Season 13, Episode 7: How Email Turned Me to Attorney to Founder (ft. Carl Davidson)

In this episode of Notes to My (Legal) Self, host Olga V. Mack talks with Carl Davidson, a former immigration attorney turned product leader and now co-founder of Candle AI, about one of the biggest pain points in legal practice: email overload, and why he left law to fix it.

Carl recounts his path from corporate and immigration law to Silicon Valley, where he saw firsthand how constant client messages, fragmented data, and inbox chaos slow lawyers down. He realized the real bottleneck wasn’t the law, it was the inbox.

Now building Candle AI, Carl is focused on reducing administrative drag, centralizing client context, and helping legal professionals reclaim their time by bringing structured data directly into email.

Together, Olga and Carl explore what happens when a lawyer becomes a builder, and how fixing “small” workflow problems can create outsized impact across the legal industry.

In this conversation, they explore:

• Carl’s transition from practicing attorney to product manager at Intuit

• How a lack of structured data creates chaos in legal workflows

• Why email remains the #1 source of friction, stress, and lost time for lawyers

• The “magic moment” principle in product design, and why it matters for adoption

• How Candle AI brings case context directly into Gmail/Outlook to eliminate tab-switching

• Why client communication still defaults to email despite modern tools

• The rise of founder-builders in legal tech and the role AI plays in enabling them

• Why small firms and solo practices must not be left behind in the AI revolution

Key Learning Outcomes:

• Understand why email overload is a systems problem—not a personal efficiency failure

• See how integrated AI can reduce context switching and reclaim billable time

• Learn how to follow user pain to build products lawyers actually adopt

• Explore how structured data unlocks powerful automation across the legal stack

• Gain insight into the future of legal practice—and why lawyers who build will shape it

If you’ve ever felt buried under email, frustrated by scattered information, or curious about how AI can make legal work lighter, this episode will show you how one former attorney turned that frustration into a mission, and a company.

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