If you care about legal technology, M&A due diligence, and building tools lawyers actually use, this conversation offers clear takeaways and practical detail you can put to work on your next deal. 

Subscribe, share with a colleague who lives in data rooms, and leave a review with the one feature that would save your team the most time.

Subscribe now to the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (https://legaltechstartupfocuspodcast.buzzsprout.com) to hear more conversations with pioneers transforming the intersection of law and technology.

  Connect with Connor on LinkedIn or visit Marveri.com to discover (and get a demo of) how AI is transforming legal due diligence and empowering lawyers with the technological edge they need in today's competitive environment. 

And note, too, that Marveri recently raised $3.5 million from investors, including Alven, Day One Ventures, I2BF, and a syndicate of early users—a powerful vote of confidence from the very practitioners who use the platform daily.
 
 

Subscribe to Monica's Venture Legal Newsletter:
• https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7302735858552446976

Discover Zentlaw and Law Innovation Agency:
• https://www.lawinnovationagency.com/
• https://zentlawgroup.com/

Discover the transformative power of legal technology with Karl Seelbach, the visionary litigator who co-founded the Austin, Texas-based Doyle Seelbach law firm (https://www.doyleseelbach.com) and Skribe (https://skribe.ai), a legal tech startup committed to revolutionizing depositions and enhancing litigation practice efficiency. Listen as Karl shares his journey from the courtroom to the forefront of legal tech innovation. Learn how Karl's passion for personal injury defense and drive to modernize legal processes sparked the creation of Skribe.
 
Get ready to witness how a legal tech power user like Karl can unlock the potential of legal tech (especially AI's use in legal settings. This episode unpacks how pushing legal tech to greater limits can transform mundane tasks like invoice appeals and billable hour tracking. See how a power user of AI (and legal tech more generally) can improve financial outcomes and save valuable time. We also delve into the critical balance of privacy and accuracy when integrating AI into legal research and the robust discussions surrounding its capabilities.
 
 As we look to the horizon, the episode imagines a future where technology continuously reshapes the legal landscape (e.g., envision virtual and augmented realities redefining how we conduct negotiations and make courtroom appearances). This discussion emphasizes the importance of embracing technological collaboration within the industry through conferences and community interactions. Join us in this insightful conversation on how legal tech use can assist lawyers in staying competitive and even help lawyers become more inspired by their day-to-day work in a world of ever-evolving legal service delivery methods.

In this episode, recorded at the Legal Tech Fund Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, host Charlie Uniman interviews Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, about the company's innovative AI-powered legal technology platform and its impact on the legal industry.

Key Discussion Points

• Luminance's origin story: Founded in 2015 by Cambridge mathematicians responding to lawyers' needs for automation of repetitive tasks
• The company's proprietary Legal Pre-trained Transformer (LPT) model and its advantages over generic large language models
• How Luminance's AI knows when to defer to human judgment, building trust with legal professionals
• The platform's evolution from serving law firms to enterprise clients, including AMD, Koch Industries, and DHL
• User-friendly interface: "Push-button" simplicity in Microsoft Word integration
• Real-world ROI examples, including recovery of missed early payment discounts
• Key business metrics for scaling legal tech companies

Join Charlie Uniman, your podcast host, and Jack as they explore:

• The challenges lawyers face in accurately tracking their billable hours and their impact on law firm revenue.
• The origins of Ajax were born from a personal experience of witnessing the tedious and time-consuming nature of manual timekeeping.
• The unique features and benefits of Ajax, highlighting its seamless integration with widespread practice management software and its intuitive user interface.
• How Ajax helps lawyers recover two to three billable hours per week, on average, by capturing time spent on short tasks that are often overlooked.
• The importance of user-friendly design in legal tech and how Ajax draws inspiration from successful consumer apps to create an enjoyable user experience.
• Ajax's significant impact on its customers includes a compelling story of a law firm that chose Ajax over a competitor after a head-to-head trial.
• The importance of seeking out advisors with expertise in areas beyond the legal field, particularly in product design, to ensure the development of genuinely user-friendly solutions.

Don't miss this insightful conversation! Tune in to learn how Ajax is helping lawyers work smarter, not harder, and maximizing their earning potential.

Gary provided an insightful overview of LexCheck, emphasizing its evolution from a natural language processing (NLP) development shop to a leader in AI-driven contract review solutions. We discussed their latest offering, LexCheck Insights, which combines NLP with large language models (LLMs) to create a powerful contract review tool. Gary highlighted the unique features of LexCheck Insights, including its ability to generate playbooks in minutes and its best-in-class redlining capabilities.

As we explored the competitive landscape, Gary explained how LexCheck distinguishes itself from other players in the market. He pointed out the limitations of traditional LLMs in contract review and how LexCheck's proprietary pre-processing and post-processing technologies enhance the quality and comprehensiveness of contract analysis. This nuanced approach allows LexCheck to address the complexities of legal documents that many competitors overlook.

In discussing marketing and sales strategies, Gary candidly shared that there is no secret formula for success. He stressed the importance of hard work and a balanced approach to lead generation, combining both inbound and outbound strategies. He noted that legal tech sales often require a hands-on approach, as the legal industry has historically been slow to adopt new software solutions.

Gary offered valuable insights on onboarding for legal tech entrepreneurs. He advised against assuming that users will intuitively understand the software and emphasized the need for a thorough onboarding process. He encouraged startups to invest time and resources into helping users become comfortable with their products to avoid the dreaded "shelfware" phenomenon.

As we wrapped up our conversation, Gary reflected on the milestones that have brought him the most pride over the past ten years, particularly the joy of seeing customer renewals and the professional growth of his team members.

Damien provided an insightful overview of vLex, a legal data/legal data science company that boasts an impressive repository of over a billion legal documents from the United States and worldwide. He explained how vLex utilizes data science to tag and structure this vast amount of information, enabling users to run large language models (LLMs) across the data to answer complex legal questions.

We also explored the significance of having well-structured data and how SALI contributes to this by providing a comprehensive taxonomy of legal concepts, dramatically enhancing legal data's usability.

As we delved deeper, we discussed the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) concept and how vLex employs a five-stage process to increase the likelihood that the legal answers provided by vLex’s LLMs are grounded in reliable data. Damien elaborated on how this process not only retrieves relevant cases but also analyzes their validity and relevance, providing users with a robust legal analysis that would typically take hours of work for a lawyer.

We also touched on the implications of generative AI for the legal profession, particularly how it could disrupt traditional billing models. Damien highlighted the advantages for plaintiff-side lawyers who can leverage VLex’s technology to save time and increase profitability while addressing the potential challenges for defense-side lawyers relying on hourly billing.

The conversation then shifted to the competitive landscape of legal tech, where we discussed the risks posed by large tech companies potentially absorbing legal tech innovations.

Damien emphasized the importance of having unique data sets and value propositions to stand out in a crowded market, warning that companies that merely act as wrappers around existing LLMs without offering additional value may need help to survive.

Towards the end of our discussion, we explored the future of AI in legal tech, particularly the integration of symbolic reasoning with neural networks. Damien shared his insights on how combining these two approaches could enhance AI's reasoning capabilities, making it more effective in the legal domain.

We concluded with a discussion on the importance of free access to legal data and how it could foster innovation and competition in the legal tech space.

This episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone interested in the intersection of law and technology, particularly those looking to understand how data science and AI are transforming the legal landscape.

• 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

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.

• 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.

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

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.

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.

· 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's Subscription Attorney Website:  https://subscriptionattorney.com/

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

Gaurav talks about how, as a software developer and not a lawyer but who recognized the potential of natural language processing AI, he ventured into the legal tech industry. He co-founded Lexion to focus on making sense of contracts for corporate enterprises.

During its history, Lexion transformed from being a simple repository for contracts to a CLM for an entire organization that serves as an operational workflow platform to speed up deals.  Gaurav also describes how Lexion harnesses AI to, among other things, enhance contract visibility, manage renewals and reminders, and provide powerful search and reporting features.

According to Gaurav: Some of Lexion’s chief areas of focus include customer requirements and rapid implementation, and learning from competitors' shortcomings (notably, the high failure rates of CLMs generally). Lexion found that other CLM systems' complexities and steep learning curves significantly deter adoption. So, Lexion designed its system to integrate seamlessly into an organization's existing workflow, offering immediate functionality without requiring extensive setup or training.  This, and Lexion’s focus on integrating with platforms like email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, promotes high adoption rates.

Lexion has recently raised funds in an environment of challenging macroeconomic conditions and increased diligence from potential investors. Gaurav attributes Lexion’s recent fundraising success to, in part, the company's robust business model, dedicated team, high customer retention, and high user engagement. As Gaurav notes, Lexion's vision to serve corporate operations teams and not just the legal department (by giving just a couple of examples, automating standardized sales contracts and employment offer letters) was also an attraction to potential investors.

