Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast

The Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast covers the startups that develop and sell legal tech products and services. Through interviews with legal tech startup founders, investors, customers and others with an interest in this startup sector, the podcast's host, Charlie Uniman, and his guests will discuss such topics as startup management and startup life, startup investing, marketing and sales, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how customers purchase legal tech. In short, the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast will focus on just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.

Episode 57 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Tanguy Chau, co-founder & CEO of Paxton and Michael Ulin, co-founder and CTO of Paxton 03/14/2024

Episode 57 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Tanguy Chau, co-founder & CEO of Paxton and Michael Ulin, co-founder and CTO of Paxton 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. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/30378348

Episode 56 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A conversation with Jackie Schafer, founder and CEO of Clearbrief 11/24/2023

Episode 55 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO of Blackboiler 11/01/2023

Episode 54 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A Conversation with Otto Hanson, CEO of TermScout 08/07/2023

Episode 53 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A Conversation with Mathew Kerbis, founder of Subscription Attorney and evangelist for the subscription legal services business model 07/24/2023

Episode 52 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - A Conversation with Steve Fretzin, Podcast Host of BE THAT LAWYER and Legal Business Development Coach for Lawyers 07/15/2023

Episode 51 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast)-- An Interview with Gaurav Oberoi - CEO and co-founder of Lexion 05/22/2023

Episode 51 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast)-- An Interview with Gaurav Oberoi - CEO and co-founder of Lexion In this 51st podcast episode, your podcast host Charlie Uniman interviews Gaurav Oberoi, CEO and co-founder of Lexion (). Gaurav talks about how, as a software developer and not a lawyer but who recognized the potential of natural language processing AI, he ventured into the legal tech industry. He co-founded Lexion to focus on making sense of contracts for corporate enterprises. During its history, Lexion transformed from being a simple repository for contracts to a CLM for an entire organization that serves as an operational workflow platform to speed up deals. Gaurav also describes how Lexion harnesses AI to, among other things, enhance contract visibility, manage renewals and reminders, and provide powerful search and reporting features. According to Gaurav: Some of Lexion’s chief areas of focus include customer requirements and rapid implementation, and learning from competitors' shortcomings (notably, the high failure rates of CLMs generally). Lexion found that other CLM systems' complexities and steep learning curves significantly deter adoption. So, Lexion designed its system to integrate seamlessly into an organization's existing workflow, offering immediate functionality without requiring extensive setup or training. This, and Lexion’s focus on integrating with platforms like email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, promotes high adoption rates. Lexion has recently raised funds in an environment of challenging macroeconomic conditions and increased diligence from potential investors. Gaurav attributes Lexion’s recent fundraising success to, in part, the company's robust business model, dedicated team, high customer retention, and high user engagement. As Gaurav notes, Lexion's vision to serve corporate operations teams and not just the legal department (by giving just a couple of examples, automating standardized sales contracts and employment offer letters) was also an attraction to potential investors. Gaurav concludes the podcast by describing some of Lexion’s guiding business principles, including the company’s obsession with the customer, an insistence on clear written communication among team members, and a company-wide commitment to transparency regarding company direction and individual and team performance. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/26914848

Episode 50 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) -- An Interview with Kevin Miller, CEO of LegalSifter (www.legalsifter.com) 05/02/2023

Episode 49 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) -- An Interview with Andy Hoyt, CTO of Aderant (www.aderant.com) 04/13/2023

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Episode 48 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) - An Interview with Mike Zouhri and Bryan Saunders of Painworth (www.painworth.com) 02/13/2023

Episode 47 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - A Conversation with Jerry Ting, Founder and CEO of Evisort 09/22/2022

pisode 46 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Zach Posner, co-founder and Managing Partner of The Legal Tech Fund 08/17/2022

Episode 45 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), an interview with Luke Yingling, founder and CEO of Analytica Legalis (www.analyticalegalis.com). 07/08/2022

Episode 44 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Susann Funke, CEO and co-founder of LEX AI 06/01/2022

Episode 43 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Jace Lynch, COO of HyperDraft, and Sean Greaney, HyperDraft's General Counsel 05/10/2022

Episode 42 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Raman Malik, Founder and CEO of Rhetoric 04/25/2022

Episode 41 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Scott Leigh, Co-Founder and CEO of AltFee 04/12/2022

Episode 40 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Christy Burke founder of Burke & Company 03/23/2022

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - An Interview with Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of TrialView 01/27/2022

