
Olive Legal recently launched!
Founded by Sam Damashek & Greg Volynsky
Meet Sam and Greg, the team behind Olive.
Sam's ex-girlfriend introduced him to Greg back at CMU in 2017, and while that relationship didn't last, their friendship has. After undergrad, Greg (left) went to Harvard Law School ⚖️, while Sam (right) worked for three years at Jane Street, including a year in Hong Kong, where he built out a satellite dev team for the algo options trading desk 📈.
Greg graduated, Sam quit, and they founded Olive with a big idea: use AI to make the law more accessible. Given Greg's background, the founders started with AI in corporate law but quickly realized the space was crowded and turned their attention to the under-competed $65B personal injury market.
The incentives are aligned—plaintiff lawyers are paid on contingency and, therefore, love time-saving tools. Paralegals are expensive, and LLMs are getting good enough that, with care, they can replace specific paralegal tasks.
Olive has competitors who have proven substantial demand for medical chronologies, but they operate at best on hybrid human/AI approaches with multi-day turnarounds. The founders think there's space for an AI solution that cuts humans out of the loop entirely with instant turnarounds, and they think they're the right team to do it.
I guess they liked the color scheme?
Olive will capture an increasing share of the value paralegals provide personal injury lawyers. The company founders also see Olive expanding beyond just personal injury—interpreting unstructured medical data is critical for insurers to defend malpractice claims, class action firms to assemble plaintiffs, claimants to appeal insurance denials, providers to improve outcomes, the Social Security Administration to process disability applications speedily—the list goes on. Olive Legal is on a mission to remove barriers to information transfer, and therefore make justice more accessible.