Gaurav concludes the podcast by describing some of Lexion’s guiding business principles, including the company’s obsession with the customer, an insistence on clear written communication among team members, and a company-wide commitment to transparency regarding company direction and individual and team performance.

• What does LegalSifter do and how does it do it?
• The hype cycle of AI.     
• The growth of the company? 
• Finding the right investor for a legal tech startup. 
• Partnering with other companies. 
• Regulatory reform in Arizona.

Charlie and Andy discuss Aderant's broad functionalities, including practice management, litigation management, billing, recruiting, and knowledge management. Andy turns next to his current focus on innovation and disruption in the legal industry through data analytics and AI. Andy mentions Aderant's upcoming Momentum conference (May 2023), where it plans to unveil new technology for the legal tech space.

Andy and Charlie close the podcast by covering futuristic legal tech trends (including blockchain (not "crypto") and the metaverse), Aderant's plans for staying ahead of the technology curve, and the pride that Aderant takes in its ability to evolve with the changing needs of clients and its continuing to be a leader in the market.

Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us his story where, as the victim of a hit-and-run by a drunk driver, Mike was inspired to create Painworth.

Mike and Bryan describe Painworth's aim: to be the "voice" of the personal injury victim in settlement discussions of the victim's claims.  Painworth does this by educating the victim with award estimates for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages that will carry weight with lawyers and insurance adjusters because they are based on Painworth's machine learning-driven reviews of relevant court-based and other documentation relevant to award calculation.  Painworth's secret sauce is that it was built for use by personal injury victims (i.e., "regular people") themselves.

Mike, Bryan, and Charlie discuss:

- How Painworth simplifies processes for its users without sacrificing its use of a sophisticated approach at the back-end for award estimation,

- Painworth's process for educating its "regular-people" customers in its web app's use and its processes for iterating on UI/UX improvements.

- Painworth's roll-out plans for a US-based web app,

- How Painworth has succeeded in gaining acceptance by both lawyers and insurance adjusters for Painworth’s use by personal injury victims, and

- Business events that Mike and Bryan are most proud of to date.

(i) How Jerry planted the seed for founding Evisort while still a student at Harvard Law School (and the role that serendipity played in Jerry's finding his co-founder),

(ii) what law schools can (should?) do when it comes to training lawyers-to-be in the art of legal innovation and what perspective law students can bring to innovation in legal,

(iii) just what it is that Evisort does in the contract lifecycle management space (with the discussion focusing on, among other things, Evisort's out-of-the-box usability and how Evisort really does help take the grunt work out of contract review),

(iv) Evisort's success in marketing to in-house legal departments and other business enterprise personnel involved with contracts (here Jerry covers how Evisort has achieved success by helping those departments transform from being a "brake" on enterprise success to becoming a "gas pedal" that accelerates business success), and

(v) the very personally gratifying story behind one of the business successes that Jerry and his team are most proud of to date.

Interested in the subject of how legal tech startups can get funded? Thought so - that's why this is a "must listen" episode.

Here Zach Posner of The Legal Tech Fund (TLTF) (i) talks about fund-pitching strategies, (ii) offers advice for legal tech startups when facing the headwinds in today's economy and (iii) discusses TLTF's forthcoming Summit conference (December 7 - 9, 2022 in Miami; register here by the November 23, 2022 deadline: https://www.tltfsummit.com) and the Summit's StartUp Challenge (apply here by the August 31, 2022 deadline:(https://www.tltfsummit.com/apply-now) ).

Hear Luke (a) chart his path from law student to legal tech startup founder, (b) relate how, as a student entrepreneur, he was able to take advantage of programs at his law school and elsewhere aimed at assisting very early-stage student-founded startups, (c) describe what Analytica Legalis does and how it distinguishes itself from other tools for litigators that analyze judges' opinions, (d) explain the preparations his company undertook to ready itself for its beta testing program, (d) also explain how he attracted investors that were interested in funding a pre-revenue legal tech startup, (e) discuss the importance of data visualization techniques for making his company's UI intuitive and easy-to-use and (f) tell listeners of the pride he and his team have taken in generating both commercial and academic excitement for the results available from the built "from-the-ground-up" version of Analytica Legalis' machine learning software and in innovating in the judge analytics space.

Susann also explains how LEX AI:

- has developed key metrics that show how its tools free timekeepers from low value work that clients won't pay for

- gathers valuable feedback from its top-of -funnel sales efforts

- has benefitted from building a diversified team, particularly when it comes to its solution building and cross-border marketing efforts

- uses social media (including Instagram and soon TikTok) to bolster its marketing efforts (particularly among younger lawyers and younger business people)

- finds a welcoming user base inside law school and university classrooms

HyperDraft is an AI-driven full service document generation, editing and closing platform for lawyers and other legal professionals.   Listen to Jace and Sean describe: (1) HyperDraft's origin story, (2) their company's commitment to designed-in simplicity and ease of use, (3) HyperDraft's own brand of customer on-boarding (ranging from an intuitive UI, helpful app tools tips, written materials and video explainers), (4) their aim
to expand from currently targeting North American customers to targeting the European legal tech market next, (5) their successin selling HyperDraft to boutique and other SMB law firms, as well as to solo practitioners and (6) how and why they are most proud of HyperDraft's team, product value, software development responsiveness and short time-to-value for HyperDraft's customers.

Most leaders at legal tech startups present at one time or another to existing and prospective stakeholders (most importantly, to customer and investor prospects). So, it stands to reason that those leaders could use an app that makes getting presentation feedback as easy as clicking a button. Raman and his team have designed Rhetoric to be just that app; a "Grammarly for presentations," if you will (as Rhetoric itself puts it on its website) .

Raman discusses (1) how Rhetoric works, (2) the growing importance of asynchronous presentation-giving, (3) several of Rhetoric's chief use cases and (4) Rhetoric's success in closing a seed round.

Raman also gives some presentation-making pointers of his own (including his noting of two common presentation mistakes; namely, not soliciting enough feedback and ignoring the importance of tailoring the sequencing of a presentation’s topics for each different audience group). Finally, Raman explains how he and his team pride themselves on how carefully they define their goals, while at the same time being open to goal-revision as the Rhetoric team strives to learn, iterate and improve quickly.

Scott also talks about his company's "land and expand" strategy when selling into law firms and about the pride that he and his colleagues take in AltFee's thought leadership efforts to educate lawyers about alternative fee arrangement management. In addition, Scott provides insight into AltFee's app design and post-sale customer success efforts.

(i) What are the most significant steps that legal tech startup leaders can take to “up their game” when it comes to communicating their company’s value proposition to law firms and in-house legal departments?

(ii) What are some of the chief “unforced errors” that you’ve seen legal tech startup leaders commit in dealing with the press and in undertaking social media campaigns?

(iii) Because legal tech startup founders often ask for tips on establishing their thought leadership bona fides, are there any pointers that you can offer to assist them in using their already existing subject-matter expertise to enhance their credibility as thought leaders?

We learn from Stephen how his founding of TrialView began, as is the case with many other legal tech startup founders, with frustrations he faced while practicing law.  Stephen explains that, as a junior trial lawyer working on long-running litigations, he wondered why his and his colleagues' wrangling with many thousands of documents couldn't be handled better with the introduction of digital technologies. As Stephen's developed his thinking  about the "digitization of trial work," he came to realize that it it went beyond just the digitizing document review (a step that was already being addressed by e-discovery companies). As Stephen came to see it, digitization tools could also be applied to the task of coordinating, in real time at trial: (i) the presentation of trial documents and (ii) the collaboration among the parties to the litigation in dealing with those documents and their presentation in court.

Stephen goes on to discuss, among other topics:

(A)  How TrialView went from its first, very minimum viable, product to the initial funding round for the company and the company's development of a fully-featured trial management tool.

(B)  The way in which the COVID pandemic accelerated TrialView's development of video features in support of trials and other dispute resolution mechanisms that were required to be conducted on a fully-remote basis.

(C) Stephen's belief that, even post-pandemic, we will witness a hybrid approach to conducting trials, mediations and arbitrations (where much of what was formerly done in-person will be carried out remotely, but with a core set of dispute elements more frequently than not being handled in-person).

(D) What marketing approaches TrialView has taken successfully, especially in the face of getting both judges and frequently litigating parties (such as insurance companies) "on board" with TrialView's use (with Stephen also pointing out here how TrialView has partnered with companies that handle trial-related tasks outside of TrialView's purview to call attention to TrialView's offering) .

