Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast

After Charlie introduces Mike and congratulates him on the recent Time of London article about Contend, Charlie and Mike discuss:

• Just what it is that Contend (at https://contend.legal) does to provide safe, accessible, and affordable information for "regular people" when those people confront a legal issue (principally, providing both signposts to information resources (often secondary sources aimed at non-professionals) and connecting people to legal professionals and other organizations that can provide additional help)

• Why Contend at present operates only in England and Wales (primarily because (i) the UK's regulation of the legal services delivery system is less hidebound by outdated and overly broad "unauthorized practice of law" rules and (ii) the UK's legal innovation culture is so well developed)

• How Contend markets its product offerings (initially focussing on paid Google ads, now coming to rely more on organic Google search of access-to-justice content that Contend creates, and partnering with A2J nonprofits and other brand-building efforts)

• The significant business challenge Contend has so far faced (customer acquisition - and, in particular, conveying why Contend is a service provider that consumers can trust) and the most significant "win" that Contend is to date most proud of (having as significant and favorable an impact on people's lives as Contend has had)

Link to Times of London article about Contend: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/we-use-ai-to-make-justice-more-accessible-to-ordinary-people-fk78crxtt

In this podcast episode, Chris and your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, discuss:

What Aderant’s (https://www.aderant.com) software offers its large law firm customers generally and, most significantly, how Aderant’s new offering, 'Stridyn,' brings a real platform technology to Aderant’s suite of practice management and related tools. The Stridyn technology enables Aderant’s customers to integrate all Aderant tooling and third-party software seamlessly.

How Aderant is bringing GenAI’s natural language processing features (and other machine learning architectures) to Aderant’s software suite, especially with Aderant’s MADDI “legal assistant.” This innovative feature has the power to significantly reduce the time spent on routine tasks, allowing legal professionals to focus on more strategic and value-adding activities.

How to understand the true meaning of 'cloud-first' and 'cloud-only' in legal tech use for law firms. Chris also explains how a legal tech vendor’s robust security and privacy features are not just crucial, but non-negotiable for encouraging the adoption of cloud-based software by legal tech customers, ensuring their data is always safe and protected.

Chris shares valuable insights for legal tech startup leaders on the subject of legal tech software pricing. He emphasizes that a 'value-based, ear-to-the-market' driven pricing strategy is key to gaining market share. He cautions against the risky path of bottom-up cost-plus pricing, advocating for a pricing approach that aligns with the value the product brings to the market.

Podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Jim cover the following in this episode:

• How Jim’s undergrad major in computer science and his graduation from law school took him from his first job as a lawyer doing document review to working for over a decade in e-discovery. 

• Eventually leaving e-discovery work to found his own company offering services outside the legal tech field, Jim nonetheless kept track of the immense benefits accruing to document review from the use of NLP and, eventually, GenAI solutions. 

• Jim realized how these GenAI-driven solutions could solve longstanding problems with less up-to-date e-discovery solutions. With this realization, Jim returned to the e-discovery field to start his own business, eDiscoveryAI (www.ediscoveryai.com), and bring the benefits of GenAI to e-discovery customers.

• Jim explains how GenAI-driven e-discovery tools advance e-discovery far beyond the levels of accuracy achievable from the predictive coding tooling previously used in e-discovery - all at a lower cost and with faster time-to-value.

• Jim explains how, by operating as a nimble startup with virtually no bureaucracy to get in the way, Jim and his colleagues at eDiscoveryAI can get closer to the customer and build customer-requested features more rapidly than his big-company competitors.

Your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Peter discuss:

Peter’s professional background and his founding of Titans (https://www.titans.legal) and the creation of the Legal Tech Trends newsletter (https://www.legaltechtrends.com/)

Adoption trends, including the factors promoting (or hindering) legal tech adoption by large law firms

Where large law firms are when it comes to the GenAI “hype cycle”

Peter’s most contrarian view on legal tech

What are the biggest mistakes (“own goals”) or oversights that legal tech vendors suffer from

Peter’s (surprising views) as to what the blue ocean spaces are in the legal tech competitive landscape

• Tanguy's and Mike's Respective Backgrounds and Path into Legal Tech:
• Tanguy is an engineer with advanced degrees (including an MBA) from MIT and experience in venture capital, notably early-stage investing in legal tech startups (one of such startups being Ironclad)
• Mike has a background that includes working at the Federal Reserve, McKinsey, and co-founding a company that applied AI in the insurance space. Mike’s experience with AI and legal/regulatory challenges contributed to starting Paxton.
• Paxton's Recent Award: Celebrated being one of the winners at the 2024 ABA Tech Show Startup Alley
• Paxton's Technology and Approach:
• Focuses on developing industry-specific, application-specific, and firm-specific legal language models for greater accuracy, response speed, and security.
• The data for model training includes public domain legal documents, emphasizing legal-specific training over general-purpose models.
• Paxton enables customization for firms by allowing connections to internal knowledge sources without training the model on client-specific data unless requested.
• Applications of Paxton:

1. Legal Research: Provides access to laws, regulations, and court rulings across all states and federal levels.
2. Document Drafting: Uses a vast corpus of legal documents to assist in drafting accurate first drafts of legal documents.
3. Document Analysis: Offers document analysis and Q&A capabilities for large volumes of documents, ensuring data privacy and governance for firms.

• Use Case for Training Young Lawyers: Paxton aids in training younger lawyers by allowing them to ask questions and practice without fear of judgment, enhancing their learning and confidence.
• Future Roadmap: Paxton plans to develop more advanced language models, connect to more data sources, and execute multi-step workflows for synthesized answers from various data sources.
• Advice for Legal Tech Startups: Tanguy and Mike emphasize the importance of being customer-centric, seeking feedback, and iterating based on user input to improve and refine the product.

