Techstars Spotlight: Software platform courts easy-to-manage litigation data

Amid a digitized world, the legal industry is among the “last frontier” for tech, Thadd Hale said.

“There is a lot of opportunity in the legal space,” said Hale, co-founder and CEO of Vector Legal Method. “Litigation as a whole is not very structured or standardized. As you can imagine, lack of standardization can be difficult for industries that are very document heavy.”

Eying this opportunity, serial entrepreneur Hale teamed up with successful litigators in 2015 and launched Vector Legal Method: a software-as-a-service litigation case management system that streamlines documents, deadlines and tasks for cases.

“The software allows attorneys to track, manage, analyze and organize their entire caseload,” Hale said. “It’s basically making the process more transparent, collaborative and efficient.”

Vector breaks litigation down into 163 different aspects, Hale said.

“So instead of creating one folder and putting the thousands of documents in it, it’s broken down by complaint,” he said. “Having a structure allows you to find what you need very quickly. …

The law firm sets up their cases and then they connect the customer to see what is happening all within the system.”

The SaaS platform — which was selected for Techstars KC’s 2017 cohort — has created actionable metrics and analytics for the litigation process, Hale said. He added that without standardization, easily accessing this information is not possible.

In addition to the platform’s organizational capabilities, Hale said, he hopes the availability of analytics can be a selling point for the service.

“Law firms can look at how long it takes them to handle certain cases, how much it costs to handle certain cases, and also be able to tell if particular attorneys are more efficient than others,” Hale said. “Vector will be able to standardize the way litigations are tracked managed and analyzed and then deliver industry wide statistics.”

In May, Vector closed a seed round of $800,000, led by such local investors as Royal Street Ventures and Missouri Technology Corporation. The firm is also a 2016 graduate of Digital Sandbox KC.

Vector is expected to use the funds to beta test the platform amongst 50 attorneys in September, Hale said. The test will represent firms small and large across the nation.

“Our beta test is just to make sure that there’s no bugs. We’ve already had a lot of attorneys involved in designing and testing the product throughout the development cycle,” he said. “We will probably launch officially in October. We want it to be perfect before we go to the broader market.”

Hale has more than a decade of experience in the legal tech sector, founding the Silicon Valley-based legal services firm Advanced Discovery in 2005. Although Techstars KC is not his first experience in an accelerator as an entrepreneur, it is a milestone for Vector, he said.

“We’re learning new things every day through Techstars,” he said. “The Techstars network is huge. They’ve already made key introductions for us across the country with lawyers and in house legal departments to be able to test assumptions and make sure that we’re delivering the product that the market needs.”

With a primary focus on enterprise-level sales and establishing a customer base, Vector expects to hire up to 15 people in Kansas City within a year, he said. Hale is confident that Techstars will assist the firm in achieving that goal, he said.

“I think the biggest thing for us is going to be taking advantage of the Techstars network,” Hale said. “The statistics show that the number of overall startups that succeed is way lower than the number of Techstars startups that succeed. They have experience helping startups grow. ”