out of the top five firms on the list of AmLaw 200 firms, some of the world’s largest firms by revenue.
Alongside his co-founders, Jeffrey Gettleman and Maxim Isakov, Ovbiagele plans to use the funding to further develop AI capabilities on the platform and expand its team of eight in product and customer-facing roles.
Ovbiagele is a repeat founder of legaltech ventures. He started his previous Y Combinator-backed company, Ross Intelligence, in 2015 (Isakov was the founding engineer). The product ranked how well quotes from case law answered natural-language questions, using the machine learning technology that powered IBM’s Watson. The company raised more than $17 million CAD across two rounds, both led by Inovia Capital.
In 2020, technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence for copyright infringement, claiming it had used headnotes, or summaries of key legal principles, from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research platform. Ross filed a counterclaim after announcing they would shut down operations, citing fundraising difficulties and legal fees associated with the lawsuit. Earlier this year, a US federal judge ruled against Ross, stating that its use of Westlaw content did not constitute “fair use.”
RELATED: Harvey to bring AI legal platform to Canada with new Toronto office
Ovbiagele and Ross’s other co-founders were granted an appeal in June. The US Third Circuit Court is set to hear their arguments and determine whether exact quotes from case law can be considered copyrighted, and whether using these to train an AI model qualifies as fair use.
The legal industry is increasingly adopting AI-powered tools from companies like Clio and Harvey that automate aspects of legal work, such as client intake and document drafting. At the same time, industry incumbents such as Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis have rolled out their own AI solutions to automate legal tasks.
While the technology’s use is gaining steam in the industry, professionals have concerns about its implementation. A 2024 survey of 443 Canadian legal professionals by Appara, a legaltech company, said that concerns around data privacy, security, and tool accuracy are “holding the legal industry back from fully embracing AI.” Twenty-six percent of respondents were concerned about the risks and ethical implications of using AI, and 23 percent didn’t trust how their data was being used.
Feature image courtesy Bench IQ.