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.
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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.
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Episode 56 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A conversation with Jackie Schafer, founder and CEO of Clearbrief
11/24/2023
Episode 56 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A conversation with Jackie Schafer, founder and CEO of Clearbrief
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.
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Episode 55 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO of Blackboiler
11/01/2023
Episode 55 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO of Blackboiler
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.
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Episode 54 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A Conversation with Otto Hanson, CEO of TermScout
08/07/2023
Episode 54 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- A Conversation with Otto Hanson, CEO of TermScout
· 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.
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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 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
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: Mat's LawSubscribed Podcast:
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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 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
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: All Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast episodes at:
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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.
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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 50 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) -- An Interview with Kevin Miller, CEO of LegalSifter (www.legalsifter.com)
Among the subjects that your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, discusses with Kevin are: What does LegalSifter do and how does it do it? The hype cycle of AI. The growth of the company? Finding the right investor for a legal tech startup. Partnering with other companies. Regulatory reform in Arizona.
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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
Episode 49 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) -- An Interview with Andy Hoyt, CTO of Aderant (www.aderant.com)
At the outset of the podcast, Andy shares his professional background, which spans over 20 years in the technology industry, building software solutions for various industries. He also talks about his transition to legal tech and his excitement about the future of innovation in the industry. Charlie and Andy discuss Aderant's broad functionalities, including practice management, litigation management, billing, recruiting, and knowledge management. Andy turns next to his current focus on innovation and disruption in the legal industry through data analytics and AI. Andy mentions Aderant's upcoming Momentum conference (May 2023), where it plans to unveil new technology for the legal tech space. Andy and Charlie close the podcast by covering futuristic legal tech trends (including blockchain (not "crypto") and the metaverse), Aderant's plans for staying ahead of the technology curve, and the pride that Aderant takes in its ability to evolve with the changing needs of clients and its continuing to be a leader in the market.
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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
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)
Our guests today are Mike Zourhi, the co-founder and CEO of Painworth, and Bryan Saunders, Painworth's Director of Growth, Marketing, & UX/UI. Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us his story where, as the victim of a hit-and-run by a drunk driver, Mike was inspired to create Painworth. Mike and Bryan describe Painworth's aim: to be the "voice" of the personal injury victim in settlement discussions of the victim's claims. Painworth does this by educating the victim with award estimates for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages that will carry weight with lawyers and insurance adjusters because they are based on Painworth's machine learning-driven reviews of relevant court-based and other documentation relevant to award calculation. Painworth's secret sauce is that it was built for use by personal injury victims (i.e., "regular people") themselves. Mike, Bryan, and Charlie discuss: - How Painworth simplifies processes for its users without sacrificing its use of a sophisticated approach at the back-end for award estimation, - Painworth's process for educating its "regular-people" customers in its web app's use and its processes for iterating on UI/UX improvements. - Painworth's roll-out plans for a US-based web app, - How Painworth has succeeded in gaining acceptance by both lawyers and insurance adjusters for Painworth’s use by personal injury victims, and - Business events that Mike and Bryan are most proud of to date.
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Episode 47 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - A Conversation with Jerry Ting, Founder and CEO of Evisort
09/22/2022
Episode 47 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - A Conversation with Jerry Ting, Founder and CEO of Evisort
Podcast host, Charlie Uniman, sits down (virtually) with Jerry Ting of Evisort to talk about: (i) How Jerry planted the seed for founding Evisort while still a student at Harvard Law School (and the role that serendipity played in Jerry's finding his co-founder), (ii) what law schools can (should?) do when it comes to training lawyers-to-be in the art of legal innovation and what perspective law students can bring to innovation in legal, (iii) just what it is that Evisort does in the contract lifecycle management space (with the discussion focusing on, among other things, Evisort's out-of-the-box usability and how Evisort really does help take the grunt work out of contract review), (iv) Evisort's success in marketing to in-house legal departments and other business enterprise personnel involved with contracts (here Jerry covers how Evisort has achieved success by helping those departments transform from being a "brake" on enterprise success to becoming a "gas pedal" that accelerates business success), and (v) the very personally gratifying story behind one of the business successes that Jerry and his team are most proud of to date.
