It's not every day that an e-discovery startup wins a spot at one of the world's top business “accelerators.” Of the 705 applicants for the 2014 class at Techstars Chicago, only 10 made the cut for this summer's boot camp for promising entrepreneurs. Offering a place to a legal-industry starup for the intense 90-day program was a first for the Midwest organizers, and a suprise for the legal software's creator.

“I thought they hated us,” recalled Jay Leib , founder and managing member of NexLP, which stands for next generation language processing. NexLP blew through the Techstars Chicago elimination gauntlet with its Story Engine technology, which uses a “text analytics engine to index corporate email and understand the social, emotional and behavioral information locked within data,” explained Leib, who previously worked at kCura as its chief strategy officer.

While Leib name-drops IBM's Watson and iPhone's Siri in his NexLP elevator pitch, his software doesn't talk—so far—but it does use natural language processing and machine learning technology to beef up electronic data discovery by revealing narratives and connections.