(E) TrialView's penetration of markets outside Ireland and the UK, including especially its targeting of the deposition-taking market in the US

(F) How Stephen and his TrialView colleagues are most proud of the role TrialView played in keeping Irish courts functioning at the outset of the COVID pandemic.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Legal Q (www.legalq.io). As LegalQ describes its offering on its website, “Searching [for an attorney] online feels overwhelming. Referrals from friends and family leading to dead ends. Often the only way to get legal help is by talking to an attorney. Use the LegalQ app to get help today [and] a licensed attorney will help you [to]: Know your options and legal rights, Avoid common legal pitfalls and mistakes, [and] Get personalized guidance for unique legal issues.”

After talking about Zeb’s professional background and LegalQ’s product, Charlie’s discussion with Zeb digs deeply into:

• Given the need to reach customers in mass, “retail-like,” markets, LegalQ’s go-to-market and marketing strategies (and, more particularly, how those strategies entail Google searches, Facebook ads and, more generally, search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization strategies)
• The iterative process that LegalQ uses refine its app design, improve its customer onboarding and, most interestingly, revise its core revenue model (well after LegalQ’s initial launch) in light of market reactions to its initial business model approach
• LegalQ’s use of analytical tools to understand the most cost-effective ways to lower customer acquisition costs
• The importance for LegalQ of making a great senior marketing hire
• LegalQ’s ambitious (and access-to-justice driven) mission statement (a mission attributable, at least in part, to LegalQ’s participation in the TechStars program).

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal.  On its website (www.dashboardlegal.com), Dashboard Legal writes of its value proposition: "Tired of switching between email threads, apps and workarounds? Dashboard Legal lets you and your team work right from your inbox - by transforming it into a unified workspace for all the materials related to a case or transaction."

Mat and Charlie talk about the following topics during this episode:

• How Mat's experience working as a law firm deal lawyer led him to build a suite of tools that creates an "inbox-first" universal view of a deal or litigation that helps to solve the organizational and collaboration roadblocks that Mat confronted when he practiced law,

• What Dashboard Legal does to systematize legal matter workflows and encourage lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration, while at the same time allowing its users to continue using software that they've long used as part of their day-to-day work (e.g., such as word processing and email apps like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook),

• The growing importance of collaboration among legal professionals and the benefits that such collaboration offers those professionals (not least of which is the improvement of one's "lifestyle" at work), and

• What approaches Dashboard Legal has taken to market its offering (including participation in partner-channels such as Reynen Court and Jameson Legal Tech) and how important a part the building of relationships with customers plays in Dashboard Legal's marketing.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Rich Lee, a co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR.  On its website (www.neweraadr.com), New Era ADR says “Use smarter, more intuitive tools to get to resolution faster with some of the most experienced mediators and arbitrators in the industry. Do it all from home or anywhere in the world on our fully-digital platform. Get everything done in one place, without everyone being in one place. Don’t waste your time, money, or energy on logistics or fighting, make it simple with New Era ADR.”

Here are some topics that Rich and Charlie discuss:

• How Rich made his way from law school to co-founding New Era ADR.
• How Rich’s experience as a GC and also as a business person at IP-related businesses (where he confronted first hand the expense and inefficiencies of litigating disputes in court) informs his vision for New Era ADR.
• What’s New Era ADR’s secret sauce when it comes to providing a software-based approach to alternative dispute resolution? (Hint: Among other things, shorter times-to-resolution, a “virtual first” approach, an emphasis on UX and the customer experience, and versatility as a platform that enables New Era ADR to handle not only disputes that involve commercially sophisticated parties, but also disputes that involve consumers and disputes that have A2J implications)?
• What business successes are Rich and his co-founders most proud of to date.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase.  On its website (www.clausebase.com), ClauseBase speaks of itself as “.  .  .  [going] beyond simple template editors, offering you all the power you need to draft complex documents.”

Here are some of the topics that Charlie and Senne discuss in this episode:

How did Senne find his way to co-founding a legal tech startup?

What does ClauseBase’s product offering do for lawyers?

In what markets does ClauseBase make its product offering available?

What marketing and sales channels has ClauseBase found most success (and what such channels have been less successful)?

What is ClauseBases’s process for successful customer onboarding?

How does ClauseBase avoid becoming “shelfware?”

Of what business successes is Senne most proud?

Here are the highlights what Jeremy, Jon and Charlie discussed during this episode:

- How did Jameson Legal Tech “grow” out of Jameson Legal?

 - Just what kind of services does Jameson Legal Tech offer the participants in its two-sided market (as of today, those participants consisting of: (i) legal tech companies that need assistance in their marketing and sales efforts and (ii) law firms and in-house legal departments looking to license legal tech software solutions)?  What additional services is Jameson Legal Tech considering offering in the future?

- Which legal tech companies currently comprise Jameson Legal Tech’s software solutions platform?

- In what markets does Jameson Legal Tech currently offer its services?

- What accounts for today’s interest in the creation  of, and participation in, legal tech marketing consortiums like Jameson Legal Tech?

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Jonathan Fish and Kyle Richless of Cap Gains Inc. and QSBS Expert (www.qsbsexpert.com). QSBS Expert is Cap Gains Inc.’s first offering, one that helps startup founders, investors, and lawyers (among other startup stakeholders) understand the nuances of a significant US tax exemption that’s available to eligible startups and their investors that qualify for this exemption’s use.

Jonathan and Kyle each first explain how their professional backgrounds led them to their co-founding Cap Gains Inc. and the introduction of Cap Gains Inc.’s QSBS Expert offering.  The “main event” follows as Jonathan and Kyle explain just what QSBS is and why it matters to startups and  startup stakeholders.  Hint:  QSBS stands for “qualified small business stock” and refers to what can be a financially significant US federal (and possibly state-level) tax exemption.

Pay attention startups first, because there can be “real” money at stake here and second, because the availability of that potential for tax savings, as Jonathan and Kyle further explain, is subject to eligibility and qualification criteria that are chock full of nuance and possible trip wires that, if tripped, can “bust” the tax exemption’s availability.  So, with Jonathan’s and Kyle’s able assistance, we get an overview of the history of the QSBS exemption, its motiving policy and some of the pitfalls to consider (and avoid if possible) to preserve the exemption’s availability for otherwise eligible and qualifying startups and investors.

Jonathan and Kyle go on to describe just what kinds of services QSBS Expert offers when it comes to understanding and taking advantage of this exemption.  Given the complexities of the law and regulations applicable to this exemption, QSBS Expert’s service offering can be tax exemption-preserving tool that’s well worth exploring.

Charlie, Jonathan and Kyle conclude the podcast with the latter two discussing “words of startup wisdom” (WOSW?) that legal tech startup leaders should find helpful in managing their startup’s business.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Jason Gabbard, the founder of JUSTLAW(www.just.law) a startup that, as it writes on its website, offers families, individuals and small business “legal matters covered by our [monthly] protection plan.”

Jason dives right into a recounting of his career and, we learn, it is a varied one from a business standpoint.  

After law school, Jason spends four years in corporate law at NYC law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Jason goes on from there (i) to found, in the early 2000’s, a “distributed” law firm, (ii) to create a legal tech startup in 2010 that extracts M&A deal clauses from SEC databases and that, with humans in-the-loop, also analyzes those clauses and (iii) to found Counselytics, another legal tech startup, one that automates much of the analytics that went into Jason’s previous startup’s clause-based work.  

Jason has successful exits from both of the above-mentioned startups. And, in fact, for several years works at Conga, the company that acquired Counselytics. All this leads to Charlie and Jason discussing the (over?) abundance of companies in the CLM space and the frothiness in the market for investing in legal tech startup (and in startups, in general).

Charlie and Jason next turn to Jason’s latest venture, called JUSTLAW, that aggregates small business demand for legal services and surfaces that demand to solo and small/medium-sized firm practitioners.  What’s of particular note here is that the practitioners charge for their services available on the basis of a tiered monthly subscription model (with the tiers corresponding to different levels of lawyer services).

Jason concludes this podcast episode with words of wisdom to other legal tech startup founders/leaders (i) who are eyeing (or may someday eye) an M&A exit, (ii) whose startups are deluged with customer feature requests, (iii) who are building senior level teams and (iv) who are just moving from practicing law to starting up a legal company.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean (www.tonkean.com). Tonkean describes itself on its website as a set of no-code software tools that enables business people (including, of course, lawyers and allied legal professionals) to “Automate complex business processes, fast.”

Michael begins the podcast by describing how he arrived at Tonkean. Michael’s journey saw him begin his career as a software engineer. From that role Michael moved on to more customer-facing roles, involving product management and software deployment. Michael next spent several years as a member of Google’s legal operations team.

At Google, Michael became a Tonkean customer himself when he became central to the roll-out of Tonkean software to Google’s legal ops team members and others at Google. (At this juncture, Charlie and Michael talk about the increasingly important role that legal operations is coming to play at in-house legal departments worldwide.) Now at Tonkean, Michael helps to bring Tonkean’s process automation software to law firms and in-house legal departments.

