A recent post of mine drew a lot of attention for stating that the number of legal startups had nearly tripled in two years. Relying on the Angel List roster of legal startups, I observed that the number had grown from 412 two years ago to 1,094 as of the date of my post, reflecting nearly threefold growth. (Just since my post, another nine companies were added to the list.)

Over at Associate’s Mind, Keith Lee did what I should have done. He took a closer look at the Angel List roster. He found that it includes some companies that no longer exist. Worse, it includes entities that clearly are not startups, such as law firms, private investigators and notaries.

Prompted by Keith’s post, I conducted my own review of the Angel List. It confirmed that the list contains many entities that shouldn’t be there. In fact, after I removed the junk from the list, I had whittled it down to just 375 actual startups.

At the same time, however, the Angel List omits companies that should be there. Just off the top of my head, I added some companies that I noticed were missing, bringing the list up to 408 companies.

Keith’s conclusion was that there is not an explosion in legal technology. The fact of the matter is, his conclusion is no more valid than its opposite. All we really know is that the Angel List is not a reliable data set on which to base any conclusion. It is not reliable today and it most likely was not two years ago when I took the baseline number.

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