Milyli CEO and co-founder Steve Ankenbrandt has a clear idea of the kind of software company he wants to run, and it departs from the stereotype of epic workweeks in both the startup world and the legal field that Milyli serves.
“We believe strongly in not overworking the team, and we want to focus on getting high productivity out of smart folks,” he said. “You can have really smart rockstar engineers who come in to solve complex problems and who get a lot of work done in a 40-hour workweek.”
A co-founder of kCura, Ankenbrandt watched that e-discovery software company grow and thrive, in large part because it got the culture right. He translates that experience to Milyli, which started out in 2008 providing solutions for kCura’s Relativity platform.
With the knowledge that accepting venture capital might mean surrendering control over how Milyli was run, Ankenbrandt and his co-founders decided early on that they did not want to pursue outside investment for Milyli.
Yet the company has expanded to building Relativity customizations for major corporations and litigation firms. Today, the company offers a suite of proprietary tools that integrate directly with Relativity.
And Milyli (pronounced muh-lil-ee) is growing at a healthy clip. Starting the year with just over 30 employees, Ankenbrandt expects to end the year with more than 50.
“The products are definitely taking off, and we’re focusing a lot of attention on growing our product team, but the e-discovery space is also growing,” he said. “If the economy is good, people are suing people. If the economy is not good, more people are suing people.”
Milyli’s flagship product, Blackout, is an automated tool for redacting personal information from electronic legal documents. In major litigation cases, the evidence database can contain millions of pages of documents. Traditionally, redaction of sensitive information from these documents has been a manual process performed by entry-level staff, but Milyli’s software uses pattern matching to do it automatically.
“We’ve worked with law firms and asked them how they did this six months ago,” Ankenbrandt said. “They’ll tell us they had a first- or second-year [lawyer] billing $200 or $300 an hour doing five weeks’ worth of work. We’re allowing them to do it in minutes or hours.”
Part of Blackout’s roadmap includes integrating machine learning algorithms that will help the pattern recognition software grow more sophisticated over time, drawing on more context to get better at distinguishing birth dates from other dates, for example.
“You can’t just match a date pattern and redact them all,” Ankenbrandt said. “You need to intelligently figure out why something is a birth date from the words surrounding it and the kind of document it’s in.”
To Ankenbrandt, those kinds of tech challenges, along with the opportunity to have a real impact, are what makes the e-discovery landscape so exciting.
“We were drawn to challenging problems, and a big part of e-discovery is the size of the data and the analysis involved in looking for the needle in the haystack,” he said. “A lot of big cases are decided before they ever go in front of a judge because one party will use a platform like Relativity and find the smoking gun.”
Image via Milyli.
What's your company's story? Let us know with a tip or a tweet @BuiltInChicago
