Darrow is an Israeli legal tech company, focused on the US, which has found a very special niche in the market: helping plaintiff firms build their class action cases. The platform, plus their PlaintiffLink portal, taps AI to gather information about potential claimants and then helps lawyers to manage the development of the case via a dedicated digital space.
Artificial Lawyer spoke to co-founder and CEO Evyatar Ben Artzi to find out some more. But, first, let’s cover their new hire, which they’ve just announced. Mathew Keshav Lewis is joining as the first Chief Revenue Officer and US General Manager for Darrow, which recently raised a $35m series B round.
He brings over 20 years of experience driving revenue and growth for several high-profile legal and technology companies and will be responsible for helping Darrow scale as it continues an accelerated growth trajectory. He previously worked for SaaS real estate deal management platform Dealpath, alternative investment platform Yieldstreet, and legal services pioneer Axiom Law.
Right, onto PlaintiffLink and the wider Darrow platform.
‘We fuel law firm growth. We help lawyers working on class actions find plaintiffs, using legal experts, data scientists and genAI,’ explained Ben Artzi.
The cases could be environmental, employment, you name it. For now the focus is on the US, although they are happy to explore global matters as well.
So, how do the latest capabilities of PlaintiffLink and the Darrow platform work? In short, combined they collect information from public sources and collate the potential claimants via a dedicated portal focused on a particular matter. The customer can then use the portal’s tools to triage and vet the results as they come in, while Darrow keeps the search running, bringing in more claimants to a particular law firm that’s using the portal.
But who uses this? Ben Artzi noted that it’s not just plaintiff law firms who are interested in this kind of information, litigation funders ‘are looking at this as well’. Also, anyone – including the corporate targets themselves – may want to know about potential class actions that are building up.
And the data? They look at whatever is online, from comments on social networks, to academic papers, to news items, to what authorities and regulators are looking at, anything that points toward a brewing class action.
They can then compare these event facts against case law to see if something may be about to happen. Meanwhile, the PlaintiffLink portal helps to funnel potential plaintiffs into the system. And, he stressed, humans are always in the loop on their side.
Why do this? Ben Artzi added that in the past, law firms have often resorted to things such as billboards to gather claimants together, but this takes the methodology forward by a major leap across the digital realm, plus it helps firms to manage the entire onboarding process via a digital platform as well.
But, what about the challenges caused by the increased ease that individuals and law firms now have to file? Ben Artzi said that one challenge in the market was duplication of representation, i.e. multiple firms representing the same claimant – but their system could help with that.
This site then asked about deep fakes. Have they seen any so far when it comes to class actions? Not yet, he said, but added that software can be used to check underlying meta data to check if a person is authentic.
To conclude, Ben Artzi stated that building a major class action could take over six months to find the right people, now with Darrow they can get to a suitable number in a matter of days.
So, there you go. Legal tech and AI are finding their way into every aspect of the legal world.