Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast Charles Uniman

Tanguy's and Mike's Respective Backgrounds and Path into Legal Tech: Tanguy is an engineer with advanced degrees (including an MBA) from MIT and experience in venture capital, notably early-stage investing in legal tech startups (one of such startups being Ironclad) Mike has a background that includes working at the Federal Reserve, McKinsey, and co-founding a company that applied AI in the insurance space. Mike’s experience with AI and legal/regulatory challenges contributed to starting Paxton. Paxton's Recent Award: Celebrated being one of the winners at the 2024 ABA Tech Show Startup Alley Paxton's Technology and Approach: Focuses on developing industry-specific, application-specific, and firm-specific legal language models for greater accuracy, response speed, and security. The data for model training includes public domain legal documents, emphasizing legal-specific training over general-purpose models. Paxton enables customization for firms by allowing connections to internal knowledge sources without training the model on client-specific data unless requested. Applications of Paxton: Legal Research: Provides access to laws, regulations, and court rulings across all states and federal levels. Document Drafting: Uses a vast corpus of legal documents to assist in drafting accurate first drafts of legal documents. Document Analysis: Offers document analysis and Q&A capabilities for large volumes of documents, ensuring data privacy and governance for firms. Use Case for Training Young Lawyers: Paxton aids in training younger lawyers by allowing them to ask questions and practice without fear of judgment, enhancing their learning and confidence. Future Roadmap: Paxton plans to develop more advanced language models, connect to more data sources, and execute multi-step workflows for synthesized answers from various data sources. Advice for Legal Tech Startups: Tanguy and Mike emphasize the importance of being customer-centric, seeking feedback, and iterating based on user input to improve and refine the product.

In this podcast episode, Jackie shares her personal journey from working as a lawyer to founding Clearbrief, an AI-powered litigation analysis tool that integrates with Microsoft Word to assist with research, citations, and document management.
Jackie and Charlie discuss the challenges women founders face in getting venture capital attention and support, even when their offerings are high quality. Jackie spoke about the importance of women legal tech startup leaders speaking confidently about their product and its market prospects (especially when, as was the case with Jackie’s own early product development efforts, the assessment of product prospects is based on feedback arising out of literally hundreds of customer interviews).
Charlie and Jackie also talk about the difficulties of marketing a product to senior law firm decision-makers (who, after all, control budgets) based not only on the product’s firm-wide and enterprise-wide benefits but also on the product’s prospects for improving the quality of life for junior lawyers and paralegals.
Charlie and Jackie cover the implications of AI on the legal profession, including AI’s potential impact on billing practices as technology continues to drive efficiency.

In this episode, your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Dan Broderick discuss:
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.

        
· Otto is CEO of TermScout, which provides data and analytics on market terms in contracts to reduce friction in negotiations.

· Otto was motivated to start TermScout after seeing startups overpay for legal services due to a lack of data on market terms.

· TermScout uses AI and human review to analyze contracts and provide market data on common clauses.

· TermScout's offering helps lawyers know what's "market" to resolve disputes over contract terms. TermScout's customers are both the contracting parties and their legal teams.

· TermScout also offers contract certification to validate a vendor's contract as balanced and have it labeled as such.

· Otto sees room for more contract standardization not only by way of the use of standard forms, but also through the standardization of various contracts' overall concepts.

· When it comes to the interoperation of various legal tech vendors' offerings, Otto and Charlie discuss how legal tech tools should ideally interoperate via APIs using a standard schema.

· Otto and Charlie also consider how the onus is on legal tech companies to coordinate standards and seamless interoperability to improve customer experience and reduce the drag on software use that comes from having to constantly shift among different legal tech applications.

Mat Kerbis founded Subscription Attorney LLC to offer legal services through recurring monthly fees rather than hourly billing; in that way better aligning incentives between lawyer and client.       Going solo allowed Mat the freedom to innovate with new billing models, which is harder at larger firms wedded to the billable hour.       The subscription model expands affordable access to legal help, helping close the "justice gap."       Mat leverages legal tech and other automation strategies to work efficiently and keep costs low as a virtual solo practitioner who charges on a subscription basis.       When developing their product offerings, legal tech companies should consider the needs of subscription model law firms as a growing niche.        An "all-in-one" solution tailored to subscription law firms could integrate practice management, document automation, intake, billing, etc.        Mat's "Law Subscribed" podcast profiles lawyers using alternative fee arrangements and also features the tech enabling new models beyond the billable hour.        The legal industry needs new models like subscription-based billing as it competes for talent against fields with better lifestyles and fewer grueling hours.        Mat aims to spread the subscription model to save the legal profession and head off competition from alternative legal services.    
Mat's Subscription Attorney Website:  https://subscriptionattorney.com/
Mat's LawSubscribed Podcast: https://lawsubscribed.com/#podcast

Podcast host, Charlie Uniman, and Steve Fretzin discuss:
Lawyers need training in business development and client relations, which is not taught in law school. Technology can help lawyers be more efficient, so they have time for business development.  
Social media is a great marketing equalizer that allows individual lawyers, as well as small-to-medium-sized firms, to build their brand and get their voice out, social media's certainly not just for big firms.  
Automating scheduling, email outreach, and content creation through technology frees up lawyer time and builds relationships through organization and consistency.  
Becoming a thought leader takes consistency and multiple touches, through content creation, networking, writing, and speaking engagements. Business coaches can help too.  
Leveraging virtual assistants, marketing professionals, and technologies like chatGPT allows lawyers to focus on their strengths and delegate marketing tasks.  
Tracking marketing data and metrics helps assess what's working through things like CRMs (though CRM adoption is slow).   
Investing time and money in marketing coaching provides high ROI through increased business and, in larger firms, control over one's career. Lawyers should learn enough to guide the process rather than do it all.  
Steve's website: https://www.fretzin.com/
All Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast episodes at:  https://legalfocus.libsyn.com/