Michael next describes just what Tonkean’s software does, with an emphasis (not surprisingly) on how Tonkean’s process automation software applies to work carried out by in-house legal departments and law firms. Essentially, Tonkean’s web-based tools gives non-coders the opportunity to use intuitive drag-and-drop functionality to build workflows. These workflows, in turn, permit data of many different kinds to move among the pieces of software that lawyers and allied legal professionals are already familiar with.

By way of just a couple of examples, legal ops team members, paralegals and lawyers — who, being subject matter experts when it comes to matters like conflict waivers and client intake procedures — can automate (without needing any coding skills) start-to-finish conflict-waiver workflows or client intake workflows. And, as Michael points our later in the podcast, with Tonkean’s not requiring coding and involving only software with which a lawyer and his or her law firm or legal department colleagues are already familiar, there’s little, if any, change management effort necessary to encourage that use.

Charlie asks Michael what it’s like to be marketing and selling to law firms and legal departments out of a company like Tonkean that isn’t devoted exclusively to the legal tech vertical. In answering, Michael notes that Tonkean’s software is aimed at any business person who needs to funnel data through a workflow quickly and efficiently and that the business person in question can certainly be a lawyer. That said, Michael goes on to explain that Tonkean does make a strong effort to be involved with “legal,” including having a membership in CLOC (the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and having a section dedicated to legal operations in its online learning center.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Raj Goyle, the co-founder and CEO of Bodhala (www.bodhala.com). Bodhala assists in-house legal departments in managing their outside counsel spend and describes itself on its website as follows: "Bodhala’s mission is to create a transparent market for legal services. Using data to illuminate price discovery, we can drive competition and innovation not just for buyers of legal services, but for the entire industry."

Raj begins the podcast by talking about his professional journey to legal tech. After college and law school, Raj worked in the non-profit sector and on public interest and civil rights law matters, entered politics after winning election to the Kansas State House of Representatives and served as the director of a family investment office. Listeners will hear from Raj about how it was his work in public interest law and the public sector (and not - as one might have expected - any prior work in a commercial law practice) that motivated him to strive for efficiency in the delivery of legal services and, at Bodhala, to help in-house legal departments monitor and control their law firm legal-spend

Raj next describes what differentiates Bodhala from other legal tech companies in the spend management space (hint: offering data cleansing and data organization to its customers, together with up-to-date "what's market" information about legal-spend). In this segment of the podcast, Raj pulls no punches in explaining what it is about much of private law firm practice and the self-regulation of the legal industry that incentivizes behavior that, in turn, makes spend management such a pressing issue for so many law firm clients.

Charlie and Raj close this episode with a discussion of legal tech startups' increasing success in fundraising from institutional investors. Here Raj observes a surge in interest in investing in the legal tech vertical on the part of not only venture capital firms, but also private equity firms.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software. Koho is a value added reseller (VAR) of contract lifecycle management software that describes its mission as ". . . mak[ing] the contracting processes faster, more collaborative, and more secure . . . by providing a solution that’s built around [a customer's] specific processes and [that] scales with [that customer's] organization."

During the podcast, Charlie and Marc discuss the following:

- Marc's professional background; including, of course, how he and his team took Koho from providing help desk services to its customers to the legal tech vertical where it operates today

- What it means for Koho to act as a VAR in the contract lifecycle management space, and how it offers its principal customers (namely, in-house legal departments worldwide and of various sizes) not only an explanation of what contract lifecycle management's business case is and assistance in assessing the need for such software in the case of a particular in-house department's operations, but also advice in choosing the right contract lifecycle software and, once chosen, implementing that software and providing software support services to get (and keep) the software running

- Insights into how Koho markets its services to potential customers around the world.

The episode begins with Jim describing his professional journey in founding My Legal Einstein. Jim, with an engineering degree from MIT in hand, started his career by working (outside legal tech) on the application of AI to video streaming. This work expanded into Jim's taking an interest in AI's applicability to data beyond the video streaming space. After exploring AI's application to still images and sound, Jim became intrigued by how AI can be applied commercially to written text. And, from there, it was a short step for Jim to understand how, with the law's everyday involvement with large language data sets, AI was a "natural" when it came to helping lawyers wrangle with contract management issues.

Jim next takes listeners on a tour of My Legal Einstein's product offering. Here we learn that My Legal Einstein's mission overall is to make AI, and it application to contract management, readily accessible to lawyers. In fact, making "access to AI" easy and intuitive for lawyers is one of My Legal Einstein's core values.

We also learn from Jim how My Legal Einstein assists lawyers' contract review work with contract clause extraction and collaboration tools that can be up and running within five minutes of a law firm's or legal department's signing into My Legal Einstein. As Jim, explains, shortening "time-to-value" for the My Legal Einstein customer is another core value for Jim's company, with the company achieving this time-to-value acceleration by - among other features - flattening the learning curve for putting My Legal Einstein to use. Jim tells tells us that one of My Legal Einstein's features is a built-in messaging service that sends extracted clauses to the client's business people with no need to "switch apps." As a web-based service, hosted by Google Cloud, Jim notes that My Legal Einstein necessarily takes privacy and security needs very seriously and even adds application-level security features to those that Google Cloud itself provides.

Jim points out that My Legal Einstein offers a monthly subscription for its services (thereby avoiding long-term customers contract lock-in). And, as Jim notes further, his company also offers a free 30-day trial.

The conversation next turns to how My Legal Einstein markets its product. Jim here talks about how the company makes itself known to potential customers by leveraging its AI know-how to provide educational content (in what Jim describes as an almost CLE-style) through various media (including presentations to bar association members) that familiarizes lawyers with AI's use in legal practice and dispels misunderstandings that foster distrust and even "fear" of AI among lawyers.

The podcast concludes with Jim describing how he's most proud of My Legal Einstein's fast achievement of product-market fit and the company's respect for its customers when it comes both to avoiding marketing hype about AI and to educating lawyers about AI.

Charlie Uniman, host of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), welcomes to this episode two co-founders of UK-based legal tech startup Summize (www.summize.com): Tom Dunlop, Chief Executive Officer, and Dave Smith, Chief Development Officer. Among just one of its several contract-related solutions, and as described on its website: "Summize is a lightweight assistant to the contract lifecycle. Upload any contract and the platform creates an instant, easy-to-read summary."

The podcast kicks off with Tom and Dave talking about the career paths that brought them together to co-found Summize. Speaking of his own career path, Tom says that he started out as a private law firm lawyer in the UK and from there moved into in-house GC roles at tech company scale-ups. As Tom puts it, his role as a tech company GC enabled him to see business innovation first hand, but that role also exposed him to the frustrations that lawyers face in dealing with the inefficiencies in their day-to-day work.

Those frustrations resulted in Tom's exploring software solutions that could mitigate those inefficiencies, his meeting Dave and their co-founding Summize. As Dave explains, he brought his 30 years of software development experience to bear in co-founding Summize. One of the questions that Dave entertains from Charlie is whether Dave believes that developing software for lawyers differs from developing software for other types of business users.

Tom and Dave next describe just what Summize's software offerings do. Its original product offering was the "instant" creation of contract summaries. As that offering operates today, law firms and in-house departments can augment their Microsoft Office 365 experience with a plug-in that Summize built to generate these summaries directly in Microsoft Word and can also obtain those summaries by querying their contracts through plug-ins for Slack and Microsoft Teams as well.

Summize assists private practice and in-house lawyers in, among other things, creating contracts, assessing the conformity of contracts with a firm's or enterprise's contract playbooks and contract precedent banks, and understanding contract definitions and other clauses. According to Tom and Dave, all of Summize's contract analytics offerings emphasize ease of use, short time-to-value and a modular approach that enables Summize's software to "play well" with other vendors' contracts software. In fact, one of Summize's chief aims is to have its post-signing offerings enhance a customer's use of that customers's other, existing, contract management tools.

The final segment of the podcast has Tom and Dave offering "words of wisdom" when it comes to legal tech startup management. Here Tom describes Summize's successful efforts at content marketing and its use-case based method for customer onboarding. Charlie, Tom and Dave conclude the podcast with a discussion of what aspect of startup management Tom and Dave are most proud of to date (hint: that aspect involves the growth and maintenance of a company culture that is both customer-centric and committed to continuous product improvement).

After learning of Chris's professional beginnings in engineering-related ventures (and also after learning just how the company's name, "Trokt," came to be), Charlie and Chris first discuss what it is that Trokt offers. Chris establishes an excellent use case for blockchain technology as he describes, in a very understandable and user friendly way, how Trokt's "thumbprint" tech enables document creators/users to establish securely the authenticity of a document as it may move from one law firm, enterprise or custodian to another. There's no better way to appreciate what the blockchain can offer than to hear Chris describe what Trokt's tech can do to track and confirm a document's authenticity (and, by the way, it is indeed blockchain that we're talking about here, not cryptocurrency, which happens to be just one use for blockchain tech).