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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
pisode 46 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Zach Posner, co-founder and Managing Partner of The Legal Tech Fund
Episode 46 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) - An Interview with Zach Posner, co-founder and Managing of The Legal Tech Fund (www.legaltech.com) Interested in the subject of how legal tech startups can get funded? Thought so - that's why this is a "must listen" episode. Here Zach Posner of The Legal Tech Fund (TLTF) (i) talks about fund-pitching strategies, (ii) offers advice for legal tech startups when facing the headwinds in today's economy and (iii) discusses TLTF's forthcoming Summit conference (December 7 - 9, 2022 in Miami; register here by the November 23, 2022 deadline: https://www.tltfsummit.com) and the Summit's StartUp Challenge (apply here by the August 31, 2022 deadline:(https://www.tltfsummit.com/apply-now) ).
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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 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).
Luke Yingling founded his legal tech startup, Analytica Legalis, about a year ago during his second year in law school. As you'll hear from Luke, his company has already raised its pre-revenue seed-stage financing and is looking forward to launching its beta version (with law firm beta testers already lined up and eager to go) this coming August. Hear Luke (a) chart his path from law student to legal tech startup founder, (b) relate how, as a student entrepreneur, he was able to take advantage of programs at his law school and elsewhere aimed at assisting very early-stage student-founded startups, (c) describe what Analytica Legalis does and how it distinguishes itself from other tools for litigators that analyze judges' opinions, (d) explain the preparations his company undertook to ready itself for its beta testing program, (d) also explain how he attracted investors that were interested in funding a pre-revenue legal tech startup, (e) discuss the importance of data visualization techniques for making his company's UI intuitive and easy-to-use and (f) tell listeners of the pride he and his team have taken in generating both commercial and academic excitement for the results available from the built "from-the-ground-up" version of Analytica Legalis' machine learning software and in innovating in the judge analytics space.
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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 44 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Susann Funke, CEO and co-founder of LEX AI
Episode 44 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), an interview with Susann Funke, co-founder and CEO of LEX AI (www.lexai.co). As Susann tells us, LEX AI has built proprietary natural language processing tools that automate the preparation of accurate and readable summaries of often voluminous regulations for use by lawyers and business people alike. From there, Susann charts her path from practicing law to co-founding LEX AI . In doing so, Susann describes how a massive client project - with a very tight deadline - motivated her to find a way to automate the immense amount of manual effort that the project required. Susann also explains how LEX AI: - has developed key metrics that show how its tools free timekeepers from low value work that clients won't pay for - gathers valuable feedback from its top-of -funnel sales efforts - has benefitted from building a diversified team, particularly when it comes to its solution building and cross-border marketing efforts - uses social media (including Instagram and soon TikTok) to bolster its marketing efforts (particularly among younger lawyers and younger business people) - finds a welcoming user base inside law school and university classrooms
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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 43 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Jace Lynch, COO of HyperDraft, and Sean Greaney, HyperDraft's General Counsel
Episode 43 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast () -- An interview with Jace Lynch, COO of HyperDraft (), and Sean Greaney, HyperDraft's General Counsel. HyperDraft is an AI-driven full service document generation, editing and closing platform for lawyers and other legal professionals. Listen to Jace and Sean describe: (1) HyperDraft's origin story, (2) their company's commitment to designed-in simplicity and ease of use, (3) HyperDraft's own brand of customer on-boarding (ranging from an intuitive UI, helpful app tools tips, written materials and video explainers), (4) their aim to expand from currently targeting North American customers to targeting the European legal tech market next, (5) their successin selling HyperDraft to boutique and other SMB law firms, as well as to solo practitioners and (6) how and why they are most proud of HyperDraft's team, product value, software development responsiveness and short time-to-value for HyperDraft's customers.