In this podcast episode, Jackie shares her personal journey from working as a lawyer to founding Clearbrief, an AI-powered litigation analysis tool that integrates with Microsoft Word to assist with research, citations, and document management.

Jackie and Charlie discuss the challenges women founders face in getting venture capital attention and support, even when their offerings are high quality. Jackie spoke about the importance of women legal tech startup leaders speaking confidently about their product and its market prospects (especially when, as was the case with Jackie’s own early product development efforts, the assessment of product prospects is based on feedback arising out of literally hundreds of customer interviews).

Charlie and Jackie also talk about the difficulties of marketing a product to senior law firm decision-makers (who, after all, control budgets) based not only on the product’s firm-wide and enterprise-wide benefits but also on the product’s prospects for improving the quality of life for junior lawyers and paralegals.

Charlie and Jackie cover the implications of AI on the legal profession, including AI’s potential impact on billing practices as technology continues to drive efficiency.

In this episode, your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Dan Broderick discuss:

How Dan started BlackBoiler after practicing law for 7 years, having gotten the idea for Blackboiler while reviewing large numbers of contracts for a client and realizing how much of the work could be automated.

BlackBoiler’s focus on automating high-volume contract review and markup during the negotiation phase, with BlackBoiler using machine learning AI to learn from historical edits and rule sets in order to suggest edits in tracked changes.

BlackBoiler’s target market consists principally of corporate legal departments, with people in those departments - and in other departments in the enterprise - using BlackBoiler’s software to help them review contracts more efficiently and to empower business users who “touch” contracts frequently, but who aren’t lawyers.

What some of the challenges are in selling AI, including the challenge (and importance) of separating hype from reality and getting customers to think “problem-first,” not “AI-first.”

How BlackBoiler uses machine learning, but currently not of the generative AI type, as the tasks that Blackboiler carries out are more a matter of text-classification than text-generation. However, Dan does point out that generative AI may be helpful for purposes of initial drafting and finding clauses.

For legal tech startup leaders, some of Dan’s key pieces of advice are finding the determination to get through business highs and lows and making sure to reward positive team dynamics.

         · Otto is CEO of TermScout, which provides data and analytics on market terms in contracts to reduce friction in negotiations.

· Otto was motivated to start TermScout after seeing startups overpay for legal services due to a lack of data on market terms.

· TermScout uses AI and human review to analyze contracts and provide market data on common clauses.

· TermScout's offering helps lawyers know what's "market" to resolve disputes over contract terms. TermScout's customers are both the contracting parties and their legal teams.

· TermScout also offers contract certification to validate a vendor's contract as balanced and have it labeled as such.

· Otto sees room for more contract standardization not only by way of the use of standard forms, but also through the standardization of various contracts' overall concepts.

· When it comes to the interoperation of various legal tech vendors' offerings, Otto and Charlie discuss how legal tech tools should ideally interoperate via APIs using a standard schema.

· Otto and Charlie also consider how the onus is on legal tech companies to coordinate standards and seamless interoperability to improve customer experience and reduce the drag on software use that comes from having to constantly shift among different legal tech applications.

• Mat Kerbis founded Subscription Attorney LLC to offer legal services through recurring monthly fees rather than hourly billing; in that way better aligning incentives between lawyer and client.
•       Going solo allowed Mat the freedom to innovate with new billing models, which is harder at larger firms wedded to the billable hour.
•       The subscription model expands affordable access to legal help, helping close the "justice gap."
•       Mat leverages legal tech and other automation strategies to work efficiently and keep costs low as a virtual solo practitioner who charges on a subscription basis.
•       When developing their product offerings, legal tech companies should consider the needs of subscription model law firms as a growing niche.
•        An "all-in-one" solution tailored to subscription law firms could integrate practice management, document automation, intake, billing, etc.
•        Mat's "Law Subscribed" podcast profiles lawyers using alternative fee arrangements and also features the tech enabling new models beyond the billable hour.
•        The legal industry needs new models like subscription-based billing as it competes for talent against fields with better lifestyles and fewer grueling hours.
•        Mat aims to spread the subscription model to save the legal profession and head off competition from alternative legal services.
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Mat's Subscription Attorney Website:  https://subscriptionattorney.com/

Mat's LawSubscribed Podcast: https://lawsubscribed.com/#podcast

Podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Steve Fretzin discuss:

• Lawyers need training in business development and client relations, which is not taught in law school. Technology can help lawyers be more efficient, so they have time for business development.
•   Social media is a great marketing equalizer that allows individual lawyers, as well as small-to-medium-sized firms, to build their brand and get their voice out, social media's certainly not just for big firms.
•   Automating scheduling, email outreach, and content creation through technology frees up lawyer time and builds relationships through organization and consistency.
•   Becoming a thought leader takes consistency and multiple touches, through content creation, networking, writing, and speaking engagements. Business coaches can help too.
•   Leveraging virtual assistants, marketing professionals, and technologies like chatGPT allows lawyers to focus on their strengths and delegate marketing tasks.
•   Tracking marketing data and metrics helps assess what's working through things like CRMs (though CRM adoption is slow). 
•   Investing time and money in marketing coaching provides high ROI through increased business and, in larger firms, control over one's career. Lawyers should learn enough to guide the process rather than do it all.

Steve's website: https://www.fretzin.com/

All Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast episodes at:  https://legalfocus.libsyn.com/