Post Category → Tech

Legal Startups: All Chasm, No Revenue

Kenneth Adams over at Koncision wrote a blog post recently that caught my attention: The Perils of Innovation, about the challenges of true innovation in the corporate law field.  Take-home point:

Bringing innovation to the transactional world is like competing against a giant cartel. It’s like competing against faith. That’s what makes it so bracing, but it’s also why most people offering technology solutions to the transactional world will fail.

I started commenting on his post until I realized I was writing a mini-essay and that, given the relevance to other topics I cover, it made more sense to post here.  Ken talks about the recent shut-down of Ridacto, a little contract analysis tool that I came across – wait, now that I think about it, Ken was the one who introduced me to it, via Twitter – and found interesting, but a bit shy on execution. You uploaded a contract (more on that later), it ran an analysis, and then produced a proofing report that pointed out issues with defined terms, section references, etc. Much like a simpler version of Deal Proof, which my firm licenses but for some reason no-one used until I discovered it.  It’s highly imperfect, but has honestly saved my life as a junior associate, and has saved the clients I’ve worked with probably about 5-figures so far.

Here’s my comment to Ken’s post:

I’m pretty optimistic about the future of transactional legal tech, but I think that any startup trying to enter the space has to be incredibly strategic about how they build momentum.  I tried Ridacto – it seemed interesting, though the UI was a bit confusing.  But I think the real issue was that their approach to how they analyzed contracts would simply be a non-starter at a law firm of almost any size – hey, upload this contract for a private transaction that hasn’t occurred or been announced yet, we’ll analyze it for you, but we promise we’ll delete it afterwards!  Umm, yeah, good luck with that one.  I got my hand slapped by my IT overlords because Box, not Dropbox, but crazy-secure used by like the CIA Box, wasn’t secure enough for them.  Just suggesting Ridacto would get me laughed at.

Lesson: If you’re a legal startup, your customers, or at least those controlling their buying/use decisions, are pathologically paranoid about security and credibility.  You simply can’t be a $100K, bootstrapped, “lean startup” and expect to get any momentum in this space.  In some ways, you never get to truly enjoy the Early Adopter phases of most tech startups. You start out right in the middle of Geoff Moore’s famous “Chasm” – all the problems of a startup – burning cash, an un-proven business model or product + all the problems of a scaling tech co. that usually has revenue to rely on, like gaining credibility and convincing conservative customers.

The last sentence or two is a point I want to drive home.  The transactional legal field does have early adopters who love playing with new toys, myself included, but we’re (i) few and far between, (ii) usually at the junior level, and (iii) as a result, don’t control the purchasing decisions of our firms.  As a junior, I’ve recently been able to convince our firm of about 4-500 lawyers to trial two pieces of tech that can, and already are, transforming parts of our practice.   One of those is a true startup – BrightLeaf. But there are a number of factors that had to be in place before I could do that:
  • Price – low up-front cost, subscription based. If it doesn’t work out, we make a clean break, little money lost.
  • Trial Period/Demo – don’t expect any firm to consider your product unless you offer a trial, or at least a demo that they can play with.  Demos can be helpful where the firm would need to build in a bunch of of its own information to truly get a feel for the product.
  • Security – I’d have every single aspect of our firm in the cloud if I could, but I have to answer to IT people who get panic attacks at hearing the word “dropbox.”  If you’re handling anything with sensitive information, you need security credentials, and that isn’t cheap.
  • Credibility –  Hire ex-corporate lawyers that can sell – good luck finding them.  Network and get in contact with a single firm that (i) is an industry leader, (ii) has people who are willing to trial software – most likely tech-focused lawyers, and (iii) would allow you to mention their name in marketing materials.  Lavish them with attention.  Most law firms are sheep. Nothing perks the ears of a corporate partner better than “Well, X and X LLP are using it.”  That’s how legal language gets adopted. Same with legal tech.

Low up-front costs for customers and trial periods/demos, so not much revenue to rely on up-front – classic startup.  Security and credibility to convince conservative decision-makers that you’re legit, will make it past their IT people, and truly understand their problems – that’s the Chasm, and it costs money.  Usually a tech co. has some revenue from early adopters to rely on when its dealing with the Chasm, but not a legal startup.  You start out right in the middle of it.