Chris then goes on to offer wisdom to legal tech startup leaders from his own experiences in leading such a startup himself. Most significantly, Chris cautions against overpromising and underdelivering on a startup's tech (don't be the "smoke," be the "fire") and alerts listeners to ethical considerations that must accompany a legal tech startup leader's decision making.

Seb and Caroline begin the podcast by talking about how LoveLegal came to be. Of special note is how, when doing web development work for an estate planning firm in a neighboring office suite, Seb saw an opportunity to improve the way law firms deliver legal services. Seizing that opportunity, Seb initially created a predecessor company, Wills Suite, and then used his experience with that predecessor to enlarge the scope of his offering with the founding of LoveLegal.

Charlie, Seb and Caroline next dive more deeply into LoveLegal's offering. At bottom, LoveLegal aims enable its customers to use white-label, client-facing and web-based automation tools to do client intake and to provide legal documents -- all in a less expensive, less mystifying and less drawn-out manner when compared to the way documents were for the most part provided before LoveLegal came on to the scene. As Seb and Caroline go on to explain, LoveLegal isn't a "do it yourself" destination for consumers with legal document needs because lawyers remain in the loop; reviewing and signing off on the documents that are produced on LoveLegal's platform

Seb and Caroline move on to discuss: (i) LoveLegal's approach to marketing (the thought leadership approach to marketing plays a major role here), (ii) the relative ease with which LoveLegal onboards its customers (and, in turn, the ease with which those customers onboard their clients), and (iii) the pride Seb and Caroline take in successfully bootstrapping LoveLegal's growth in the face of the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns.

This is episode 23 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) where your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews David Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of Intellext (www.intellext.ai), a platform that offers tools for enhancing the efficiency of, collaborating on, and bringing actionable insights into the process of negotiating term sheets.

As with many legal tech startup founders, David explains how his years of experiencing the pain of dealing with the contracting process; in David’s case as a business person who negotiated the principal terms of contracts (before turning matters over to lawyers) led him, with his co-founders, to try to mend the broken process of term sheet negotiation. David goes on to describe Intellext’s approach to (i) using templates, (ii) providing what David describes as “smart highlighting” to capture the principal terms of an enterprise’s full-length contracts, (iii) integrating with Microsoft Word and email programs and (iv) using machine learning — all with the aim of getting to a negotiated term sheet more quickly, with greater adherence to enterprise negotiation guidelines and better and more consistent negotiation outcomes.

Charlie and David next cover (i) Intellext’s success in negotiating funding rounds, despite the constraints imposed by the COVID pandemic, (ii) David’s thoughts on startup pivots and his own encounters with pivoting at Intellext and (iii) Intellext’s broadening the reach of its platform to find customers in verticals adjacent to legal tech (such as fintech and proptech)

Dan kicks off the discussion by describing how he went from university to a career at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) (where he worked in strategy initially and then helped to start PWC’s tech startup accelerator program) and then on to join the MDR LAB team. Once at MDR LAB, Dan and his colleagues were tasked with broadening the LAB’s reach by moving beyond what might be called a “plain vanilla” type of legal tech incubator; namely, one that worked with legal tech startups only at a single stage of their development in a program that lasted only several months in any given year. In broadening the LAB’s reach, Dan and the rest of the team aimed to have the LAB take a more agile, three-prong approach to the structure of its programs that enabled MDR LAB to work with startups at all stages of their development, all year round.

Dan paints a picture of how the three-prong program structure at MDR LAB works. As Dan outlines it, there are now three separate legal tech startup development programs at the LAB, each with its own cadence and duration and each catering to companies at different stages of a startup’s development. The “Launch” program lasts approximately 6 months and caters to earliest stage legal tech startups, i.e., those at the problem solving/idea stage. The “Improve” program lasts 12 weeks and caters to legal tech startups that have achieved product-market fit and that want assistance in working with their target market and improving their product development; all in partnership with product users at Mishcon de Reya. The “Sell” program is for later-stage legal tech startups that have customers and market traction and are eager to determine, by way of a pilot of their product offering with Mishcon de Reya itself, whether they are a good fit as a legal tech vendor to the law firm.

Applications for each program can be found at the MDR LAB website, with the Launch and Sell programs getting under way in 2021. As Dan explains, the LAB considers a number of factors in assessing applicants, with a focus on assessment of (i) the significance of the problem addressed by the applicant, (ii) the applicant’s value proposition and (iiii) the team’s ability (or potential ability) to execute on solving the problem and realizing that value proposition.

Speaking specifically to the Launch program, Dan explains that the LAB is interested in hearing from applicants who, armed with a sound product idea, may nevertheless have yet no tech or startup experience themselves. Not only is the the “recovering lawyer” with years of practice experience welcome to apply, but equally welcome to apply are law students or junior lawyers who may have the “right” idea.

In operating the Launch program, the LAB can be understood as almost a kind of co-founder to the individuals who have been accepted into that program. As Dan explains, the LAB will provide program entrants with assistance from experts in tech, data science, business strategy and other areas of startup management. Moreover, MDR LAB has partnered with Founders Factory, an accelerator and venture studio for corporate investors, whose team of founders, operators and investors will provide program entrants with a wide variety of operating , financing and other management advice in such areas as, among others, marketing, revenue growth, hiring and product development.

Giles tells us about the route that he’s taken professionally to being hired at Avvoka. What’s prominent in the telling is Giles’ explanation of how someone like himself, with an educational and professional background in law, came to be hired for a marketing position at a legal tech startup. The key point here is that the founders who hired Giles believed that having someone with a lawyer’s background would best enable Giles to market and sell Avvoka’s solution to lawyers. Why? Because Giles background would enable him to understand the business practices, pain points, incentive structures and, most importantly, the significant tech use-cases that challenge practicing lawyers everyday. Encouraging thoughts for lawyers and law students who are thinking of moving into a marketing or sales role at a legal tech startup.

Charlie and Giles next delve into the feature set and benefits of Avvoka’s software platform. Giles explains how Avvoka goes beyond what’s now considered “table stakes” in contract drafting automation (e.g., templating features and the like). Avvoka takes this “step beyond” by making its software intuitive enough to put the automation right into the lawyers’ hands themselves, all without sacrificing the power and sophistication of the automation processes themselves. Further, as Giles also points out, Avvoka not only provides an end-to-end automation solution that encompasses drafting, negotiation and collaboration , it also offers contact analytics tools that can tell a law firm or legal department much about the negotiation process itself (to take just a couple of examples, the analytics can inform users (i) just what clauses are most often negotiated and how a particular clause’s negotiation has gone and (ii) just who are the law firm’s or legal department’s most effective and efficient negotiators). As Giles notes further, with analytics like this in hand, lawyers using Avvoka can not only increase the likelihood of winning better terms in negotiations, but can also arrive at a successful end to those negotiations more quickly.

Giles closes the podcast with a discussion of how Avvoka encourages adoption and use of its software once it has signed up a new customer. One important element in encouraging adoption and use is being sensitive to each customer’s unique needs. Giles offers the example of understanding how a law firm’s use of standard form contract preparation as a business development tool differs from an in-house legal departments need for contract standardization as part of that department’s risk reduction strategy. Giles also tells us how, with its emphasis on ease-of-use and fast and effective training and its creation of both the Avvoka Academy (where anyone can sign up to attend a free training session) and a 14-day free trial program, Avvoka is enjoying marketing success.

As Stephen explains, Conventus Law provides a digital media platform that focuses on the purchasers and vendors of legal tech in Asia. Conventus Law also encourages a conversation that speaks to expanding the set of skills that lawyers bring to their clients to include a deeper appreciation of the business issues those clients face, many of which can be better addressed with the use of legal tech. Stephen elaborates on his view that legal tech vendors would do well to emphasize that their law firm customers needn't "fear" legal tech as a massive disruptor of their business, but instead should understand adoption of legal tech as a necessary incremental change in how law firms approach serving their clients' needs.

Charlie and Stephen turn to how Conventus Law is partnering with Zegal, a contract management company operating chiefly in Asia. In its partnership with Zegal, Conventus Law will be rolling out Conventus Docs, which will provide private law firms with the tools to offer in-house lawyers with access to digitized standard documentation. As Stephen sees it, Conventus Docs will do the "heavy lifting" in enabling law firms to digitize documents and make them available those firms' enterprise clients on the Conventus Docs platform. And once made available on that platform, these documents can be expected not only to generate revenue for law firms, but also to provide firms with a new way to market their expertise and, thereby, win the opportunity to do more high-value work for new and existing clients.

