2015 Year in Review: The Cool, The Beautiful & The Intelligent

2015 was quite an eventful year in legal tech. Here’s my shortlist in random order:

• Apparently AI is the new Black. ‘Hire Peter’ earn an astonishing 755 votes on ProductHunt;
• But Big Data has all grown up and will electrify the legal sector;
• In September 2015, we surpassed 1000 legal startups on Angel.co;

But 2015 is also the year legal startup growth stalled:

• In October, I didn’t de-dup startups tagged as both legal tech and legal so the real numbers aren’t that spectacular.
• In 2014 (337), we had a 56% increase compared to 2013 (215). 2015 is just 2% (349)
• Yet, tagged as Legal Tech (139) almost doubled compared to last year (78)

I made a breakdown of types of legal startups registered in December 2015 on Angel.co and it seems that:

• 18 startups aimed to sustain or support lawyers (or simply be law firms in disguise);
• While only 1 replaced lawyers with tech at the point of need;

• But Angel.co isn’t the only place to hunt legal startups. Mattermark.com (paid) of CB Insights (paid), or Dealroom.co (freemium) are also excellent sources;
• Heck, there even is a dedicated legal startup tracker called LawHackers.co;
• And I also discovered that there are about 946 in the US while roughly 1405 legal startups come from outside The States (Source: Mattermark.com, Dec. 9, 2015);
• I was also happy to see a cool tax startup make it on ProductHunt;

And now for the moment you all have been waiting for: Legalcomplex awards for the coolest, the most beautiful and the most intelligent legal tech of 2015…envelope please…

The Cool

Blockchain

I feel this is the beginning of something epic for the internet and the law.

Honorable mention: Machine Learning

The Beautiful

Kresolve

I was smitten by the use of gif’s to convey the beauty in legal.

Honorable mention: ZocDoc

The Intelligent

Lawbot.co

I see brilliance in its simplicity and power of its potential.

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Disclosure: This review was compiled based on my 2015 stats from Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, My Blog, Medium etc so it’s completely bias and non-scientific.?