Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast

Episode 30 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala 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.

Episode 29 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software 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.

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), Charlie Uniman, your podcast host, interviews Jim Chiang, founder and CEO of My Legal Einstein (www.mylegaleinstein.com). As My Legal Einstein puts it on its website, the company " . . . is an online software technology company . . . that leverages the latest AI NLP technology to transform the legal contract collaboration and negotiation process." 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.

Episode 27 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Tom Dunlop and Dave Smith of Summize 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).

With this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, welcomes Kevin Miller, CEO of LegalSifter (www.legalsifter.com). According to its website, LegalSifter " . . . fixes many of the pre-signature contract challenges [its customers] face. It reads contracts and gives in-context advice. It's fast, easy-to use, and is configurable for [the customer's] organization." LegalSifter's website also describes its post-signature contract management tools where "[LegalSifter] keep[s] track of [a customer's] contracts using A.I., easy-to-use contract software, attorneys, paralegals, and a passion for technology and service."   Kevin begins by describing his professional journey, first, acquiring a JD, next undertaking a brief stint in legal practice, then on to getting an MBA and working as a senior manager at growth-stage companies outside the legal tech sector. This description leads to the story of how Kevin became the CEO, about five years ago, of LegalSifter, a startup squarely in the legal tech vertical.   Charlie follows up with questions about LegalSifter's product offerings and we learn that LegalSifter offers both pre-signing and post-signing contract analysis and management services. As Kevin describes those offerings, his company uses natural language processing technology (its "legalsifters") to surface ("sift" out), and give advice concerning, key provisions in contracts. Kevin also describes his company's "Concierge" services where, AI and related technologies, together with LegalSifter's personnel, an enterprise can have LegalSifter act as the enterprise's "contract librarian" to assist with post-signing contract management.   Kevin next offers some helpful "words to the wise" advice for fellow legal tech startup leaders. First, Kevin emphasizes the importance of post-sale customer nurturing and the how even very early-stage legal tech startups should target hiring people whose talents are particularly geared to post-sale customer success. Kevin then notes that a well-designed and ongoing "land and expand" strategy (i.e., growing the number of users at an existing customer) is an oft-neglected path to solid sales growth. Kevin concludes by talking about a realization that came to him only after several months of leading LegalSifter. This is when Kevin came to understand that managing a startup did not mean tearing up the big company "playbook" that he had developed in previous roles, but instead that leading an early stage company meant just the opposite; namely, calling on that playbook's management strategies to manage a startup like LegalSifter.

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.