Charlie asks Stephen to offer a birds'-eye view of the Asian legal tech market, including in his description of that view just how legal tech vendors can best promote actual use of their software by their customers. Stephen notes that avoiding the dreaded "shelf-ware" fate of underused software is best achieved by insuring ease of use, by offering timely and well-designed training (that, in addition to instruction, demonstrates how the software offers "critical services and information" at "critical times") and by leaving users with a "WOW" experience that can rival the experience those users have when using the best designed "consumer" apps on their mobile phones and home desktop computers.

Daniel starts off by telling our listeners how he moved from practicing law with firms in New Zealand and Australia, to obtaining a business degree from Cambridge's Judge Business School to meeting with Legatics' founder and deciding, after that meeting, to eschew plans to work in "big tech" and instead join the Legatics team.

Charlie and Daniel cover the Legatics product's features and benefits. Those benefits include (1) automating routine aspects of deal-doing, (2) reducing the risk of human error by, among other things, providing a "single source of truth" for the deal, (3) promoting junior lawyer retention at law firms by making the handling of deal work less mind-numbing, (4) accelerating time-to-closing of the deal and (5) with its multi-sided platform feature, enhancing client satisfaction by providing law firm clients with transparency into a deal's progress and with collaboration tools that permit client involvement with aspects of the deal. Daniel also describes how the client involvement/transparency benefits have generated positive marketing spillover effects as clients, having become familiar with Legatics while working on a deal with a law firm that's a Legatics' customer, call for its adoption and use by other of the client's law firms.

Daniel explains Legatics' deep commitment to encouraging what it calls "practical adoption" of its product by its law firm customers. By practical adoption, Legatics means avoiding the dreaded "shelf ware" problems, where legal tech software sits unused, "on the shelf," despite a law firm customer's licensing the software in question.

As Daniel describes it, Legatics exemplifies its devotion to customer engagement and adoption by creating two teams that take aim at those goals. One such team, the one that focuses on customer success, reacts quickly to customer feedback and provides customer support. The other such team, the one that focuses on customer engagement, takes a more holistic approach to Legatics/customer interactions by helping a customer measure its ROI from Legatics' use, by insuring that potential users of the Legatics' offering are aware of its benefits (including its integrations with other law firm software), by providing plans to its customers for rolling out the software to adoptees and by describing clearly just what "success actually looks like" to current and potential users.

Daniel offers one more example of Legatics' commitment to customer "practical adoption." As Daniel relates, Legatics has gone so far as to engage with academics in the field of behavioral science. Legatics has undertaken this engagement in order to, among other things, apply principles from behavioral science in workshops that Legatics conducts with several law firms to drive change-management successes at those firms.

We kick off with Shrey describing his journey into legal tech. That journey took him from business school at Chicago Booth to roles in corporate venture capital and a non-legal tech business and then eventually to founding Docket. At this juncture, Charlie and Shrey discuss how Shrey's conversations ("pre-Docket") with a former business school classmate who then worked as a trading firm's compliance officer inspired Shrey to focus on building a solution for in-house lawyers' workflow and related problems (which stemmed largely from having only email, spreadsheet and file storage storage to work with). And that solution (which, of course, is Docket) is designed to be a champion for in-house lawyers that delivers what Docket describes as the in-house legal department's "system of record." In short, as Shrey mentions, Docket is aimed at providing in-house legal departments will tools so those departments can be seen for what they are; namely, not "cost centers," but "centers for excellence."

Shrey next describes just what Docket does. As Shrey explains, Docket offers in-house legal departments numerous features and benefits, including: (i) a way of standardizing the sourcing of legal requests from the business people who are the in-house lawyers' clients, (ii) tools for managing -- on one platform that's dedicated solely to legal department matters -- the department's documents, tasks, calendars and other aspects of its workflow and (iii) when it comes to legal department management, a showcase for the department's activities which, among other things, offers charts and dashboards and allows for the creation of KPI's for monitoring and reporting legal department work.

Charlie and Shrey conclude the podcast episode by taking up Docket's experience in two well-know startup accelerator programs: (i) 500 Startups, which invites tech startups in a variety of verticals into the program and (ii) the accelerator program operated by Lexis/Nexis, where the program is devoted to startups in the legal tech vertical. Shrey recounts his experiences with both programs in some detail and, in doing, helps clarify the difference between accelerators and incubators and describes the benefits Docket derived from its participation in these programs.

In this, one of the most wide-ranging episodes of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), Charlie Uniman welcomes Bill Henderson. Bill is a law professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, editor of the online publication, Legal Evolution (www.legalevolution.org) and Interim Director of the Institute for the non-profit Future of Law Practice (IFLIP) (www.futurelawpractice.org). Charlie and Bill kick off the podcast with Bill describing his interesting journey from college to law school to a law professorship (interesting, especially, because of Bill's spending over a decade between starting and finishing college as a fireman and EMT in the Cleveland area).

Next, Bill discusses IFLP's mission, which consists principally on offering online and real-life boot camps (for law students and mid-career professionals) and working internships (at law firms and legal departments) that aim to "equip lawyers with the knowledge and skills that are essential in modern legal practice." In this regard, Bill talks about educating so-called "T-shaped" lawyers who can supplement legal (doctrinal) knowledge and skills with skills that involve technology, design, business decision-making, data analytics and project management. Bill also describes how the traditional "one-to-one consultative" aspects of law practice have involved to include a more "one-to-many" way of practicing law. We learn from Bill about IFLP's ambition to take its programs to a much larger scale than they operate at currently and IFLP's efforts to raise the funds necessary to achieve that scale.

Given Bill's role as a law professor, Bill and Charlie turn next to legal education and consider what have been both the accelerators and the retardants of change in how law students are taught in most US law schools. Bill distinguishes how so-called "top tier" law schools can persist in avoiding, to a greater degree perhaps than other law schools, classroom teaching in areas that, while outside the area of traditional doctrinal learning, can have a positive impact on a law student's readiness to practice law upon leaving school for a law firm or an in-house legal department. Bill draws a distinction between (i) on the one hand, the AmLaw top 150 law firms that hire predominantly from the top-tier schools to do clients' "bet the company" lawyering and (ii) on the other hand, in-house legal departments and the remainder of the law firms in the US that handle more day-to-day, but vital, operational client work. With this distinction in mind, Bill calls out the day-to-day work as a "contested area," where an client desire for efficiency and, therefore, cost-effectiveness allow in-house counsel and law firms outside the AmLaw 150 to battle successfully with the upper-echelon firms in garnering legal work and, thereby, to increase hiring demand for law students trained in disciplines that enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Finally, Bill delves deeply into what impedes the adoption of innovative approaches to law practice at so many law firms (and even in-house legal departments) both inside and outside the US. Bill and Charlie talk about cultural and financial barriers to innovation and discuss the impact of exogenous factors (like the worldwide financial crisis that began around 2008 and the worldwide COVID crisis) that can act as forcing functions for the adoption of innovations in the practice of law and the business of delivering legal services. As Bill, quoting a friend, puts it: "necessity [in the form of exogenous factors] is not only the mother of invention, it's also the mother of adoption."

In Episode 16 of the of Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Teruel Carrasco, Chief Revenue Officer at dealcloser (www.dealcloser.com).

Teruel first talks about how his journey began with working in B2B marketing outside of legal tech. From there Teruel moved on to being involved with private equity investing and startup consulting. And then Teruel describes how he next joined dealcloser to head up revenue and growth. And, as you'll hear from Teruel, it was quite a bit of serendipity in his consulting and investing roles that brought him to his position at dealcloser.

Charlie and Teruel next talk about just what kind of product dealcloser offers. As should be clear from its name, dealcloser provides transaction management solutions for law firms and in-house legal departments. Among the things that Teruel mentions in this segment of the podcast are the features that distinguish dealcloser from other players in the transaction management space.

Following a pattern established in discussions with previous podcast guests who are involved in a startup's marketing to law firms and legal departments, Teruel and Charlie go over some of the steps that dealcloser takes to market its product. These steps include: (i) going to where innovation-minded lawyers can be found (e.g. trade shows and other conferences), (ii) educating the market with thought leadership content delivered through social media, (iii) hiring a full-time and experienced director of marketing and (iv) marketing to champions at a customer to encourage non-users at that customer to "come aboard."

Following this marketing discussion, Teruel talks about dealcloser's customer onboarding efforts. Here, Teruel talks about achieving product "stickiness," and recommends generous use of training videos, together with more standard (but always user-friendly) documentation, virtual training in real-time with users working on actual transactions, and periodic follow-up's both to get feedback and smooth out user interface and user experience kinks.

