Robert Ambrogi Blog
In February 2024, I wrote here about the launch of Bench IQ, a company that is using generative AI to provide comprehensive insights into the decision-making patterns of judges — based not just on their written rulings, but also their rulings from the bench and other data.
At the time, the company had just closed a $2.1 million pre-seed round, and now comes news that it has raised a $5.3 million seed round and landed four of the top five Am Law 100 firms as customers.
Notably, the company’s CEO and cofounder is Jimoh Ovbiagele, who as a 21-year-old in 2014 cofounded ROSS Intelligence, an early entrant in AI legal research that shut down after it was sued by Thomson Reuters.
Ovbiagele founded the company together with Jeffrey Gettleman, a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis, who came up with the idea, and Maxim Isakov, who had been founding engineer at ROSS and is now Bench IQ’s chief technology officer.
(Pictured above are Gettleman, Isakov and Ovbiagele.)
What makes the company unique is its approach to providing intelligence into judges’ decision-making patterns.
Using a proprietary dataset, it uses large language models and AI agents to identify patterns in judges’ reasoning and provide insights litigators can use in litigation strategy.
Notably, it does this based not just on their written rulings, but also on their oral rulings from the bench and other indicators.
“We’re trying to solve a longstanding problem in the legal field, and that is that judges only write judicial opinions for 3% of rulings,” Ovbiagele told me in February 2024, when I first wrote about the company.
“So often when attorneys are writing court documents or preparing for oral arguments and they want to know what their judge thinks about different issues in their case, they have very little information to go off of. That’s the problem that we are solving with Bench IQ.”
Gettleman, speaking about today’s announcement, said: “The judge is the single most important stakeholder in any legal proceeding. When billions are on the line, every nuance in judicial philosophy matters. Understanding how that judge thinks can determine success or failure.”
The seed round announced today was led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC and Haystack VC.
“In a market where many legal AI tools focus on saving time or rely on commoditized data, Bench IQ stands apart,” said Brandon Gleklen, principal at Battery Ventures. “Users tell us the platform doesn’t just help — it transforms how they prepare for high-stakes moments in court.”