Good luck being a true “lean startup” in this space.  Frankly, I think that an intrapraneur – operating with the brand and budget of a large Co., but with the freedom to innovate – has much better odds than a true entrepreneur running a legal startup. I know many VCs aren’t (yet?) pouring money into the legal space, but we’ll see.  We desperately need innovation, but it’ll take serious, well-funded risk-takers with a strong understanding of corporate law practice (not an easy combination to find) to make it happen.

Startup Law Hack: Get to Know Your Associate

One common gripe that you’ll hear around the startup community is that a startup using a large law firm will simply be “thrown to a junior associate.”  If you’ve read my post “In Startup Law, Big Can Be Beautiful” you’ll understand my perspective on this.

Junior associate can mean someone who is truly clueless about what they are doing.  But with the right firm, it can also mean someone who:

  • has been assigned tasks appropriate for their skill level, with senior-level oversight
  • has access to other more experienced (read: expensive) attorneys when they’re actually needed
  • has access to institutional knowledge and resources within the firm to efficiently handle most of your basic needs, and
  • because they are early in their career, will be much easier to get ahold of than a senior attorney managing dozens of much larger clients.

Much like how properly-run hospitals efficiently distribute work, with the assistance of technology, between specialists, general practitioners, nurse practitioners, etc., you won’t find any problem with being assigned (not dumped) to a junior associate if the firm you’re working with knows what its doing.  You’ll get better service because of it.

The logical conclusion of this is, when you approach a firm, you should care just as much about the junior associate assigned to your company as you do about the partner/senior attorney.  Research their junior associates, and don’t be afraid to request one.  This will probably surprise the firm a bit, but there’s nothing wrong with making sure you are well served both at the senior and junior level.  Within any firm, there can be wide variance between associates who are there just trying to earn a paycheck and pay off debt, and those who love working with entrepreneurs and have the credentials to show it.

The Ad Hoc Law Firm?

The other day I wrote a post, In Startup Law, Big Can Be Beautiful, in which I reflected on the trend of boutique law practices popping up in the startup space, and whether large law firms really are as out-dated in this area as today’s zeitgeist would suggest.  One theme of the post was the notion of startup law being integrated, much like healthcare, in the sense that input from many specialists is often required to provide proper counsel to a client.  Boutique practices are obviously at a disadvantage in this respect because their whole model is built around not having teams of lawyers in dozens of specialties under the same roof: they call this “overhead.”

I recently came across an article with an extremely interesting concept: the ad hoc law firm. It talks about how solo practitioners and boutique practices, at least in some areas, are creating networks through which they can consult with one another and scale when required, but operate independently when not.  From a theoretical and economic perspective, this certainly sounds like the best of both worlds: you have capacity equivalent to a large firm built into your network with specialists and generalists on call when needed, but you only pay for what you use.

I posted a question on quora, which unfortunately no one has answered, asking what sorts of process boutiques and solos have in place to make this kind of system work.  The area that really interests me is how technology can be used to facilitate this concept.  Right now it seems that most boutiques simply call a specialist when they need one, and then begins a process of probably checking conflicts and transferring the necessary documents over.  Consulting outsiders seems to carry far more friction than it would inside of a firm.

But what if all the boutiques/specialists in this “network” operated on the same platform, and scaling was simply of matter of “inviting” others to a particular deal, much like you invite someone on LinkedIn or Basecamp. A few clicks and all the requisite checks and file access could happen automatically.  Going one step further, what if these networks had a shared document management system, through which they could share work-product with one another? That would address another advantage mentioned in my post: that volume and experience curves favor large firms.

That sounds like a powerful idea, and if someone’s not working on it already, there’s an enormous market opportunity to be grabbed.  Cloud-based law practice services like Clio and Lawloop are well-positioned to go after this, but right now it seems they’re focused more on connecting attorneys within a single firm.  Some form of Google+-esque granularity would need to be built in to accommodate a wider network.