Midpage, an ‘AI-native’ legal research platform, has raised a $4m Seed round, taking its total funding to $6.2m. It was led by an unnamed ‘legal publishing house’, with participation from Big Law angels and existing backer LEA Partners.
Founder, Otto Zastrow, told Artificial Lawyer that the legal publishing house was not one of the major ones, such as Thomson Reuters, but he could not name it.
Meanwhile, the New York-based company has also launched Proposition Search, which it explained means you can now ‘simply type in a proposition you want support for and quickly find the best case to support it’.
Zastrow noted that this had been inspired by Casetext’s Parallel Search, prior to its deal with TR.
He explained: ‘That feature allowed users to type a sentence right into the search bar. The search results would highlight conceptually similar sentences from responsive cases, even if they didn’t contain the same key terms you had searched for.
‘Parallel Search made it easier to find support for propositions. It removed the steps of (1) breaking down your proposition into search terms, and (2) scrolling through search results to find the sentence that supported your proposition. It was ahead of its time.’
But, he added, it had ‘short-comings’.
‘In the worst case, the search would latch onto the wrong aspects of the query you typed in. You’d get stuck with pages of results that were not quite right, and wind up iterating on your query several times over, particularly when researching more nuanced issues.
‘In the best case, the search would return relevant results, but it still took time to determine which case was the best for you to cite. You still had to open results in new tabs and skim them to filter out cases that were factually inapposite, came out the wrong way, or had the wrong holding,’ he added.
So, Midpage has built Proposition Search, which he said ‘picks up from where Parallel Search left off’.
He explained: ‘With Proposition Search and custom AI filtering, you can cast your net for the relevant cases, then quickly zero in on the best case.’
The example of looking for matters related to the legal concept of ‘faithless servant’ was then given.
‘In this example, we need support for the proposition that the faithless servant doctrine requires repeated acts of disloyalty. So we just type that into the search bar and click Proposition Search.
‘A lot of [the found] cases are relevant and helpful. But the best case is one that emphasizes that a single act of disloyalty isn’t enough to violate the faithless servant doctrine. We can add a column to sift through the results for exactly that.’
‘With Proposition Search and custom AI filtering, you can cast your net for the relevant cases, then quickly zero in on the best case,’ Zastrow concluded.
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So, there you go. Looks like it’s taking things forward. And congrats on the $4m Seed funding. More rocket fuel!
You can find more about Midpage here.
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Legal Innovators California conference, San Francisco, June 11 + 12
If you’re interested in the cutting edge of legal AI and innovation – and where we are all heading – then come along to Legal Innovators California, in San Francisco, June 11 and 12, where speakers from the leading law firms, inhouse teams, and tech companies will be sharing their insights and experiences as to what is really happening.
We already have an incredible roster of companies to hear from. This includes: &AI, Legora, Harvey, StructureFlow, Ivo, Flatiron Law Group, PointOne, Centari, LexisNexis, eBrevia, Legatics, Knowable, Draftwise, newcode.AI, Riskaway, Aracor, SimpleClosure and more.
Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, Baker McKenzie, Gunderson, Ropes & Grey, A&O Shearman and many other leading law firms will also be taking part.
See you all there!
More information and tickets here.
P.S. there will also be a Legal Innovators New York conference this November…! See here.
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