For those of you hanging on my every word on the internet (hey, mom, thanks for reading!) you'll recall that I've written a fair bit recently about creative ways to bring more capital to legal technology and innovation. In one post, I entertained the notion of a legal-specific venture fund. Expanding upon that idea in the next post I tossed out what I thought were three new and novel ways to increase funding in legal innovation, ideas that, I was sure, no one had thought of: (1) crowdfunding, (2) micro or indie-VC and (3) an XPRIZE for legal.

With regard to the first two, I'll let you go back to that post and read what I wrote, but here's what I wrote for the third:

My final idea is some kind of moonshot prize for legal innovation or technology. The XPRIZE mission is to bring about “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity” through incentivized competition. The best known XPRIZE is the Ansari X Prize related to spacecraft development awarded in 2004. The prize was $10 million but the competition spurred over $100 million in investment in pursuit of the prize. I remain convinced that the buzz from an audacious goal and the promise of a large purse will attract greater attention to opportunities in legal.

This idea of offering a “big purse” is not limited to XPRIZE, the corporate sector has experimented with this format as well—Netflix is perhaps the most notable (and maybe infamous) example with the Netflix Prize but others such as the DARPA Grand Challenge or the Google Lunar X Prize have done the same. But I thought I was truly suggesting something that legal hadn't seen.

But, someone has dangled a big fat carrot in front of legal innovators. And that someone is Clio and the carrot is their LAUNCH//CODE contest, the finalists of which were announced a few weeks ago and the winners of which will be announced this week at the Clio Cloud Conference.

In this piece I'll talk about the background of the contest: what inspired Clio to offer it and how they're thinking about innovation through LAUNCH//CODE. I'm also generally aware, both anecdotally and because Clio was gracious enough to share with me the list of some of the awesome innovations that teams created that didn't make the finals, of the total investment that the ecosystem made in LAUNCH//CODE. I'll talk about that here too. In the next piece I'll talk about the finals, the winner, and my reactions.

I talked briefly with Clio employee Andrew Gay who is responsible for LAUNCH//CODE. Gay admired the investment that Quickbooks made in their partner community, with a similar competition the Small Business App Showdown. Gay urged the Clio team to bring a similar level of investment—and inspire a similar level of innovation—with similarly positioned competition. And, thus, LAUNCH//CODE was born. Gay says that Clio is thrilled with the response to LAUNCH//CODE. They're humbled by the fact that that partners made technical investments solely for the purposes of submission to the LAUNCH//CODE competition.

But the more interesting question is what and, specifically, to what extent did LAUNCH//CODE spur new ideas in or bring new talent into legal.

First, let's start with quantity. Andrew expressed some hesitation about sharing the total number of applications with me. But I chuckled when he told me that the applications numbered over 50 because I worried there would be, like, seven. This is awesome. To me, this is a strong sign that even with a competition that is clearly skewed to benefit one platform, Clio, legal innovators respond positively to incentives, even when the prospect of success isn't entirely certain.

Next, is quality. If quantity gives us an overall sense of the health of the legal tech ecosystem, the quality of submissions to LAUNCH//CODE tells us how healthy the ecosystem is compared to others. For example, are the submissions simple hacks or flimsy extensions of existing functionality offered by companies that are already Clio partners or are they new interesting directions that highlight the power of both the Clio partner and Clio itself. From everything I can see, I'd say it's mostly the latter.

While I'll talk some about the depth of the integrations of the finalists in my next piece, I wanted to hit on a few entrants that weren't selected as finalists. The first is the integration submitted by LAWCLERK. Because LAWCLERK is a consulting client of mine I know how much effort they put in not only in considering what to build but in building the integration. A marketplace for freelance lawyers, LAWCLERK's LAUNCH//CODE submission allowed Clio using lawyers to seamlessly transfer their freelance lawyer's billing content from LAWCLERK to Clio. Again, I happen to know that building the integration was no small feat for LAWCLERK, which is still very much an early stage company, but it also helps to address a key obstacle to greater adoption of freelance lawyers: how to bill for those lawyers.

I also spoke to LAUNCH//CODE participant Tom Martin of LawDroid about his decision to put in for the LAUNCH//CODE competition. He said that a Clio integration was always on the roadmap—LawDroid is based in Vancouver, BC, so the simple proximity to Clio made the collaboration compelling. Ultimately, even though LawDroid didn't make the finals, he felt that visibility to the Clio audience from participation alone was valuable. Further, because a voice-enabled integration, Tali, did make the finals there's been great spillover interest to LawDroid.

The final measure of the overall impact of LAUNCH//CODE is what I'm calling “hype.” I can already hear you telling me that hype is the last thing we need more of in legal tech. As an observation of some of the choir-preaching that goes on in legal tech, I couldn't agree more. I've said in a number of different venues that we need more innovators out talking to and preaching the gospel of legal tech among those in legal outside of the legal tech crowd and, more significantly, to those outside of legal.

So, how did LAUNCH//CODE do in this category? I think that the results are mixed. On one hand, I'm excited to see that a number of the LAUNCH//CODE submissions came from companies who have founders who have had success outside of legal and whose companies see legal as simply one sales vertical. I'm also excited to see companies like LAWCLERK and finalist Your Firm App, both of which were founded and led by attorneys, getting into the LAUNCH//CODE game. The competition is definitely bending lawyer behavior toward innovation. On the other hand, I'm not sure that LAUNCH//CODE could be considered a smashing success. Sure, the submissions were solid and innovative, but there wasn't anything revolutionary. The competition was fierce but, even if I hadn't had access to information about the applicants or knowledge of specific applicants' submissions, it didn't appear to be crazy fierce. I mean, witness the fact that I wrote a blog post advocating for something exactly like LAUNCH//CODE without remembering that LAUNCH//CODE existed.

But here, too, I'm inclined to give LAUNCH//CODE specifically and Clio in general a pass. Hype takes time. There's truth to the saying “10 year overnight success.” Take Clio's Conference for example. It's now in its sixth year and maybe only in the past three or four—thanks in part to Bob Ambrogi's regular glowing reviews—has it emerged as a (or even the) premier legal technology event; I feel like I can comfortably say that now that I'm no longer employed by Avvo. The success of LAUNCH//CODE can't and shouldn't be measured in the span of a single year. That's just not enough time.

My overall scorecard for LAUNCH//CODE is largely positive to mostly positive. Insofar as an innovation-spurring XPRIZE-like investment in legal tech is concerned, it's too early to tell. But as far as whether Clio should be satisfied with what they've done, particularly in light of the fact that this is a brand new idea for Clio and a pretty new idea in general, they should consider this launch completely successful.

Dan Lear is a lawyer and legal industry gadfly and the Chief Instigator of Right Brain Law. As a practicing attorney he advised technology companies from startups to the Fortune 100. Since his transition from tech lawyer to legal technologist, Dan's been featured or published widely in the legal industry press and spoken to at SXSW Interactive, Ignite Seattle, Georgetown University, Stanford University, ReInvent Law, and the National Conference of Bar Presidents. Most recently, Dan was the Director of Industry Relations for Avvo. Follow him @rightbrainlaw.