Mona knew she wanted to transform the legal profession. UTS Startups and an MBA showed her how.
Mona Chiha was born with an entrepreneurial spirit, but it wasn’t until she found herself at UTS that she realised how much of an advantage it gave her in business.
The founder of legal start-up JurisTechne and a recent graduate of the UTS Master of Business Administration (MBA) (Technology Stream), Mona was previously a serial entrepreneur. She’s launched and run everything from a finance brokerage to a micro-lending business, a software solutions agency, and a litigation funding business — but until she enrolled at UTS, she’d done it almost all on her own.
While many of her ventures were successful, Mona knew that formalising her business knowledge could turbocharge her growth. In 2022, she took the leap into the UTS MBA.
“My family encouraged me to go straight into the workforce after high school. I didn’t do an undergraduate degree, but I’d always wanted to study at university,” she says.
“My success so far has been largely the result of my own curiosity and wanting to learn.”
Now, Mona has found her niche: not only is she finally a university graduate but she’s also a member of UTS Startups, a community of more than 600 businesses based at the UTS Broadway campus. It’s the mentored learning opportunity and the professional network she’s long been looking for.
Pioneering a new legal field
At UTS, Mona worked on her biggest business to date: JurisTechne, an ethical and explainable legal AI model that’s pioneering the field of algorithmic law. The idea emerged from the years she spent working as a litigation funder where she invested in legal claims, providing funding for people who were unable to cover their expenses upfront.
The traditional litigation funding process is costly and time consuming, requiring multiple levels of review and risk assessment to help decide whether or not to fund a claimant’s case. JurisTechne changes that by using proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms to automate the process, making it faster, more accurate and more cost-effective than traditional methods.
During her two years at UTS, Mona leveraged her MBA learning to prepare JurisTechne for launch. The course content gave her the formalised business knowledge she was seeking, but it was the ability to tailor her coursework to support her business-building goals that was instrumental to her success.
“I’ve looked at every aspect of the business in conjunction with every subject that I've done. And it just adds clarity and formalises the methodologies I’m using,” she says.
In a subject called Artificial Intelligence for Enterprise, for example, students explored the fundamentals of machine learning and learnt how to apply them to a real business challenge. Mona used the opportunity to seek out specific information that would further JurisTechne’s development.
“I knew that there was a machine learning approach out there that would help me get to the outcome I was looking for. My lecturer helped shine a light on what I needed and said, ‘Here are some tools, here are some algorithms, here’s how you could use them’,” Mona says.
“Every subject was based on JurisTechne. It has been game changing.”
Mona’s MBA also introduced her to a wealth of legal and technology experts who have become instrumental to JurisTechne’s growth. Among them was Dr Ian Opperman, the former Chief Data Scientist for the NSW Government who was a guest speaker in one of her classes. Now, he’s her data mentor and advisor and a JurisTechne shareholder.
Mona Chiha at her recent JurisTechne event held at UTS Startups
Building community, capacity and confidence
Alongside her degree learning, Mona also took advantage of everything that UTS Startups had to offer. As one of Australia’s leading university entrepreneurship communities, UTS Startups offers expert support, and critical industry and funding connections that helps participants bring their business ideas to life.
For Mona, who was accepted into the program in her first year of study at UTS, that support was invaluable. It included regular mentoring sessions with the UTS Startups leadership team, networking opportunities with other founders, and access to low-cost legal support that smoothed the way to JurisTechne’s growth.
The experience has also helped her build professional connections that have transformed her working life.
“In all my businesses, I was always looking for a community, especially other women in tech and other women founders. It’s quite lonely when you’re the founder and there’s no one to talk to,” she says.
Another standout benefit was the opportunity to work with UTS student interns, who can apply for short-term roles within businesses in the UTS Startups community as a way of gaining professional experience.
“I’ve had 30 engineering and business students working for JurisTechne. I wouldn't have had access to that had I not been a part of UTS Startups,” Mona says.
With JurisTechne’s launch date now set for February 2025, Mona has graduated with First Class Honours in her MBA and is now pursuing an Entrepreneurial PhD at UTS.
“It’s been such a journey,” she says.
“I never thought I would have this opportunity. Without UTS, there’s no way this business would have gotten to where it is now.”
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