When a friend asked Ryan Bencic for tips on how to represent himself in a personal injury lawsuit, the University of Alberta Faculty of Law alumnus saw a gap in the marketplace that led him to co-create legal technology that guides users through the heart of the process.
“Many of these injury cases involve a standard framework,” said Bencic, who graduated with a law degree in 2016. “The initial work is done by the time people come to the table to negotiate ... and where there's structure, that process can be automated.”
“Initial work” means that an injured person calculates what should be awarded for their injuries—in pain and suffering, loss of function, loss of wages—by comparing their circumstances to other, similar cases. That usually occurs once they’ve had medical treatment and a prognosis but might not take place until many months or years after the event that caused their injuries.
Once a dollar figure is established and agreed to, a settlement can be reached by the two parties coming to an agreement or through judgment in court. However, nearly all personal injury claims in Alberta are settled by parties out of court.
Because of the structured settlement framework, some cases aren’t valuable enough for lawyers to get too heavily involved, or the injured persons might realize that legal fees will eat up a significant amount of their settlement, which is often a 30 per cent contingency fee, before other costs and taxes. As well, some claimants may live in areas where such legal help isn’t readily available. Yet there aren't many tools available for people with personal injury cases to self-represent themselves, said Bencic.
“Self-represented litigants face two key issues: they don't know what they're entitled to and, even if they did, they don’t know the road map once they get on this path.”
That’s part of the gap that PainWorth is trying to fill—as in “What’s your pain worth?”
How it works
Bencic teamed up with an injured friend—who supplied the user-experience know-how—and a third co-founder who hammered out the technical aspects of the app while Bencic supplied the underlying legal knowledge for it.
He explained the intake process comes down to a few basic questions, such as when were you injured, what injuries did you suffer, and are you still getting treatment. Users enter this information and, based on what they provide, the app presents legal information that might be relevant to consider.
“In practical terms, the app filters information depending on whether a user's injuries might be minor or significant, whether users are healed or they are still receiving treatment, or if the treatment has stopped and the injuries are permanent,” said Bencic. “The legal information is publicly available, but most users wouldn't know how to make sense of all the noise."
The app was created in early 2019 and launched in fall later that year. Since then, individual users and several companies have turned to it.
"Insurance companies see the value in speeding up the settlement process for simple claims, to reduce their overhead costs," said Bencic, who added a multinational candy company has approached PainWorth about using the app as an early predictor for liabilities when workers are injured on the job.
UAlberta experience
His success in the legal tech and startup spaces was informed by previous positions as general counsel to a private equity “search fund” and as a lawyer with a regional law firm in Edmonton. But his experiences at the Faculty of Law opened his eyes to how varied his career in law could be.
"My research for the (former) dean of law (Paul Paton) first introduced me to the ways that the legal profession was evolving around the world, from non-lawyer ownership of law firms to discussions on regulating legal services that are not delivered by lawyers,” said Bencic.
“He's been at the helm of this research since the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. This research, and regulatory changes on the horizon, made me realize that technology would eventually play a large role in the evolution of practising law.”
Bencic also speaks of finding great insight and mentorship from professor Ryan Clements, who taught entrepreneurial law. He added it made him realize that to be a “startup” lawyer, you need to draw on broad legal experiences and be practical if you want to work with ambitious clients.
“It's alright if you don't article at a big firm or follow a traditional career path, if it leads you to your true calling,” he said.