MDR LAB: The latest cohort is in

Six early stage companies, ranging from concept through to early revenue-stage, have joined the 10-week MDR LAB programme to work alongside Mishcon de Reya lawyers and other business experts from inside and outside of the firm. The main focus of the programme is product development, aiming to help the companies deepen their understanding of the problems lawyers face in their day-to-day work, giving them the opportunity to test their products with real-life users to iterate new designs and features quickly.

Three of the selected companies are based in the UK, and the remaining are based in the US, Sweden and Ireland. Unlike Fuse, where the recent cohorts have included established players such as Kira Systems, these are all very much startups. This will be an intensive period for the startups selected and an opportunity to finesse (or completely change) their product based on invaluable end user feedback.

Successful startups out of earlier MDR cohorts include Ping, Everchron and Thirdfort, which have all received financial investment from Mishcon.

Here are the participating MDR LAB 2019 companies including Solomonic, who we have written about a good few times:

Astroscreen
Based in London, Astroscreen was founded in 2018 to protect brands from harmful social media manipulation campaigns – also known as astroturfing.

Index

Founded in 2016 and based in California, US, Index is a sales engagement platform that helps lawyers generate more business by building and maintaining relationships with new and existing clients.

Donna
Founded in 2017 and based in Sweden, Donna is an AI-powered assistant for lawyers, that improves the speed and accuracy of legal contract reviews. Available as an easy to download Microsoft Word add-in, Donna is designed to work alongside lawyers to boost productivity and reduce risk. Donna is also training a Neuro-Linguistic Programming engine to power the future digitisation of legal contracts.

Solomonic
Founded in 2017, London-based litigation analytics start-up Solomonic launched its first product at the beginning of 2019. Their offering is centred around a simple premise – the right data, rigorously analysed, enhances the quality of decision-making. Their platform helps lawyers not just to predict outcomes but to improve them.

Courtsdesk
Courtdesk was founded in 2015. Based in Dublin, Ireland, they are a legal intelligence service who specialise in creating access to previously unavailable court reports and data for corporate and legal analysis. They were also named as the European Legal Start-up of 2017 at the StartUp Europe Awards.

Hipla
Founded in 2016 and backed by HM Land Registry, Hipla’s Home Buyer Passport is a free to use, evidence based buyer qualification platform that improves transparency and helps make buyers transaction ready. Hipla are also developing a digital ‘Handshake’ – an insurance backed reservation agreement to reduce the number of house sales that fall through.

Mishcon de Reya’s chief strategy officer and director of MDR LAB, Nick West, said: “Now we’re in the third year of MDR LAB, we continue to focus our efforts on finding early-stage legaltech companies and working with them on their product-market fit. We’re passionate about delving into problems that need solving for the benefit of our clients and our business, rather than simply letting ourselves “fall in love with technology.” We have maintained strong, active relationships with the 11 companies from our previous cohorts, and cannot wait to broaden our MDR LAB portfolio and to welcome this year’s cohort to the firm. We’re also delighted to have added support from Microsoft, AWS and Hubspot to the programme this year, as we strive to give these companies the best chance of succeeding.”

Visit https://lab.mdr.london/ for more information about MDR LAB.