EvenUp co-founders Raymond Mieszaniec (COO), Rami Karabibar (CEO) and Saam Mashhad (Chief of Product & Legal Operations), from left to right.
EvenUp
Legal tech startup EvenUp now has nearly 1,000 customers using its AI-powered demand package product to assist personal injury lawyers achieve higher, faster settlement amounts.
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When EvenUp COO Ray Mieszaniec’s father was permanently disabled in a automobile accident, he settled for lower than $200,000 after years of litigation. He later learned that his family might need gotten greater than double that quantity if their lawyer had known how much they may demand from the insurance company.
The memory of this experience prompted Mieszaniec years later to found the legal tech startup EvenUp in Silicon Valley with two other Canadian expats: his friend Rami Karabibar, who had previously worked on Google’s self-driving automobile project Waymo and the food delivery startup Zoomer, and criminal defense lawyer Saam Mashhad.
With a previously undisclosed $35 million Series C funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, EvenUp is betting big on personal injury lawyers using artificial intelligence to create demand letters and legal documents demanding compensation from insurance firms, freeing up lawyers to concentrate on other tasks. The platform works by having lawyers upload their clients’ medical records into EvenUp’s system, which pulls on greater than 250,000 verdicts and settlements to create a requirement package with a corresponding settlement offer.
The startup, backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, claims its AI-generated demand letters can save as much as 15 hours per case and result in settlements as much as 30% higher than what plaintiffs would otherwise receive.
“There are about 20 million such claims a year, which can range from a car accident to a child abuse case, police brutality, etc.,” said Karabibar, CEO of EvenUp. “And unlike many other generative AI companies, we really only want to do one thing: We want to make sure that those 20 million claims get the justice they deserve.”
Michael McCready, who runs what he calls a “tech-savvy” personal injury law firm with 13 attorneys in Chicago and Indianapolis, said EvenUp’s demand product has not only saved his attorneys time but in addition led to higher settlement amounts. McCready’s firm also uses EvenUp’s medical chronology product, which helps visualize a client’s medical records in easy-to-read timelines and calendar views.
“The first thing that appealed to me about EvenUp was the fact that they used AI to go through all the medical records, identify the positive and negative cases, and then incorporate those into the demand. So it’s ideal in terms of saving time,” he said.
Harvard Law School professor David Wilkins believes generative AI could make legal processes more efficient, but he warns that defendants could also be less intimidated by demand letters they believe were written using artificial intelligence in the event that they are usually not convinced that the plaintiff’s lawyers have the experience or expertise to aggressively argue the case.
“Insurance companies will undoubtedly invest in similar technologies if they haven’t already,” Wilkins said. “So now we have an arms race and insurance companies will be more likely to have tailored and updated technologies because they know their risk profiles and their case portfolio.”
The startup is just not the just one pitching itself to law firms as an AI-powered solution to their problems or inefficiencies. AI 50 startup Harvey, a graduate of last yr’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups List, recently achieved unicorn status with a $100 million Series C funding round led by the investment arm of Google parent company Alphabet Inc. AI assistant Clio, which was launched on the Forbes Cloud 100 was ranked 56th on the list last week, participated in EvenUp’s Series B round, and recently closed an enormous $900 million Series F at a $3 billion valuation.
While enterprise capital in legal tech startups slowed down in 2023 – with lower than $1 billion in funding for the primary time since 2020 – VC funding on this space this yr is already almost double this amount. According to LSVP partners Raviraj Jain and Sebastian Duesterhoef, with recent applications of generative AI, Silicon Valley is becoming more open to investments in legal tech.
“The general opinion in the venture space so far has been to stay away from legal tech because no big companies are building on legal tech,” Jain said. “And I think you have to think beyond that.”
Duesterhoef said EvenUp was attractive to LSVP not only because the corporate’s product solves an actual problem within the legal field, but in addition since the founding team has a powerful connection to private injury law and may thus establish a private reference to customers.
Karabibar said lawyers’ openness to integrating AI into their workflows has skyrocketed recently, which has helped EvenUp gain traction out there. Last yr, legal platform Litify announced a partnership with EvenUp to offer the hundreds of lawyers who use its platform access to EvenUp’s claim package product. Litify CEO Curtis Brewer said what sets EvenUp’s products aside from competitors is the standard of the claim letters its AI tool can generate.
“We find that most personal injury law firms are trying to reduce the amount of time their legal staff spends on unimportant, repetitive tasks,” he said. “They want the legal staff to focus on more valuable and complex work.”
EvenUp now has almost 1,000 customers using its products, and investor Duesterhoef attributes this to the novelty of EvenUp’s core product.
“This is basically a new product that hasn’t been done before in this form,” he said. “You can come in completely unencumbered and not have to go through a six-month cycle of trying to dismantle and replace something, so the launch was really, really quick.”
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