Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Drew Winship knows numbers. He deals with them all day. So considering that only a small percentage of startups see projected returns, it might seem counterintuitive that the one-time litigator would leave a stable job at Brown & James to launch a tech company. Yet that’s what he did after a weekend in 2012, when he and two partners—software developer Robert Ward and analyst Jordan Woerndle—proposed a bold idea: helping lawyers predict the future. They use a complex algorithm to sift through mountains of data and help attorneys figure out an appropriate course of action. Winship often compares the resulting company’s approach to Moneyball and sabermetrics.
He and his partners call the firm’s algorithm Flux Capacitor and the artificial intelligence Marty McFly, nodding to Back to the Future—and the firm’s mission. Since Juristat launched in 2013, others have rapidly recognized its potential. The staff has doubled in size and recently moved into its own offices, in downtown’s Curlee Building. Its clients now include major St. Louis law firms, and it’s looking to expand into new areas of law after initially focusing on patents. If Winship were to calculate his firm’s chance of success today, we’re guessing he would like the odds.
You clerked for judges while in law school at Washington University. Did you find judges to be predictable?
A large percentage take their jobs extremely seriously, and they do a very good job. With that said, if you have a judge who’s very friendly to plaintiffs or pro–large company, you learn those biases or worldviews anecdotally. That’s fine, but why not know them mathematically? That’s really what Juristat is all about.
How did you come up with the concept? I know the seed was planted at Startup Weekend in 2012, when Woerndle proposed a company that works with data.
We spent hours brainstorming about the type of data set. We talked about healthcare data, social data… I actually got fed up and went in the corner to start working, because I was a lawyer and needed to bill hours. Finally, it dawned on me that we just needed a massive database. I realized that I was staring at Missouri’s litigation data set. So we started brainstorming…and it all took off from there.
Why isn’t legal data already more available?
You don’t go into the practice of law if you want to be the next Steve Jobs. There’s a certain type of person who’s attracted to law—they might be good at law, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dying to do data analysis. It was never part of being a lawyer before, but the world’s changing now.
Do you ever miss trial law?
I miss arguing motions for summary judgments in front of judges. A trial is intellectual warfare, where you’re thinking on your feet and should be heavily prepared—someone could say anything at any time, and you have to figure out a way to respond. I enjoy that level of pressure and stress. With that being said, a lot of things, from investor pitches to sales meetings, involve a similar level of stress.
What sets the best startups apart from the rest?
It’s the teams that are working at 2 and 4 in the morning on a Friday, when everyone else is out partying. It’s sheer force of will. If you put in an extra 10 hours a week, by the end of the year you’ve got 500 hours on your competition. A lot of people talk about work-life balance—startups aren’t about work-life balance. It’s about wholesale obsession with what you’re building.
How do you stay sane?
We have a good time as a group. There’s a pallet of Red Bull behind me and an equal-size shelf of bourbon.
