For about a year, I've been hearing that lawyers are using AI in droves. But it wasn’t until I talked to Jennifer Gore last week that I started to understand what that meant in practice.
"You can ask, 'What are the bad facts in my case?' and it’ll tell you all the issues that are going to be brought up by the other side," said Gore, founder of Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, talking about her legal AI platform of choice, startup Eve.
Gore is a plaintiff lawyer, representing everyday people with personal injury claims, from bicycle and car accidents to wrongful death lawsuits. She says Eve helps her keep track of the constant flood of facts in her caseload and speeds up how she processes cases. Cofounded in 2020 by David Zeng, Jay Madheswaran, and Matt Noe, Eve has been growing rapidly over the last eight months—the startup says its revenue has grown by 5x in that time, and that its customer base has grown by 800%. (Eve told Fortune it has more than 100 customers to date.)
"So much of this used to take 40 hours of work, and now you can do it in 15 minutes," said Madheswaran. "An average attorney is managing probably ten cases every month. Think about it: How do you remember all these details about ten different people, multiplied by maybe ten different witnesses per person? It exponentially compounds."
In some sense, Eve’s growth is representative of a sector-agnostic reality: People will pay for software that gives them back time, the greatest finite resource. And now, the company has reached a milestone, raising a $47 million Series A funding round, Fortune can exclusively report. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures also participating.
A company operating at the intersection of AI and law getting funded is not the surprise here, to be sure. The AI boom has facilitated a funding frenzy in the sector, as global VC deal value in the legal sector hit $2.7 billion in 2024, up by 170% year over year, according to PitchBook.
That said, I haven’t felt compelled to write about any of the legal AI startups until now since they usually left me feeling very "gold rush shrug." But I was compelled by Eve’s customers and its express specialization in plaintiff law—plaintiff law can be thorny but is undeniably huge, with billions in settlements across the industry in 2023.
David Haber, a16z general partner, good-naturedly concedes that AI for law is "a very noisy market," and on lots of levels, that’s for good reason.
"A lot of these LLMs are great at summarizing, extracting, and there’s maybe no more document-intensive industry than legal," said Haber.
But having a neat tool isn’t enough to succeed, and never really has been, AI or not.
"The ability to craft a letter in minutes instead of 20 hours is incredibly differentiated versus a human paralegal," Haber told Fortune. "But I think that alone isn’t purely defensible. What’s defensible is really owning that end-to-end workflow, becoming a system of record, becoming that system of action—characteristics that, by the way, we’d always look for when evaluating software investments pre-AI. AI is a great catalyst, a great tool for differentiation. It’s a way to wedge into the conversation and expand the TAM [total addressable market]. But ultimately the things that drive moats are largely the same."
Ultimately, Haber saw the path forward for Eve, especially as he talked to customers. Mike Morse—founder of his eponymous plaintiff law firm that’s one of the largest in Michigan—has been using Eve across his practice for a few months. He’s impressed by the customer service and the feedback he’s been getting from his "power users."
"They all started saying, ‘Eve is the future, Eve is the best one we’ve seen,’" Morse told Fortune. "For me, that’s the feedback I need to hear."
Invoking "power user" is interesting here, since it’s a phrase I’m more frequently used to hearing in the context of consumer apps. But it’s interesting to think about Eve with a touch of that lens. Madheswaran may have been slightly caught off-guard by the rapid growth at Eve—he comically described having to go to OpenAI to ask for more access and capacity. But as a former Facebook engineer, he has long known what virality and consumer adoption looks like.
"One customer, in their [recent] onboarding, they invited more people than we’d originally intended," said Madheswaran. "Now, 70% of those people are becoming daily active users. Typically, that’s something only consumer companies do, attract daily active users, but that’s the type of magic happening."
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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