Analytica Legalis (DBA Rhetoric) is a judicial analytics startup from Ona, West Virginia. Founded by WVU Law grad Luke Yingling during law school. Builds ML tools for judge-specific legal analytics — the core approach is extracting text from all opinions published by a judge in the past three years and using AI to detect patterns in reasoning, preferences, and decision-making (per WVU article). Product name: CICERO (per user agreement and privacy policy on Intercom help center). Provides structured, specific feedback on how to improve a legal brief to be more persuasive to a particular judge (per WVU Magazine). Also enables lawyers to research individual judges’ jurisprudence, education, and work history. Won 2022 ABA TechShow Startup Alley competition. Recognized in National Law Journal’s Legal Technology list. Named in Outsell Emerging 50. Presented at ILTA EVOLVE 2024. Featured on Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast. Discussed AI security challenges in Above the Law (Apr 2024). Venture-backed: ~$1M round (Jul 2024), $0.5M option/warrant (Jan 2025), early $500K (2022). SEC Form D filed. Vantage Ventures portfolio. Trademark ‘RHETORIC’ filed Dec 2022. Privacy policy on CICERO help center. Fractional CTO via Upwork (Feb-Mar 2025) suggests lean/bootstrap operations. Competes in judicial analytics space alongside Lex Machina (LexisNexis), Gavelytics (Fastcase/vLex), Trellis (state court analytics), and Westlaw Edge Litigation Analytics. Key differentiator: brief-specific persuasiveness feedback tailored to individual judges, not just outcome prediction or win-rate analytics. Primarily relevant for litigation practitioners. No public pricing. No independent reviews. No known customer references.
Company Info
- Founded: ~2021 (started during law school)
- HQ: Ona, West Virginia
- Sector: Legal Analytics / Judicial Intelligence
- Founder: Luke Yingling
- Funding: ~$2M total (estimated)
What We Haven’t Verified
No LinkedIn company page found. No public pricing. No G2/Capterra reviews. No Reddit mentions. Product depth (courts/jurisdictions covered, data sources, ML model details) not independently verified. No law firm customer references found. Unclear if primary product name is now ‘Rhetoric’ or ‘CICERO.’
Workflows
Based on practitioner evidence, Analytica Legalis is used in these workflows:
What practitioners struggle with
Real frustrations from legal professionals — the problems Analytica Legalis addresses (or should address). Sourced from practitioner reviews, Reddit threads, and case studies.
Legal research costs $400-600/hour in associate time and takes hours of manual digging — searching Westlaw/Lexis, reading irrelevant results, synthesizing case law. Clients increasingly refuse to pay for research hours on invoices. AI can compress a 4-hour research memo into 20 minutes, but most firms have no approved tool
Where it fits in your workflow
Community Data
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