Episode 55 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO of Blackboiler

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.