Most of the 15 finalists for the 2024 Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW do have something in common. And it should surprise nobody.

As reported by Bob Ambrogi in his excellent LawSites blog (Voting Is Closed and Here Are the Results: The 15 Finalists You Chose To Be In the 2024 Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW, available here), voting is now closed and your votes have been tallied to decide  the 15 legal tech startups that will get to participate as finalists in the eighth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2024, taking place Feb. 14-17 in Chicago.

These 15 finalists will face off in an opening-night pitch competition that is the opening event of TECHSHOW, with the conference’s attendees voting at the conclusion of the pitches to pick the top winners. The first-place winner gets a package of marketing and advertising prizes. All 15 also get to exhibit in a special Startup Alley portion of the TECHSHOW exhibit hall.

As Bob notes: “In October, we issued a call for entries. From all the entries we received, a panel of judges narrowed the applications down to 25, which we posted on Dec. 4 for you, the readers, to select the final 15.”

And they received a lot of votes – 51,670! Bob then lists the 15 winners in order of their vote tallies. (The descriptions were provided by each company. The full descriptions can be read on the original ballot page.)

So, what do most of the entries have in common? Three guesses and the first two don’t count! 😉 Artificial intelligence capabilities, of course. 13 of the 15 entries mention either “AI” or “ChatGPT-style” capabilities within their full descriptions. Two of them – Beagle and Altumatim – are eDiscovery platforms.

Doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s only the latest illustration of how the application of AI is impacting legal technology. It’s probably why I received so many additional suggestions for the 12 legal use cases for generative AI infographic that eDiscovery Today and LTMG published a couple of months ago. AI is impacting legal tech more and more.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that 13 of 15 entries mention AI? Or are you surprised that 2 of them didn’t mention it? 😀 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot completing a voting ballot”.

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