Wexler is one of a growing cohort of genAI-based legal tech startups that have come to life since last year. Its focus is on establishing facts in any contentious matter. It will also be one of several companies taking part in Legal Innovators UK’s Startup Gallery on November 6 and 7 in London, (see more below).
Wexler is the brainchild of Gregory Mostyn, Co-Founder and CEO. Artificial Lawyer spoke to him this week about the fledging business and the realities of running a genAI startup.
First, what does it do? Fundamentally what it does is create time lines, extract facts, analyse the key people in a case, and help to test out case hypotheses. This can be applied to a wide range of contentious matters from ‘an internal investigation, to international litigation, to an employee grievance’. And the goal is that the platform ‘reduces doubt, saves critical time, and increases ROI’ for the lawyers.
As Mostyn told this site: ‘We are eDiscovery adjacent.’ He noted that when some firms take on a large case some of the initial preparation work, e.g. creating timelines and extracting the key facts, is done by junior lawyers or even paralegals, and often on a flat fee. Moreover, this work is highly laborious and tiredness can lead to errors. Therefore, bringing in AI-driven efficiency makes total sense.
They are currently doing POCs and have a project with a global law firm, and are in advanced discussions with others.
In terms of the LLMs they’re using, it’s OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude and ‘a bit of Llama’, which as noted in other stories seems to now be the standard models for most legal tech companies at present, along with Gemini and Mistral.
Mostyn noted that given the focus of data extraction he’s expecting increasingly better outputs for Wexler as LLMs improve. He also stressed that they are not just a wrapper and their value is in their workflows and UI/UX around specific legal tasks.
In terms of pricing, they go by the page. Customers buy a package of pages, e.g. 500,000 pages to be analysed, and then they can use that up on multiple matters.
In terms of the approach, Mostyn explained that getting all of the needed detail from documents, e.g. timelines, people, other key facts, means there are multiple calls to an LLM and it’s compute intensive.
In terms of funding, he noted that because of the relatively high compute costs of LLMs for large document sets – and aside from building the team – it’s hard to bootstrap a legal genAI startup.
This is a change to the legal AI startups using early NLP / ML from the 2010s, which in several cases did bootstrap, or only took on very small amounts of cash until they’d really got traction in the market, at which point major funding happened.
Funding so far has been a pre-Seed round that included Myriad Venture Partners, and before that an Angel round, which involved several lawyers. The goal is to do a Seed round in October this year.
The plan is to grow in the UK – a centre for international litigation – before tackling the biggest market of them all: the US.
Mostyn added that working as a startup at this stage in the generative AI era is actually very useful.
‘There is a very short feedback loop with our customers now,’ he noted, as they are working very closely with those doing POCs. That in turn helps to speed the company’s development and could give them an edge on some larger players in the same market segment.
So, there you go: have genAI, will create legal tech solutions. As Mostyn noted, success will be all about getting the interface between the product and the users right, giving them what they want in ways that others don’t, or that others don’t do so well. Like most of the genAI-backed startups, they can’t control the foundational LLMs they depend on to power their solutions, but they can refine and make excellent the workflows that create value for the customers.
Good luck to them.
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Legal Innovators UK Conference – London – November 6 + 7
If you are a startup, or intrigued to know what new startups in legal tech are doing, then come along to Legal Innovators UK on November 6 + 7. Just as we did in California in June, we will have a Startup Gallery dedicated to new companies – please get in contact with the team if you’d like to take part.
Plus, there will be plenty more to explore: the evolution of legal ops; new business models and the world of ALSPs – both those connected to law firms and independent; the changing demands on legal innovation teams; and much more across the two-day landmark event.
So, if you want to be at the intersection of legal innovation’s cutting edge and the people, firms, and companies leading it, then Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 6 + 7, is the event for you.
See you there!
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If you would like to be a speaker, sponsor, or get more information, then please email conference organisers Cosmonauts at this address:
Plus, if you would like to secure your ticket now, please see the Ticket page here.