Introducing Phaselaw: eDiscovery software you actually enjoy using

The legal tech industry has exploded in recent years as AI use cases in legal have become clear. But ironically, eDiscovery — one of the largest and most well-established legal tech categories — has seen relatively little startup activity. Legacy eDiscovery incumbents have begun to adopt AI features, but it’s not enough. To truly build a category defining product in the AI-native world, you need to build it from the ground up. 

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In my previous role as CTO at Chartbeat, we built products that transformed how the practice of journalism was done. Our mission was to empower teams with real time data — with us handling petabytes of data each day — and I was able to see the the impact that data and AI products can have on industries that have been starved of actionable data.

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When I speak to eDiscovery leaders I hear a similar narrative to what I heard in the early days of Chartbeat — teams struggling with slow, legacy systems that are expensive to purchase and so complex they require certifications to use.

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At Phaselaw, we believe a better way is possible. We believe that modern AI will transform how document review is done. In this future, legal teams will spend their time on the complex tasks experts are best suited to tackle, while AI systems tackle rote document review. 

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Phaselaw is built on three key beliefs:

• The best AI systems leverage human insight for complex legal reasoning and computational power for processing large data volumes.
• Security and privacy must be built into any enterprise-grade solution for lawyers. They deal with the most sensitive data within an organization and are entrusted to handle it with care. Public models and shared data infrastructure aren’t options for these teams.
• We believe that enterprise software doesn’t have to suck, that it can be modern, fast, and even joyful to use.

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We’ve gotten our start by solving the problem of redaction consistency — ensuring that redactions of personal, irrelevant, and privileged information are applied uniformly across large collections of documents that include exact and near-duplicates. Many of our early users are in the field of employment law, where many in-house teams try to tackle document production on their own. We already have nearly two dozen customers on board — from Fortune 500s to public-sector organizations to SMEs — and we’re growing and expanding to other use cases rapidly.

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To fuel that growth, I’m thrilled to announce Phaselaw has raised $2.8M in funding, led by Pear, Defined, BoxGroup, and Twelve Below to fuel our mission of rethinking eDiscovery from the ground up.

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If you’re a professional working in the field, I’d love to connect and learn more about the challenges you face to see how we can help.

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And if you’re looking to build the future of legal tech with us, we’re hiring. Check out open roles here.

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