Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast

Your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Peter discuss:

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

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

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

Peter’s most contrarian view on legal tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Steve Fretzin discuss:

In this 51st podcast episode, your podcast host Charlie Uniman interviews Gaurav Oberoi, CEO and co-founder of Lexion (www.lexion.ai).

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.

Among the subjects that your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, discusses with Kevin are:

• 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.

At the outset of the podcast, Andy shares his professional background, which spans over 20 years in the technology industry, building software solutions for various industries. He also talks about his transition to legal tech and his excitement about the future of innovation in the industry.

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.