Amsterdam, 13 June 2022 Former litigation lawyers Caroline Korteweg and Ingrid van de Pol-Mensing have launched Uncover, an AI-powered case management solution for litigators. Their journey started from personal frustration, having spent many late-night hours manually searching for documents, reshuffling exhibits, and inefficiently drafting timelines. Uncovers’ unparalleled solution utilises unique algorithms to enable lawyers to digest the unstructured information in their case files in a structured manner, to work with that information in preparing their case, and to collaborate seamlessly with colleagues and clients throughout the entire litigation workflow.
The platform uniquely combines decades of litigation experience with a technological engine harnessing the latest advances in natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. With Uncover, lawyers are freed from time-consuming manual tasks to focus on what litigation is all about: winning cases. The Uncover team is co-building its company with European AI B2B venture studio Slimmer AI and counts Lemstra Van der Korst, CORP., and AD Advocaten as launching customers.
Caroline Korteweg, co-founder and co-CEO of Uncover, explains why they are excited to launch Uncover, “Today, lawyers spend roughly 30-40% of their time ploughing their way through documents focusing on the factual information, trying to make sense of the case file. It is fundamental but extremely inefficient and time-consuming work, resulting in lawyers longing for more hours in a day whilst clients are demanding more efficiency. We searched long and hard for solutions in the market to attend to these issues but came up empty-handed: none seem to have been built with a litigators’ approach in mind. Uncover will be exactly that: a tailored solution by litigators for litigators.”
Ingrid van de Pol-Mensing, co-founder and co-CEO, adds, “Our experience working in law for so many years helped us see these issues first-hand: case files have become more extensive and complex, and lawyers face more distractions than ever. And the bizarre thing is, we are still trying to keep up using stickies and markers while the legal tech market is developing rapidly. According to Statista, the global legal tech market is expected to be worth 25 billion USD in 2025. Its overall impact on the economy is even projected to reach 144 billion USD that year—double the impact observed in 2019. Uncover is pioneering new grounds, using the newest, most advanced NLP and deep learning technology that wasn’t available until recently. Combined with a litigator-tailored interface, Uncover will help lawyers worldwide be at the forefront of digitisation. Our goal for Uncover is to become a worldwide household name in legal practice.”
Advances in AI make Uncover possible
Being the first Dutch-founded legal startup focusing on litigation, Uncover makes a massive difference in performing the crucial steps fundamental to preparing the best possible legal advice for clients.
Leveraging AI, Uncover creates a searchable, automatically structured set of documents and offers a drafting tool that makes referring to and attaching exhibits a mouse-click away. Where lawyers used to spend hours and hours on building a timeline of events that is foundational to building their case, Uncovers’ AI automatically generates that timeline. This frees up substantial amounts of precious time for lawyers to do what they are hired to do best: be a brainstorm partner for their client, provide the best possible legal advice, and win cases.
Advances in text extraction and named entity recognition, combined with recent computational advances, allow for accurately identifying relevant events and processing large amounts of documents in very little time. Uncover is future-proofing the art of litigation, while giving law firms a new competitive advantage.
JC Heyneke, CEO of Slimmer AI, comments, “The most successful founders are those who have felt first-hand the problem they’re trying to solve. Combining Caroline and Ingrid’s extensive know-how with Slimmer AI’s deep experience in building cutting-edge AI software is a winning combination!”
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