In closing the podcast, Teruel talks about how the COVID crisis has affected dealcloser's customer acquisition efforts. In this regard, Teruel stresses the importance of demonstrating genuine empathy with customers who are confronting work-from-home challenges. Teruel also mentions the silver lining that dealcloser encountered during the crisis as customers showed a greater willingness to consider tech adoption in the face those work-from-home challenges.

In Episode 15 of the of Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Rhys Hodkinson, Head of Growth at Define (www.trydefine.com).

Rhys first discusses his professional background, describing how he moved from practicing at a UK law firm to earning his MBA in the UK and stepping next to heading growth at Define. Charlie and Rhys next talk about Define's product offering, with Rhys detailing how Define enables lawyers to master the reviewing, drafting, editing of defined terms in their contract documents -- all through an easy-to-use plug-in to the familiar Microsoft Word interface. Rhys goes on to explain why Define's use makes contract drafting more accurate and much faster.

Rhys offers pointers on marketing to law firms and legal departments (such pointers including, among other things: (i) finding (and supporting) in-firm and in-house evangelists, (ii) offering social media content and case studies that customers (and potential customers) actually find informative and otherwise of high value, (iii) offering continuing attention (e.g., with regular follow-up's) to existing customers (especially product champions) and (iv) being "present" by attending conferences and engaging with the legal tech community locally and more broadly).

From marketing, Rhys provides advice when it comes to a legal tech startup's customer onboarding efforts (here, describing how Define (i) gives priority to user experience and user interface, (ii) makes use of its corps of customer-champions/evangelists, and (iii) persists in its gathering customer feedback -- all with a view to making sure that, once licensed by a law firm or legal department, its customers' users adopt and consistently use Define's product).

Charlie asks Rhys what he and his leadership colleagues are most proud of from a management standpoint at Define (hint: its a team that's diverse in its viewpoints, supportive of team members and remarkably well-skilled).

Finally, Rhys talks about how the COVID crisis has been a "double-edge sword" as far as leading growth at a legal tech startup goes, with Rhys offering more advice to startup leadership when it comes to empathizing with customers during these challenging times, bringing even greater focus on Define's value proposition during ongoing contact with customers and properly using financial and other incentives to drive sales.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews James Quinn, co-founder and CEO of document automation startup, Clarilis (www.clarilis.com).

Charlie and James discuss: (i) James' transition from corporate lawyering at Slaughter and May in London to co-founding Clarilis, (ii) how Clarilis' technology nvolves automating the preparation of a suite of highly complex documents (i.e., those with provisions that themselves consist of many "moving parts" that articulate with complicated logic), (iii) the emphasis that Clarilis places on using a very "hands on" customer-success approach by having its team of technologists and lawyers help its law firm and legal department customers to implement the Clarilis technology (thereby driving long-term customer adoption and avoiding the "shelf-ware" fate often suffered by legal tech), (iv) James' and his team's very positive involvement with Slaughter and May's "Collaborate" startup incubator, (v) the impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on Clarilis' business and (vi) the biggest "mindset" adjustment James had to make in moving from practicing law at a Magic Circle law firm to managing a legal tech startup.

In this episode, Charlie Uniman, your host of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), interviews cybersecurity expert, Alexander Sverdlov,
co-founder of Atlant Security (www.atlantsecurity.com).

After a brief discussion of Alex's professional background, Alex gets right down to offering practical ( and immediately actionable) cybersecurity tips for working from home during the COVID 19 lockdown (and for working from anywhere outside an office when the lockdown is finally lifted). These tips include (i) video conferencing protections (including a discussion of both the now popular Zoom video conferencing tools and also Zoom alternatives), (ii) putting cyber protections in place to secure wifi use (including the use of a VPN ("virtual private network") for outside-the-office work), (iii) the importance of insuring the security of one's personal computer (including steps to take to do so), (iv) the oft-neglected security of whatever browser is being used on one's personal computer (citing, especially, the broader protections that ad-blocking browser extensions offer beyond just blocking ads themselves), (v) password and user name cybersecurity "hygiene" (using a password manager and two-factor authentication) and (vi) advice to legal tech startups to architect security at the very outset of the development of their legal tech applications.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast, Charlie Uniman, your podcast host (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), talks with Tunji Williams of Litera Microsystems (www.litera.com).

Charlie and Tunji kick off the podcast by talking about how Tunji moved from corporate practice at a large law firm to founding dealWIP, a legal tech startup that aimed at becoming a "deal workflow information platform." While at dealWIP, Tunji and his co-founders participated in two prominent legal tech accelerator programs, one managed by LexisNexis and the other managed by the UK law firm, Mishcon de Reya. Charlie and Tunji dive into what accelerator programs can offer legal tech startups (discussing, in particular, what Tunji learned from his participation) and how important it is for a startup to evaluate such programs from a timing standpoint (what is the right time for a startup to join an accelerator?) and from the standpoint of matching an accelerator's features with a particular startup's needs.

Tunji next discusses just how much progress legal tech startups have made over the last five years in marketing and selling to the "right" stakeholder decision-makers at law firms and legal department customers. This discussion leads Tunji to describe his current role at Litera, which involves assisting customers in deriving value from Litera's deal management apps so as to encourage better customer engagement with those apps. Tunji goes on to describe the commercial and educational significance of bringing Litera's suite of tools to law schools and law students.

Charlie and Tunji conclude by covering (i) what Tunji learned from the demise of dealWIP, (ii) his transition from his founder's role at dealWIP to his role as a member of Litera's team, (iii) how he, along with with others at Litera, devotes time to sketching out what deal management tech will look like decades from now and how doing so informs his day-to-day work and (iv) the importance for Tunji of being dedicated to (and, dare it be said, even in love with) his company's mission and the benefits that executing that mission can bring to Litera's customers.

Episode 11 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) finds your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviewing Alice Armitage, a professor at the UC Hastings College of Law who heads the LexLab at the law school.

Charlie delves into Alice's professional background, and learns from Alice that, after law school, she practiced law at a law firm, from there founded two startups (outside of the legal tech area) and moved next to the College of Law at UC Hasting to helm, first, the school's Legal Startup Garage and, now, its LexLab. Alice describes the core of the LexLab as involving classroom instruction in legal innovation topics, an accelerator program for legal tech startups and the staging of events that focus on matters ranging from law practice regulatory changes to legal ops. Alice also describes the unique startup-practice-clinic mission of the Legal Startup Garage at the law school.

Charlie and Alice move on to discuss (i) how the private law firm business model can impede adoption of legal tech, (ii) the absence of client pressure on law firms to promote innovation and practice efficiencies, (iii) what many law schools are doing, and also failing to do, when it comes to teaching subjects relevant to legal practice innovations, (iv) how LexLab introduces legal tech startups to law students for interning and beta-testing purposes, (v) whether law schools should include coding and design thinking into their curricula and (vi) how Alice reads the collapse of the Atrium law firm/legal tech company from her vantage point on the West Coast.

Charlie covers Travis' entré into legal tech, with Travis describing how it all began with a kiss (yes, really). Charlie and Travis next dive into the genesis, features and "special sauce" of the TrialLine application itself. From there, Travis discusses his customers' profile and his approach to marketing to his customers, emphasizing the success that he's had in driving customer acquisition with instructional content-creation, skillful use of social media, and deftly undertaken thought-leadership campaigns (offering CLE programs, for example).

Charlie and Travis take the discussion on to (i) what startup founder issues keep Travis up at night, (ii) how TrialLine deals with app support and training, (iii) the importance Travis attributes to keeping a razor-sharp focus on TrialLine's primary feature set (while remaining open to developing new features requested by customers), (iv) what aspect of Travis' work at TrialLine that he's most proud of, and (v) what Travis' experience was like at the 2020 ABA Tech Show (and how the presence at the show of law school professors and law students added a very welcome element to that experience).

Charlie covers Omer's career path, with Omer explaining how he moved from obtaining his degree from law school, and practicing law in Israel, to working on the business side in Israel (including performing in-house counsel duties) and, inspired by a desire to minimize the repetitive "grind" that business lawyers so often face, to founding Bestpractix., Next Omer explains what Bestpractix's software does to help law firms and in-house legal departments efficiently manage their organizational contract knowledge by providing access to only the most relevant contract precedents when assisting lawyers in the preparation and negotiation of contract language.

Charlie and Omer go on to discuss (i) the "feature focus" that legal tech startups should emphasize when marketing and selling to their customers, (ii) Omer's experience in entering the US legal tech market from his home base in Israel (particularly when it comes to developing a network of legal tech-related contacts in the US), and (iii) if, and to what extent, it's helpful for non-technical legal tech founders to know what software development and product management are all about (Omer himself having a software engineering background).

