This episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) has your host, Charlie Uniman, interviewing Chris Draper, founder and CEO of Trokt (www.trokt.com). As Trokt describes itself on its website, ". . . we build technologies and engineer solutions designed to lessen the clutter associated with document collaboration and secure finalized versions of various digital file types with immutability against digital fraud." 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.

In episode 24 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Seb Shakh, founder and CEO of LoveLegal (www.lovelegal.com) and Caroline Ragan, LoveLegal's COO. As stated on its website, LoveLegal wants to make "legal services easy, affordable and, dare we say, enjoyable" through a platform for lawyers (as well as accountants and financial advisors) that provides clients with legal documents such as wills, powers of attorney, advance directives, lifetime trusts and more. 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.

Episode 23 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with David Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of Intellext 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)

In episode 22 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast, your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Dan Sinclair (email: dan.sinclair@mishcon.com), Head of MDR LAB (lab.mdr.london). MDR LAB, which is part of the Mishcon de Reya law firm in the UK, consists of (as stated on the LAB’s website) consists of a “series of programmes that seek to launch, improve and scale the next generation of LegalTech.” 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.

This is episode 21 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) where your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Giles Thompson, Head of Growth at Avvoka (www.avvoka.com), a startup that automates the contract drafting, analysis, collaboration and management stack. 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.

In episode 20 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Stephen Lai, Founder and Managing Director of Conventus Law and VP - Legal Sector Solutions at Zegal. Stephen, based in Hong Kong, is a keen observer of the market for legal tech solutions throughout Asia. 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.  

In Episode 19 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Daniel Porus, Chief Commercial Officer of Legatics (www.legatics.com), a legal tech startup that offers transaction management solutions. 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.

In Episode 18 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Shrey Gosalia, founder and CEO of Docket (www.getdocket.com). 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.

Episode 17 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Bill Henderson, Law Professor, Editor of Legal Evolution and Interim Director of Development, IFLP 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."

Episode 16 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast with Teruel Carrasco, Chief Revenue Officer at dealcloser 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.