Mishcon de Reya’s pioneering incubator, MDR LAB, is bringing aboard three legal tech startups to join the autumn cohort of its Improve Programme. The companies are: Della, FundRe, and Windemnity.
Improve is a 12-week programme that gives startups in the legal space the opportunity to ‘work within their target market, to pilot and improve products, and gain a better understanding of where lawyers and their clients would benefit from new technologies’.
The new additions mean that MDR LAB has now worked with 28 early-stage legal tech businesses across its suite of programmes, the firm said. Mishcon de Reya has taken licences with eight of the products, and made equity investments in four of them, the firm added.
The three companies will operate from inside MDR LAB’s space in the Mishcon London office, rather than engaging remotely.
While readers of this site will know doc analysis system Della well already, FundRe and Windemnity are very new to the scene. Here’s an overview of the three:
Della – makes it easy to find answers in complex documents. Using proprietary artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Della provides Google-like functionality enabling legal professionals to ask questions about their contracts in plain English (and many other languages) and get clear answers and actionable insight into their contracts.
And here’s an AL TV Product Walk Through that this site did last year with Della.
FundRE – facilitates the origination of European Commercial Real Estate finance for institutional investors. The platform streamlines the execution process and provides accurate market data to improve the underwriting process for investors, lenders and debt advisors. The company was created at the start of this year by Yann Idelsen.
The company added that: ‘FundRE enables sponsors to run faster and smoother financing processes while accessing a wider lending universe. Its benefits are:
- Increased reach across the lending universe
- Increased speed of origination
- More attractive lending terms
- More accurate underwriting
- Time efficient and automated transactional process
- Process Q&A, quotes and term sheets efficiently
- Track record and previously achieved terms easily accessible.’
Windemnity – helps digitise the way that warranty and indemnity insurance is procured in mergers and acquisitions transactions. The platform combines workflow automation with data empowerment to help lawyers, brokers and insurers improve their product and service offerings. And this company, created by former Hogan Lovells lawyer Miren Patel, is so new that it doesn’t even have a website yet.
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MDR LAB noted that the three startups ‘were selected off the back of months of market engagement and scouting and that they identified more than 350 prospective candidates, engaged 108 companies and reviewed over 80 applications from startups across four continents’. I.e. to get into this cohort of three companies is really something of an achievement in itself.
Dan Sinclair, Head of MDR LAB, said: ‘We are excited about welcoming these three new businesses and giving them the opportunity and support to grow. Whilst we saw great outcomes from the previous programme, in particular with DraftWise, of which we are now both customers and investors, we knew that there is something special about being back in the office. It is really hard to replicate the on-demand nature of doing things in person and it is already proving to be much easier to build momentum and iterate.’
Dulcie Pearson, Legal Tech Analyst, Mishcon de Reya, added: ‘Following on from successful partnerships with ThirdFort and Orbital Witness in the Real Estate department at Mishcon de Reya, I’m excited for these companies to work with our transactional teams and other parts of the firm. I look forward to seeing how their products evolve during their time with us.’
And, Christophe Frèrebeau, founder and CEO of Della, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘We are extremely proud to be joining the MDR LAB Improve Programme, after working with Mishcon de Reya’s Real Estate Practice. Working with MDR LAB will allow us to test our AI in a number of additional scenarios, with different teams, and unlock further benefits for our clients.
‘We do not see ourselves as a replacement for the firm’s existing contract analysis tools; instead we want to modernise how highly efficient teams keep track of the risks and obligations that exist across their contractual landscape. For example, one of our first tasks in the LAB will be to develop a ‘triage’ tool, which will help the Real Estate Practice to identify important or unusual documents, accelerating the contract review process even further.’