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - An Interview with Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of TrialView In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), podcast host Charlie Uniman interviews Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of Dublin, Ireland-based Trialview. As TrialView puts it on its website (www.trialview.com}: "Quickly and easily digitise the trial process and save time, effort and money. . . . [Moreover,] TrialView’s unique synchronising technology enables document led hearings to be conducted remotely." We learn from Stephen how his founding of TrialView began, as is the case with many other legal tech startup founders, with frustrations he faced while practicing law. Stephen explains that, as a junior trial lawyer working on long-running litigations, he wondered why his and his colleagues' wrangling with many thousands of documents couldn't be handled better with the introduction of digital technologies. As Stephen's developed his thinking about the "digitization of trial work," he came to realize that it it went beyond just the digitizing document review (a step that was already being addressed by e-discovery companies). As Stephen came to see it, digitization tools could also be applied to the task of coordinating, in real time at trial: (i) the presentation of trial documents and (ii) the collaboration among the parties to the litigation in dealing with those documents and their presentation in court. Stephen goes on to discuss, among other topics: (A) How TrialView went from its first, very minimum viable, product to the initial funding round for the company and the company's development of a fully-featured trial management tool. (B) The way in which the COVID pandemic accelerated TrialView's development of video features in support of trials and other dispute resolution mechanisms that were required to be conducted on a fully-remote basis. (C) Stephen's belief that, even post-pandemic, we will witness a hybrid approach to conducting trials, mediations and arbitrations (where much of what was formerly done in-person will be carried out remotely, but with a core set of dispute elements more frequently than not being handled in-person). (D) What marketing approaches TrialView has taken successfully, especially in the face of getting both judges and frequently litigating parties (such as insurance companies) "on board" with TrialView's use (with Stephen also pointing out here how TrialView has partnered with companies that handle trial-related tasks outside of TrialView's purview to call attention to TrialView's offering) . (E) TrialView's penetration of markets outside Ireland and the UK, including especially its targeting of the deposition-taking market in the US (F) How Stephen and his TrialView colleagues are most proud of the role TrialView played in keeping Irish courts functioning at the outset of the COVID pandemic. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/21922526

Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ 01/03/2022

Episode 37 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal 11/15/2021

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Rich Lee, co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR 11/01/2021

Ep 035 Interview with Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase 10/14/2021

Ep 034 Interview with Jeremy Small and Jon Bartman of Jameson Legal Tech 09/27/2021

Ep 033 Interview with Jonathan Fish and Kyle Richles of Cap Gains Inc. 09/07/2021

Ep 033 Interview with Jonathan Fish and Kyle Richles of Cap Gains Inc. Episode 33 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Jonathan Fish and Kyle Richless, co- founders of Cap Gains Inc. and QSBS Expert In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Jonathan Fish and Kyle Richless of Cap Gains Inc. and QSBS Expert (). QSBS Expert is Cap Gains Inc.’s first offering, one that helps startup founders, investors, and lawyers (among other startup stakeholders) understand the nuances of a significant US tax exemption that’s available to eligible startups and their investors that qualify for this exemption’s use. Jonathan and Kyle each first explain how their professional backgrounds led them to their co-founding Cap Gains Inc. and the introduction of Cap Gains Inc.’s QSBS Expert offering. The “main event” follows as Jonathan and Kyle explain just what QSBS is and why it matters to startups and startup stakeholders. Hint: QSBS stands for “qualified small business stock” and refers to what can be a financially significant US federal (and possibly state-level) tax exemption. Pay attention startups first, because there can be “real” money at stake here and second, because the availability of that potential for tax savings, as Jonathan and Kyle further explain, is subject to eligibility and qualification criteria that are chock full of nuance and possible trip wires that, if tripped, can “bust” the tax exemption’s availability. So, with Jonathan’s and Kyle’s able assistance, we get an overview of the history of the QSBS exemption, its motiving policy and some of the pitfalls to consider (and avoid if possible) to preserve the exemption’s availability for otherwise eligible and qualifying startups and investors. Jonathan and Kyle go on to describe just what kinds of services QSBS Expert offers when it comes to understanding and taking advantage of this exemption. Given the complexities of the law and regulations applicable to this exemption, QSBS Expert’s service offering can be tax exemption-preserving tool that’s well worth exploring. Charlie, Jonathan and Kyle conclude the podcast with the latter two discussing “words of startup wisdom” (WOSW?) that legal tech startup leaders should find helpful in managing their startup’s business. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/20393732

