A new legal-tech startup based in Chicago is building an artificial intelligence assistant to help cut down research time for in-house attorneys from several hours to 90 seconds.
The company, called Responsiv, announced a $3 million seed round this week led by Greylock with participation from OnDean, the family office of Relativity founder Andrew Sieja, Permanent Capital Ventures and Julius Genachowski. The startup will use the new funding to build out its team.
Founders Nikita Solilov and Jordan Domash launched Responsiv after spending nearly a decade at Relativity, a legal-tech startup that has become a stalwart in Chicago's tech scene, where they helped build AI-enabled tools for attorneys.
They will bring what they learned there about how the legal industry operates to their new startup.
"We believe that Chicago has the potential to be the foundation and the center of legal technology," Domash told Chicago Inno.
Aside from cutting down research time, Responsiv helps with fact-finding by generating clauses, templates or policies, and giving in-house attorneys a new way to get their questions answered without having to use outside counsel.
"In-house attorneys every day confront questions spanning different products, jurisdictions, subject matters, and they're overwhelmed by the sheer volume and variety of these issues," Domash said. "They might be jumping from an employment matter in Illinois to a privacy issue in California."
Domash said that when faced with a legal question they don't have an answer to, in-house attorneys will often engage with outside counsel, but that can get expensive.
"The conventional tools in the space designed for legal research are made for law firms who want to read 20 to 30 cases," he said. "Many of our users have tried going straight to ChatGPT, but those are fraught with risks."
Domash said that while there continues to be new innovation in legal tech, most of it is designed for the largest law firms and there hasn't been much innovation tailored for in-house teams when they have questions.
When a user asks a question, Responsiv aggregates the most relevant information based on case statutes, regulatory guidance and third-party analysis to generate a comprehensive response.
"Attorneys don't just think about the answer to their question, but if the answer is going to be privileged and how they are going to defend the answer in court," Domash said. "What Responsiv allows its users to do is cut down on research time by providing direct verifiable answers to complex questions."
