Updated to properly spell Ottawa with a hat tip to Toronto-based Jeremy Secker, Government and In-House Account Executive at Clio. And again to clarify the partnership of the event, with another hat tip by Joelle Hamilton, Bilingual Digital Media and Branding Strategist | Event Design at the Canadian Bar Association. Thank you both!

What a blast! The Canadian Bar Association’s Annual Meeting included “The Pitch” on Friday, Aug. 12. It was a cross between “America’s Got Talent,” and “Jeopardy“—five very smart candidates surrounded by spotlights, huge videos, plenty of noise and five eclectic and very opinionated judges.

Moderators of the event were Aron Solomon and Jason Moyse of the LegalX at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District. (You may remember Jason, he was a panelist at the “The New Legal Tech Communities” at CodeX FutureLaw 2016. )

The Pitch was organized by CBA in partnership with LegalX at MaRS DD and sponsored by LexisNexis Canada, explained Hamilton.

 

Five early-stage Canada-based legal technology startups made it to The Pitch—out of 31 contestents who were vetted Mitch Kowalski (legal futurist and author); Randall Howard, general partner of Verdexus; Monica Goyal, founder, My Legal Briefcase; Carla Swansburg, Director, Professional Development Pricing & Knowledge Services at Blakes; and Karim Benyekhlef, director of the Cyberjustice Lab at Université de Montréal.

The Pitch definitely gained attention: the Westin Ottawa’s huge ballroom was packed. At stake (beyond the prestige and bragging rites) included a two-week residency at LegalX MaRS for two team members, for mentorship and access to investers. All five finalists also had an opportunity to network with investors at The Pitch, including a guaranteed interview with the Chinese Angeles Mentor Program.

FIVE FINALISTS

The five finalists were: Beagle; Blue J Legal; Knomos; Loom Analytics; and Rangefindr. (Both Beagle and Blue J Legal have presented at CodeX events.)

• Cian O’Sullivan  is the “Top Dog and Founder” of Beagle, and is based in Kitchener, Ontario. He is a new Fellow at CodeX and recently presented at CodeX’s Lightning Rounds at ALM’s Legal Tech West Coast. “Beagle is the technological assistant for your document review. Imaging a system that spots and highlights key areas important to your document (contract, lease, etc.),” he says.

 

 

• Benjamin Alarie is the co-founder and CEO at Blue J Legal, and is the Osler Chair in Business Law and Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Blue J. Legal “turns the grey areas of the law into black and white. In difficult situations there are reasonable arguments on both sides. It “analyzes fact situations using deep learning, discovery in seconds the distinctions that humans miss.”

 

• Adam La France— co-founder and CEO of Knomos, says it is a web app mapping a visual knowledge network of legal information for search, education and collaboration (think Google Maps for Law).”  It “leverages data visualization and deep machine learning technologies to bridge the legal knowledge gap for everyone.” He is based in Vancouver.

 

• Mona Datt is the founder and president of Loom Analytics, based in Toronto. She won The Pitch’s “People’s Choice” award. “Datt describes it as an online legal analytics system providing structure to the large corpus of unstructured Canadian legal open data.”  These statistics, she says, “are almost impossible to come by and are primarily limited to the work of legal academics. Loom is filling the gap one court level, practice area and province at a time.”

• Colin Lachance describes himself as a “legal market entrepreneur,” based in Ottawa. He says Rangefindr is a criminal sentencing tool created to “help lawyers and judges find criminal sentencing ranges in seconds instead of hours.” It’s used in law firms, libraries and courtrooms across Canada. P.S. He was named a Legal Rebel by the American Bar Association in 2014.

 

The five judges included (from left): Chris Bentley, Executive Director, Legal Innovation Zone, Law Practice Program, Ryerson University. Jane Maguire, Executive Search at Shopify, and Ottawa Chapter Co-Lead at Ladies Learning Code. Yours truly. Loik Amis, CEO of LexisNexis Canada Inc. Alan Yang, Vice President, China Canada Angels Alliance.

Also participating in The Pitch were two terrific emcees—Fred Headon, Assistant General Counsel-Labour and Employment Law at Air Canada, and Shelby Austin, Partner at Deloitte Canada.

 

 

DRUM ROLL PLEASE

And the winner of The Pitch 2016
was………………..
Cian O’Sullivan, Beagle.

 

MORE

• Live on Periscope

• Flickr photos (courtesy CBA)

• Photo credits: Canadian Bar Association

 

 

 

News Reports

• CBA/ABC National Magazine: “The Pitch: Legal tech innovators take the state at 2016 CABA Legal Conferenace.” (No author cited)
• CBA/ABC National: “LexisNexis Canada CEO on legal innovation,” (No author cited).
• cantech letter: “Beagle wins Canadian Bar Association’s Pitch competition for legal tech,” by Terry Dawes.

Congratulations to all of the participants and organizers. It was an an absolutely awesome event! And a special shout out to Farah Momen, Emily MacGregor-Staple and Leslie Lenton—and especially to Air Canada and the crew for not giving up on Aug. 11—for more than seven hours—and got us to Ottawa from very very stormy LGA! (My first flight on AC and not my last!)

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX and was a judge at The Pitch. She likes Canada more and more and more ….  🙂  Twitter: @MonicaBay  Email: mbay@codex.stanford.edu