Ep 032 Interview with Jason Gabbard, Founder of JUSTLAW 08/05/2021

Ep 032 Interview with Jason Gabbard, Founder of JUSTLAW Episode 32 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Jason Gabbard, founder of JUSTLAW In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Jason Gabbard, the founder of JUSTLAW(www.just.law) a startup that, as it writes on its website, offers families, individuals and small business “legal matters covered by our [monthly] protection plan.” Jason dives right into a recounting of his career and, we learn, it is a varied one from a business standpoint. After law school, Jason spends four years in corporate law at NYC law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Jason goes on from there (i) to found, in the early 2000’s, a “distributed” law firm, (ii) to create a legal tech startup in 2010 that extracts M&A deal clauses from SEC databases and that, with humans in-the-loop, also analyzes those clauses and (iii) to found Counselytics, another legal tech startup, one that automates much of the analytics that went into Jason’s previous startup’s clause-based work. Jason has successful exits from both of the above-mentioned startups. And, in fact, for several years works at Conga, the company that acquired Counselytics. All this leads to Charlie and Jason discussing the (over?) abundance of companies in the CLM space and the frothiness in the market for investing in legal tech startup (and in startups, in general). Charlie and Jason next turn to Jason’s latest venture, called JUSTLAW, that aggregates small business demand for legal services and surfaces that demand to solo and small/medium-sized firm practitioners. What’s of particular note here is that the practitioners charge for their services available on the basis of a tiered monthly subscription model (with the tiers corresponding to different levels of lawyer services). Jason concludes this podcast episode with words of wisdom to other legal tech startup founders/leaders (i) who are eyeing (or may someday eye) an M&A exit, (ii) whose startups are deluged with customer feature requests, (iii) who are building senior level teams and (iv) who are just moving from practicing law to starting up a legal company. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/20044415

Ep 031 Interview with Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean 07/20/2021

Ep 031 Interview with Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean Episode 31 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean (www.tonkean.com). Tonkean describes itself on its website as a set of no-code software tools that enables business people (including, of course, lawyers and allied legal professionals) to “Automate complex business processes, fast.” Michael begins the podcast by describing how he arrived at Tonkean. Michael’s journey saw him begin his career as a software engineer. From that role Michael moved on to more customer-facing roles, involving product management and software deployment. Michael next spent several years as a member of Google’s legal operations team. At Google, Michael became a Tonkean customer himself when he became central to the roll-out of Tonkean software to Google’s legal ops team members and others at Google. (At this juncture, Charlie and Michael talk about the increasingly important role that legal operations is coming to play at in-house legal departments worldwide.) Now at Tonkean, Michael helps to bring Tonkean’s process automation software to law firms and in-house legal departments. Michael next describes just what Tonkean’s software does, with an emphasis (not surprisingly) on how Tonkean’s process automation software applies to work carried out by in-house legal departments and law firms. Essentially, Tonkean’s web-based tools gives non-coders the opportunity to use intuitive drag-and-drop functionality to build workflows. These workflows, in turn, permit data of many different kinds to move among the pieces of software that lawyers and allied legal professionals are already familiar with. By way of just a couple of examples, legal ops team members, paralegals and lawyers — who, being subject matter experts when it comes to matters like conflict waivers and client intake procedures — can automate (without needing any coding skills) start-to-finish conflict-waiver workflows or client intake workflows. And, as Michael points our later in the podcast, with Tonkean’s not requiring coding and involving only software with which a lawyer and his or her law firm or legal department colleagues are already familiar, there’s little, if any, change management effort necessary to encourage that use. Charlie asks Michael what it’s like to be marketing and selling to law firms and legal departments out of a company like Tonkean that isn’t devoted exclusively to the legal tech vertical. In answering, Michael notes that Tonkean’s software is aimed at any business person who needs to funnel data through a workflow quickly and efficiently and that the business person in question can certainly be a lawyer. That said, Michael goes on to explain that Tonkean does make a strong effort to be involved with “legal,” including having a membership in CLOC (the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and having a section dedicated to legal operations in its online learning center. /episode/index/show/legalfocus/id/19872713

Ep 030 Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala 05/26/2021

Ep 030 Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala 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/index/show/legalfocus/id/19247570

Ep 029 Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software 05/13/2021

Ep 028 Interview with Jim Chiang Founder and CEO of My Legal Einstein 04/23/2021

Ep 028 Interview with Jim Chiang Founder and CEO of My Legal Einstein 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/index/show/legalfocus/id/18836255

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast

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