What ABA TECHSHOW Revealed About the Future of Legal Tech (And Why It Felt Familiar to Us)

Every year, ABA TECHSHOW gives the legal industry a useful snapshot of where technology is headed. This year’s Startup Alley competition was particularly telling. Not just because CollBox won first place out of 15 competing startups, though we’re still a little stunned by that. But because of what the competition revealed about the direction the whole industry is moving.

A recap published by Clio, which has sponsored Startup Alley for a decade, put it plainly: the legal tech startups that stood out this year have moved past chatbots entirely. They’re building tools that do actual work in the background, tools that follow the money, and tools that solve specific, painful problems instead of general ones. Reading that framing, we felt something we don’t always expect to feel in a competitive pitch environment: recognition.

From chatbots to tools that actually do things

The headline trend at this year’s Startup Alley was the shift toward what’s being called agentic AI. The idea, in plain terms, is software that doesn’t just answer questions but strings tasks together and produces outputs you can actually use.

Clio’s Damien Riehl and Joshua Lenon broke this down in a video recap following the show. They described watching tools that take in raw documents and produce ready-to-use litigation materials, or that delegate work via email the way you’d delegate to a junior associate. The lawyers don’t have to orchestrate every step. The platform does it and hands them a result.

That framing resonated with us, because it describes what CollBox has been doing for law firms since 2015, just applied to a different part of the practice.

When a law firm has outstanding invoices and no bandwidth to chase them, CollBox steps in. We reach out to clients on the firm’s behalf, work through the awkward conversations so the attorney doesn’t have to, and keep the firm’s cash flow moving. The firm doesn’t have to orchestrate the follow-up. They hand us the receivables and we handle the work.

That’s agentic thinking, applied to accounts receivable.

“They all go where the money is”

One of the most useful observations from the Clio recap was the grouping that Damien and Joshua put CollBox in. Alongside CounselPro, a financial forensics tool that can trace spending patterns through years of bank statements, and Immediator and StreamSettle, two platforms focused on settlement negotiation, they described a clear category: tools that follow the money.

Their observation was that firms will spend a dollar to recover ten. It’s not a complicated pitch. And it’s a smart place for legal tech to build.

We’ve believed that for a long time. Law firms do extraordinary work. They earn their fees. But collecting those fees has always been its own separate challenge, one that sits awkwardly outside the legal work itself and tends to get deprioritized as a result. Clio noted in their recap that lawyers are far more willing to bill than to collect, and that a managing partner had described attorneys who would rather spend an afternoon generating $2,000 in new billings than make the call to a client who owes them $10,000.

That gap is exactly what CollBox was built to close. We’re not a collections agency in the traditional sense. We work exclusively with law firms, we understand the ethics and the relationships involved, and we operate as an extension of the firm rather than a blunt instrument. But the core job is the same: getting lawyers paid for the work they’ve already done. If you’ve ever wondered what to do when invoices go past due, that’s where we come in.

What it means to us to be named the winner

Winning Startup Alley by live audience vote, in a room full of attorneys, on a stage sponsored by Clio, means something specific to our team.

It means the people who feel this problem most directly, the practitioners who run small and mid-sized firms, who carry the weight of both doing the legal work and running a business, voted with their hands that what we’re building matters.

We’ve recovered more than $100 million in outstanding receivables for law firm clients. The average firm working with us recovers around $66,000 per month and gets paid 40% faster. Those numbers represent attorneys who can focus on their clients instead of their aging receivables. They represent firms that are more stable, more sustainable, and less likely to make compromises on their work because they’re stressed about cash flow.

The Clio team wrote in their recap that the best legal technology isn’t the tool that does the most, but the tool that does the specific thing you need, inside the workflow you already have, without asking you to change how you practice.

That’s what we’ve been trying to build. We’re glad the industry is catching up to why it matters.

If you want to see how CollBox works for your firm, schedule a call with Matt.

CollBox is the only purpose-built accounts receivable management service for law firms, with integrations across Clio, MyCase, and Smokeball. Learn more at collbox.co.