Tech Nation is a UK growth platform for startup tech companies and industry leaders, and they recently announced the winners of their latest scale up competition – which included Edinburgh-based Lawtech business, Valla.
The competition ‘Rising Stars’ is designed to help the most exciting tech companies take their business to the next level with the hope of becoming world-leading companies of the future.
Valla founded by Dr. Kate Ho and Danae Shell is a data platform for the legal sector. The platform analyses millions of legal documents, extracting relevant data and turning them into insights that are easy to understand. The aim is to help lawyers and consumers make data-driven legal decisions. The first product from Valla puts a price on discrimination in the workplace. The Valla website explains:
The legal industry is drowning in data that it can never use. Every day, millions of pages of case law, decisions and precedent are created and then ignored. Valuable insights are locked away in PDFs or scattered across hundreds of text documents, waiting to be pieced together.
This has serious real-world consequences. When someone’s rights are voilated, they should know that they have legal options. When their lawyer advises them, they should feel confident they’re giving the best informed, most up-to-date advice. Right now, this isn’t happening – and real lives are feeling the impact.
Valla’s mission is to bring transparency and insight to the legal sector. We do this by analysing those millions of pages and extracting data from them. We then turn that into insight that’s easy to understand and use – insight that can make a real difference in real people’s lives.