“a team of medical students that were curing kidney stones,”
says Lewis. Next, a class at Stanford Design School on how to
launch a startup. (See http://at.la w.com/LTN136C1.) “That was
how we came into contact with the investors who eventually
backed our company,” says Lewis, who praises the entrepreneurial richness of resources at the university.
“We were able to take advantage of a number of different
resources that helped us get off the ground,” he says. “The den-
sity of the community in terms of people you can get advice
from, people that you run into who are interested in support-
ing entrepreneurship, I think is unique.”
And as legal technology becomes a hot market, there are
undoubtedly other Stanford Law projects waiting in the wings,
with principals chomping at the bit to monetize their ideas.
Among them is Securities Litigation Analytics, which has
developed a database of securities litigation. The plan, accord-
ing to director, Jason Hegland, is to provide analytics so attor-
neys can mine the data for information to help inform legal
strategy in cases. It’s a similar model to Lex Machina,, he says.
But because of the smaller number of securities cases (about
3,000), the idea has a more limited market.
Despite the small market and some technical struggles with
building the database, Hegland hopes the project will either
be spun out into its own company or acquired by an existing
legal technology or perhaps insurance business.
“Startup culture is in the air here,” says Lemley, co-founder
of Lex Machina and a Stanford Law professor. “Silicon Valley is the most hospitable place in the world in which to start
a company.”
Tam Harbert is a freelance reporter based in Washington,
D.C. Email: tam@tamharbert.com.
PHOTOGRAPH: JUAN PABLO COSTANZO
Franny Lee
SIPX
STANFORD IN TELLECTUAL
PROPERT Y EXCHANGE
W W W.SIPX.COM
Founded: 2012
Funding: XSeed Capital, with participation from Mohr
Davidow Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Konica-Minolta, Stanford University, and angel investors.
Business: SIPX was originally a research project called
the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange, explains
Roland Vogl, executive director of CodeX and a co-founder
of SIPX. There are three other co-founders:
» Franny Lee holds an LLM in law, science, and technology from Stanford and serves as vice president of university relations and product development at SIPX.
» Michael Genesereth is an associate professor in
Stanford’s computer science department, and research
director of CodeX.
» Bob Weinschenk is CEO of SIPX.
Essentially, SIPX is a database of copyright licenses.
The company is targeting the higher education market first, but has a goal of expanding into other markets eventually. Universities have a difficult time tracking and managing rights to use copyrighted material in
courses, Vogl explains. SIPX tracks the copyright permissions of a particular student or instructor under the
university’s holdings, and helps figure out the price for
the content based on those licenses, avoiding added
expense and potential liability, he says. “We’re basically trying to be the i Tunes for educational content,”
says Vogl. —T. H.