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Episode 42 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Raman Malik, Founder and CEO of Rhetoric
04/25/2022
Episode 42 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Raman Malik, Founder and CEO of Rhetoric
Episode 42 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast) -- An Interview with Raman Malik, founder and CEO of Rhetoric (www.rhetoric.app) Most leaders at legal tech startups present at one time or another to existing and prospective stakeholders (most importantly, to customer and investor prospects). So, it stands to reason that those leaders could use an app that makes getting presentation feedback as easy as clicking a button. Raman and his team have designed Rhetoric to be just that app; a "Grammarly for presentations," if you will (as Rhetoric itself puts it on its website) . Raman discusses (1) how Rhetoric works, (2) the growing importance of asynchronous presentation-giving, (3) several of Rhetoric's chief use cases and (4) Rhetoric's success in closing a seed round. Raman also gives some presentation-making pointers of his own (including his noting of two common presentation mistakes; namely, not soliciting enough feedback and ignoring the importance of tailoring the sequencing of a presentation’s topics for each different audience group). Finally, Raman explains how he and his team pride themselves on how carefully they define their goals, while at the same time being open to goal-revision as the Rhetoric team strives to learn, iterate and improve quickly.
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Episode 41 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Scott Leigh, Co-Founder and CEO of AltFee
04/12/2022
Episode 41 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Scott Leigh, Co-Founder and CEO of AltFee
In this 41st episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (), we lear that guest Scott Leigh's company, AltFee () is on a mission. And that mission is to help lawyers (whether practicing solo, at small or medium-sized firms or at Big Law law firms) gain the freedom to implement alternative fee arrangements and break out of the billable hour model. We'll hear Scott talk about how he and his team have created an app that brings repeatable methods to lawyer/client alternative fee discussions - an app that, among other things: (1) encourages healthy and disciplined upfront conversations about matter scoping and (2) brings greater transparency to alternative fee setting. Moreover, Scott describes how AltFee's app helps lawyers build a repository of alternative fee setting best practices where lawyers (senior and junior) can go for guidance as new matters arise. Scott also talks about his company's "land and expand" strategy when selling into law firms and about the pride that he and his colleagues take in AltFee's thought leadership efforts to educate lawyers about alternative fee arrangement management. In addition, Scott provides insight into AltFee's app design and post-sale customer success efforts.
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Episode 40 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Christy Burke founder of Burke & Company
03/23/2022
Episode 40 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Christy Burke founder of Burke & Company
Episode 40 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Christy Burke, Founder of Burke & Company In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Christy Burke, founder of Burke & Company (www.burke-company.com). As Burke & Company says on its website, "Legal technology providers need strong, creative PR representation to market successfully. Since 2004, Burke & Company has provided the highest standard in PR and marketing for legal tech." In addition to discussing how Christy came to found her company and what kinds of communications-related services her company provides firms and companies in legal and legal tech, Christy offers listeners a "masterclass" on legal tech sales-related communications by providing some answers to the following questions: (i) What are the most significant steps that legal tech startup leaders can take to “up their game” when it comes to communicating their company’s value proposition to law firms and in-house legal departments? (ii) What are some of the chief “unforced errors” that you’ve seen legal tech startup leaders commit in dealing with the press and in undertaking social media campaigns? (iii) Because legal tech startup founders often ask for tips on establishing their thought leadership bona fides, are there any pointers that you can offer to assist them in using their already existing subject-matter expertise to enhance their credibility as thought leaders?
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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.
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Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ
01/03/2022
Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ
Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Legal Q (). As LegalQ describes its offering on its website, “Searching [for an attorney] online feels overwhelming. Referrals from friends and family leading to dead ends. Often the only way to get legal help is by talking to an attorney. Use the LegalQ app to get help today [and] a licensed attorney will help you [to]: Know your options and legal rights, Avoid common legal pitfalls and mistakes, [and] Get personalized guidance for unique legal issues.” After talking about Zeb’s professional background and LegalQ’s product, Charlie’s discussion with Zeb digs deeply into: Given the need to reach customers in mass, “retail-like,” markets, LegalQ’s go-to-market and marketing strategies (and, more particularly, how those strategies entail Google searches, Facebook ads and, more generally, search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization strategies) The iterative process that LegalQ uses refine its app design, improve its customer onboarding and, most interestingly, revise its core revenue model (well after LegalQ’s initial launch) in light of market reactions to its initial business model approach LegalQ’s use of analytical tools to understand the most cost-effective ways to lower customer acquisition costs The importance for LegalQ of making a great senior marketing hire LegalQ’s ambitious (and access-to-justice driven) mission statement (a mission attributable, at least in part, to LegalQ’s participation in the TechStars program).
