It’s the one we’ve all been waiting for, MDR LAB, Mishcon de Reya’s legal tech incubator, has just announced this year’s cohort for its 10-week development programme in London.
And they are:
– Astroscreen
Based in London, Astroscreen was founded in 2018 to protect brands from harmful social media manipulation campaigns – also known as astroturfing.
– Index
Founded in 2016 and based in California, US, Index is a sales engagement platform that helps lawyers generate more business by building and maintaining relationships with new and existing clients.
– Donna
Founded in 2017 and based in Sweden, Donna is an AI-powered assistant for lawyers, that improves the speed and accuracy of legal contract reviews. Available as an easy to download Microsoft Word add-in, Donna is designed to work alongside lawyers to boost productivity and reduce risk. Donna is also training a Neuro-Linguistic Programming engine to power the future digitisation of legal contracts.
– Solomonic
Founded in 2017, London-based litigation analytics start-up Solomonic launched its first product at the beginning of 2019. Their offering is centred around a simple premise – the right data, rigorously analysed, enhances the quality of decision-making. Their platform helps lawyers not just to predict outcomes but to improve them.
– Courtsdesk
Courtdesk was founded in 2015. Based in Dublin, Ireland, they are a legal intelligence service who specialise in creating access to previously unavailable court reports and data for corporate and legal analysis. They were also named as the European Legal Start-up of 2017 at the StartUp Europe Awards.
– Hipla
Founded in 2016 and backed by HM Land Registry, Hipla’s Home Buyer Passport is a free to use, evidence based buyer qualification platform that improves transparency and helps make buyers transaction ready. Hipla are also developing a digital ‘Handshake’ – an insurance backed reservation agreement to reduce the number of house sales that fall through.
Mishcon de Reya’s Chief Strategy Officer and Director of MDR LAB, Nick West, said in a statement: ‘Now we’re in the third year of MDR LAB, we continue to focus our efforts on finding early-stage legaltech companies and working with them on their product-market fit. We’re passionate about delving into problems that need solving for the benefit of our clients and our business, rather than simply letting ourselves “fall in love with technology.”‘
‘We have maintained strong, active relationships with the 11 companies from our previous cohorts, and cannot wait to broaden our MDR LAB portfolio and to welcome this year’s cohort to the firm. We’re also delighted to have added support from Microsoft, AWS and Hubspot to the programme this year, as we strive to give these companies the best chance of succeeding,’ he concluded.
Artificial Lawyer is once again very much looking forward to seeing what comes out this year’s programme. If it’s like the last two, then it will be an excellent win-win scenario for all involved.
As eagle-eyed readers will have noticed, MDR LAB is now one of several legal tech incubators/accelerators/scale programmes/innovation spaces (or whatever terms you’d like use depending on the strategy of the project) around the world, and especially in London.
However, it’s fair to say that MDR LAB was one of the first – now into its 3rd year – and also perhaps the one that has most delivered in terms of helping the cohort members to truly develop their products via a close-working partnership with the lawyers at the firm.
It’s no exaggeration to say some companies have significantly improved/altered their products after going through the MDR LAB.