Toronto-based legal tech startup Bench IQ Inc. today said it has raised $5.3 million in seed funding to develop and sell its technology that helps lawyers understand how judges think.

The two-year-old company’s core product is a generative artificial intelligence-based judicial intelligence platform already used by four of the top five firms in the American Lawyer rankings. The platform analyzes how individual judges have ruled in past cases — including those without written opinions – to help lawyers strategize about how to present their arguments.

“As AI reshapes law, much of the conversation has focused on first-order gains from automating existing work,” said Jimoh Ovbiagele, BenchIQ’s co-founder and CEO (pictured, center, with co-founders Maxim Isakov, left, and Jeffrey Gettleman). “The deeper unlock is AI’s ability to enable work that was previously impossible.”

Ovbiagele, who previously co-founded legal tech firm Ross Intelligence Inc., said the company’s value lies in surfacing insights from opaque corners of the legal system. “We’re not trying to predict the outcomes of cases; we’re helping lawyers shape those outcomes,” he said.

Bench IQ developed a proprietary technique to capture the 97% of federal judicial rulings that aren’t issued in writing. It used the dataset to train commercial large language models to analyze past statements and rulings as indicators of future decisions. Ovbiagele said the system is intended not to predict decisions but to help litigators tailor arguments to specific judges.

In addition to building the data set, Bench IQ had to develop new ways to fine-tune LLMs. “No one has written about how to analyze this data on the internet,” he said. “Large language models don’t know what to do with it — so we had to teach them.”

Expansion plans

The company officially launched its platform in early 2024 and is currently focused solely on the federal judiciary. Ovbiagele said the bigger opportunity lies in state courts, where the number of judges is “orders of magnitude larger.” Part of the funding will go to expand the data set to include state judges and eventually common law jurisdictions outside the U.S. and Canada.

Bench IQ’s long-term ambition is to move beyond assisting with legal research and into case strategy. “We’re like NFL coaches studying film,” Ovbiagele said. “You don’t just look at the win-loss record. You study the playbook, the players, the tendencies and then build a plan to win.”

He didn’t provide return on investment statistics but said one law firm used the technology to assist a large company that needed a judge to approve an opt-out clause in a reorganization plan. The legal team used the platform to uncover the criteria that judge typically required in similar scenarios to build successful arguments.

Bench IQ wouldn’t disclose its pricing or the number of customers it has. Ovbiagele said pricing is both usage- and seat-based. A new bespoke analysis service is also in the works, although details are also under wraps.

The startup’s founding team combines AI expertise with legal acumen. Chief Technology Officer Maxim Isakov is also a Ross alum and Chief Customer Officer Jeffrey Gettleman spent 17 years as a practicing lawyer specializing in complex Chapter 11 cases.

The funding round was led by Battery Ventures LP and Inovia Capital Inc., with participation from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures LLC, Maple VC LLC and Haystack Ventures LP. It follows a previously undisclosed $2.1 million pre-seed raise in 2023, which was co-led by Haystack and Maple VC, with participation from three law firms and several legal tech veterans.

Photo: Bench IQ