Maya next explains just what Nextlaw Labs does for the startups that are part of its accelerator program. As Maya describes Nextlaw Labs, it's an accelerator that helps legal tech startups navigate the legal tech market and, in so doing, takes advantage of an incomparable ecosystem that arises from Nextlaw Labs' relationship with (i) its sister company, the legal tech-focused venture capital firm, Nextlaw Ventures, (ii) its parent organization, the Dentons law firm (the largest firm by attorney headcount in the world) and (iii) the Denton's worldwide referral network of law firms of all sizes. Maya offers a detailed survey of just what an accelerator such as Nextlaw Labs, one that's deeply familiar with the legal tech industry, can do to enhance a startup's chances of success in developing its product and marketing and selling that product to law firms and legal departments.

Because this podcast episode airs at the start of a new year, the conversations turns to to crystal ball gazing; that is to say, making predictions for the legal tech industry in 2020. After asking listeners to remember only the correct predictions made during the podcast, Charlie and Maya (i) reveal their optimistic take on legal tech adoption in the coming year, (ii) discuss trends in M&A for legal tech startups in 2020 (including how those trends may be affected by the increasing "platformization" of legal tech), (iii) cover some of the directions startup funding may take this year and (iv) applaud what is expected to be an increase in 2020 in the number of women who found legal tech startups and join the ranks of early-stage investors in legal tech.

Maya invites legal tech startups who wish to learn more about Nextlaw Labs to reach out to her (at talktous@nextlawlabs.com) for more information about its accelerator program and the benefits available to startups that enter the Nextlaw Labs' accelerator program by virtue of Nextlaw Labs' participation in the ecosystem of Nextlaw Ventures, the Dentons law firm and the Dentons' referral network.

As you'll hear, Ben and I riff on legal tech in a wide-ranging discussion of (i) what makes for great legal tech conferences (we had both just returned from LegalGeek London when we recorded the podcast), (ii) speaking of legal tech conferences, the next editions of both the InspireLegal get-together, coming in February 2020 -- right after New York LegalWeek concludes -- and Legal Geek North America, coming sometime in the spring in 2020, (iii) marketing ideas for legal tech startups, including the fact that the "end-user" approach to legal tech startup marketing is upon us (and where and how this "bottom's-up" approach to legal tech marketing makes the most sense) and (iv) book recommendations for lay folks who have an interest in artificial intelligence (a technology that gets a lot of buzz in legal tech).

Ben already beat me to the punch and published this discussion (which took place way back on Halloween this year) a few weeks ago on his Legal Tech Growth podcast (which can be found at www.soundcloud.com/ben-chiriboga/sets/legaltecg-growth-media). The Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast itself can be found at www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast and by searching for "legal tech startup focus" in your favorite podcast app.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast, Charlie Uniman, your podcast host, discusses the legal tech industry with Raymond Blijd. Raymond is a master analyst when it comes to providing highly relevant data and outstanding visualizations to people who want to get insights into the direction in which legal technology companies (and companies in related fields like regulatory tech, financial tech and civics tech) are heading from a business standpoint.

As is typical in discussions with our podcast guests, the episode kicks off with Raymond's discussing his journey from law school to founding his two tech business data analytics companies, LegalComlex.com and LegalPioneer.org and from there the discussion covers what distinguishes these two data companies from one another. In particular, Raymond describes LegalComplex.com's for-profit data offerings and customer base and then goes on to describe LegalPioneer.org's non-profit mission, its ambition to create a community for people interested in tracking developments in the legal tech startup field and related technology fields and its goal of eventually open-sourcing much of the data it collects.

After that kick-off discussion, Charlie asks Raymond about (i) legal tech market trends that Raymond's data analysis has discovered, (ii) what the data says about the legal tech startup categories that are most successfully attracting investor interest, (iii) predictions for new product categories for legal tech startups and (iv) what data/statistics in the past year of his research most surprised Raymond.

The Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast can be found at www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast and by searching for "legal tech startup focus" in your favorite podcast app.

After discussing the career path that took Olga from practicing law to stewarding a legal tech startup, Charlie and Olga talk about just what ParleyPro's contract management software offers its customers (including, in particular, that software's particular emphasis on collaboration and the negotiation process - both for real time use). Next the discussion focuses on Olga's role as a legal tech startup CEO, with Charlie asking her several startup business-related questions.

First, Charlie asks Olga what it is about ParleyPro that she's most proud of. Next, Olga answers questions about ParleyPro's customer on-boarding process and how Olga and her marketing team discover whom best to target when sourcing in-house legal department customer prospects.

Olga then answers a question directed at what keeps her up at night in her role (here keeping on top of calendar management and the wearing-of-many-hats figure prominently). The podcast concludes with Charlie asking Olga what single piece of advice she would offer other startup executives and their colleagues.

The Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast can be found at www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast and by searching for "legal tech startup focus" in your favorite podcast app.

After a brief bit of background about Jeroen's wide-ranging career in legal tech and a discussion of the Cliffords Chance Applied Solutions group that Jeroen leads, Charlie poses the following questions:

(i) Given the importance of timing when it comes to introducing legal tech into the market, what law firm/legal department/lawyer "pain points" are particularly ready today for a legal tech remedy? Jeroen provides four "pain point" examples. Legal tech startups - get cracking on these software opportunities!

(ii) Are there one or more keys to persuading lawyers and other legal professionals to actually use a pain-point remedying legal technology purchased by their firms (e.g., ease of use, integration with legacy tech, client demand)? Jeroen has a singular recommendation in answer this question. (Hint: It's all about product roll-out,)

(iii) Is there a trend emerging among BigLaw law firms to "productize" their legal advice offerings in order to deliver more or less routine legal work not only more efficiently, but also more widely to existing (and also perhaps newly-served) client segments? Jeroen surprises with the distinction he draws in answering this question.

(iv) Is Clifford Chance Applied Solutions open to purchasing legal tech in addition to building tech solutions itself? In short, Jeroen answers "yes;" but there's much more to this answer than just a "yes."

(v) Is institutional investor funding "reserved" only for those legal tech startups that can offer what can be called "quasi-unicorn" types of financial exits (i.e., less than the $1 billion or more "standard unicorn" valuation benchmark, but still in the high tens or more millions of dollars of exit value)? Here, Jeroen answers "no." And do listen to his complete explanation to his answer; it's an encouraging one.

Gabe and Charlie cover a lot of ground during the podcast, involving principally the intersection of legal tech and legal education. Listeners will learn from the podcast: (i) how Gabe's recent tweet proposing that law schools partner with legal tech companies "doing cool things" planted the seed for Gabe's discussion with Charlie, (ii) how the introduction of legal tech into the law school curriculum benefits law students by not only teaching them about a particular legal technology's features, but also by having them use that technology in-class and in clinical projects (the students don't just "talk the talk" about what the tech does, but actually "walk the walk" by using the tech to solve legal problems), and (iii) how the legal tech companies themselves benefit from the partnership with law schools (the companies get detailed and meaningful feedback on their tech from student users, hone their product stories as they engage with law students and locate potential champions of their tech upon the students' graduation and entry into not just BigLaw law firms, but also small and medium-size law firm and legal departments where they can immediately influence tech-buying decisions).

Gabe also explains how Suffolk and other law schools can marry their traditional pedagogy of teaching legal doctrine with their newer teaching efforts that are directed to familiarizing students with new legal practice methods that involve technology use and new business models in use at law firms and other alternative legal service companies that are altering how legal services are delivered. From that starting point, Gabe goes on to explain (i) how expert systems technologies can actually enhance the teaching of legal doctrine, (ii) how his students' course work has them diving deeply into artificial intelligence use cases (for example, employing machine learning to build a legal aid tool that helps address immigration and housing issues and that is accessible online) and (iii) why it's become easier in recent years to introduce even cutting-edge technologies like machine learning to law school faculty and the student body for use in the law school's curriculum.

Charlie and Haley talk about what took Haley from a law firm partnership to the leadership of a legal tech startup, how Haley got Doxly off the ground with the assistance of a startup studio, how Doxly is meeting the challenge of offering both a cloud-based and on-premises solution for its customers (and what Haley sees to be the current status of “cloud acceptance” by those customers), how Haley’s CEO role at Doxly has evolved in the three years since its founding, the importance of hiring to achieve diverse points of view and also how Doxly’s approach to on-boarding customers has evolved during that period.

 Charlie also asks Haley about Doxly’s recent acquisition by Litera, another legal tech company.  In this part of the discussion, Haley talks about what took her team, her board and her investors on the road to Doxly’s being acquired, what the most important factor that Haley bore in mind while pondering whether an acquisition made sense at that point in Doxly’s history and what best positioned Doxly to reach a successful acquisition closing once Haley and others on her team decided that an acquisition was the right step for all concerned.

Having just launched in beta, Reynen has become a topic topic among folks who work with and sell legal tech. Here's a chance to learn what Reynen Court is really all about.