Tech advances allow new companies to harness networks of computers and people to sift through legal information and help lawyers prep cases.

“The legal industry is ripe for innovation,” says attorney and journalist Robert Ambrogi, who covers the role of technology in law. In an influential April 13 blog post, Ambrogi proclaimed a boom in legal tech startups based on a more than doubling of listings on startup directory AngelList. Ambrogi has since produced his own streamlined listing that currently has nearly 500 companies offering technologies to the legal industry. Several are courting attorneys who need better, cheaper ways to sort through the avalanche of legal filings, rulings, and spiderwebs of citations between cases, from the local to federal level.

The innovation upsurge may in part be generational. “If you make partner today in a law firm, and if you were in college with Google, you have different expectations of technology,” says Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina. The company tracks the activities of lawyers and judges using an artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing (NLP) to analyze court documents and figure out things like how a particular judge tends to rule on particular types of cases. It can also ferret out types of cases, such as patent or trademark, the specific IP a claim asserts, and all the attorneys involved.

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Though companies like Ravel and Lex Machina employ sophisticated AI, they don’t claim to provide a robolawyer. “What we’re hopefully doing is finding cases that you need to understand,” says Nik Reed of Ravel. “Professional lawyers have to use their intuition and their best judgment to understand the law.”

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