The AUA Entrepreneurs Series aims to highlight innovative and creative startups created by AUA students and alumni. It also showcases the University’s impact as an academic institution that empowers and supports students and alumni throughout their professional journeys.
YEREVAN, Armenia — Aram Aghababyan (LL.M. ’18) is the CEO and co-founder of CaseLens, a startup company that uses AI to go through significant amounts of documents involved in major legal cases. “We help with large-scale disputes, not local-scale ones, but international disputes,” he says.
CaseLens helps law firms that deal with an immense amount of documents, featuring different forms of communication between companies and making them accessible and easy to analyze. “The disputes that we help with are typically multi-million-dollar disputes, sometimes even billion-dollar disputes, and the amount of documentation underlying those disputes is large,” he notes, hence CaseLens takes on the manual labor.
“Unlike ChatGPT or other chatbots, we actually can process this vast amount of information. With ChatGPT, you would upload a handful of documents, and the more you upload, the worse the quality becomes, whereas with our pipeline, you can process millions of documents and surface whatever is important for the dispute and understand the underlying documents,” he explains.
While studying at AUA, Aghababyan learned legal landscape, international law and arbitration, knowledge he later utilized to launch CaseLens. He explains that courses such as international arbitration sparked the initial interest of creating the company. Later, Aghababyan continued studying abroad and worked at various legal tech companies internationally. He notes that the AUA Entrepreneurship and Product Innovation Center (EPIC) was a key factor in shaping his approach to innovation. “Even if you have legal and engineering expertise, you still need to have product innovation expertise as well, and AUA EPIC was super helpful in building this into their curriculum,” he says.
Aghababyan says he hopes to build a tool in the future that can serve the international arbitration community, improving efficiency and enabling users to perform better analysis of dispute documents. He says that there are challenges that come along the way while building something new, and it’s important to know how to market it to the right people, and that there isn’t a manual to follow for guaranteed success. “The idea is to build a go-to tool for complex disputes. So it will be a vertical, AI company that will solve the document-heavy problems for dispute resolution teams,” he explains.
Aghababyan’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to approach a startup as a test. “It’s an experiment to find a business model that works. Try to refine it as you test it in the market,” he remarks.
Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values.