Esquify

Esquify, founded in Chicago in 2014 by Scott Stuart and Drew Stern, developed a workforce management platform for the legal industry, specifically targeting the eDiscovery and document review market. The founders' backgrounds, with Stuart's 30 years in law and corporate restructuring and Stern's experience in technology at companies like Sprout Social and Salesforce, informed the company's direction. They identified a significant inefficiency in how contract attorneys handled document review for litigation, a process often billed hourly with little oversight into actual productivity.

The company's core offering was a software platform that integrated with existing eDiscovery solutions to monitor, manage, and analyze the performance of human reviewers. Using machine learning, the system provided real-time analytics on reviewer speed and accuracy, allowing case managers to supervise teams remotely and more effectively. This addressed the challenge of ensuring productivity and focus when lawyers reviewed thousands of digital documents. The platform's features included supervisory tools, built-in communication, and up-to-the-minute ratings of reviewers, who were incentivized to perform accurately. Esquify's business model was twofold: clients could license the platform on a monthly subscription basis to use with their own review teams, or they could leverage Esquify's network of vetted, U.S.-based contract attorneys. The company reported that its technology could reduce document review costs by 25-45% and increase reviewer productivity significantly.

Serving law firms and Fortune 100 companies, Esquify gained traction in the legal tech space. The company secured a total of $1.25 million in funding, including a seed round of $710,000 in July 2017 led by Network Ventures with participation from Foley Ventures and Bridge Investments. After demonstrating rapid growth and winning several awards, Esquify was acquired by Xact Data Discovery (XDD), a major provider of eDiscovery services, in December 2018. The acquisition was an "acqui-hire," and Stern and Stuart continued to lead the platform within XDD, embedding Esquify's technology into XDD's managed review services to enhance their offerings.

Keywords: eDiscovery, legal technology, document review, workforce management, legal services, machine learning, contract attorney, litigation support, legal tech, data management, reviewer analytics, AI automation, productivity software, virtual supervision, Xact Data Discovery, Drew Stern, Scott Stuart, legal document analysis, remote legal teams, law firm efficiency