Stanford University is a legendary breeding ground for startups — Silicon Valley giants Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc. all came out of the Palo Alto, Calif., institution’s computer science and engineering departments.

Now, Stanford Law School is getting in on the action. In the last four years, the school has become a hotbed of entrepreneurship in the field of legal technology. Since 2009, at least five startups have spun out of the school. The first was Lex Machina, a company that maps electronically available patent litigation events and outcomes to build a litigation database.

Since then, startups have been happening with increasing frequency, observes Clint Korver, a partner at Ulu Ventures, which has invested in three. “I think Lex Machina broke the ice, showing the commercial potential of collaboration between the law, business, and engineering schools.”

Most of these companies are still in very early stages, but together they are the first fruits of a concerted effort at Stanford Law to increase entrepreneurship and nurture new businesses that apply the latest technologies — including machine learning, data analysis, visualization, and advanced search techniques — to make the practice of law more efficient. Stanford’s Center for Legal Informatics, aka CodeX, seems to be the vortex of this activity. A joint project of the law school and computer science department, CodeX focuses “on computational law, an innovative approach to legal informatics based on the explicit representation of laws and regulations in computable form,” according to its website. Its work “includes theoretical research on representations of legal information, the creation of technology for processing and utilizing information expressed within these representations, and the development of legal structures for ratifying and exploiting such technology,” the website states.

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Tags: Cisco Systems Inc., Stanford Law, Stanford Law School, Stanford University