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Episode 37 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal
11/15/2021
Episode 37 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal
Episode 37 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal. On its website (), Dashboard Legal writes of its value proposition: "Tired of switching between email threads, apps and workarounds? Dashboard Legal lets you and your team work right from your inbox - by transforming it into a unified workspace for all the materials related to a case or transaction." Mat and Charlie talk about the following topics during this episode: How Mat's experience working as a law firm deal lawyer led him to build a suite of tools that creates an "inbox-first" universal view of a deal or litigation that helps to solve the organizational and collaboration roadblocks that Mat confronted when he practiced law, What Dashboard Legal does to systematize legal matter workflows and encourage lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration, while at the same time allowing its users to continue using software that they've long used as part of their day-to-day work (e.g., such as word processing and email apps like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook), The growing importance of collaboration among legal professionals and the benefits that such collaboration offers those professionals (not least of which is the improvement of one's "lifestyle" at work), and What approaches Dashboard Legal has taken to market its offering (including participation in partner-channels such as Reynen Court and Jameson Legal Tech) and how important a part the building of relationships with customers plays in Dashboard Legal's marketing.
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Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Rich Lee, co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR
11/01/2021
Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Rich Lee, co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR
Episode 36 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Rich Lee, a co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Rich Lee, a co-founder and CEO of New Era ADR. On its website (), New Era ADR says “Use smarter, more intuitive tools to get to resolution faster with some of the most experienced mediators and arbitrators in the industry. Do it all from home or anywhere in the world on our fully-digital platform. Get everything done in one place, without everyone being in one place. Don’t waste your time, money, or energy on logistics or fighting, make it simple with New Era ADR.” Here are some topics that Rich and Charlie discuss: How Rich made his way from law school to co-founding New Era ADR. How Rich’s experience as a GC and also as a business person at IP-related businesses (where he confronted first hand the expense and inefficiencies of litigating disputes in court) informs his vision for New Era ADR. What’s New Era ADR’s secret sauce when it comes to providing a software-based approach to alternative dispute resolution? (Hint: Among other things, shorter times-to-resolution, a “virtual first” approach, an emphasis on UX and the customer experience, and versatility as a platform that enables New Era ADR to handle not only disputes that involve commercially sophisticated parties, but also disputes that involve consumers and disputes that have A2J implications)? What business successes are Rich and his co-founders most proud of to date.
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Ep 035 Interview with Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase
10/14/2021
Ep 035 Interview with Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase
Episode 35 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Senne Mennes, a co-founder of ClauseBase. On its website (), ClauseBase speaks of itself as “. . . [going] beyond simple template editors, offering you all the power you need to draft complex documents.” Here are some of the topics that Charlie and Senne discuss in this episode: How did Senne find his way to co-founding a legal tech startup? What does ClauseBase’s product offering do for lawyers? In what markets does ClauseBase make its product offering available? What marketing and sales channels has ClauseBase found most success (and what such channels have been less successful)? What is ClauseBases’s process for successful customer onboarding? How does ClauseBase avoid becoming “shelfware?” Of what business successes is Senne most proud?
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Ep 034 Interview with Jeremy Small and Jon Bartman of Jameson Legal Tech
09/27/2021
Ep 034 Interview with Jeremy Small and Jon Bartman of Jameson Legal Tech
In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Jeremy Small, CEO of Jameson Legal and Jon Bartman, Head of Jameson Legal Tech, a division of Jameson Legal (www.jamesonlegal.com/jameson-legal-tech). On its website, Jameson Legal Tech describes itself as follows: “With a focus on Legal Tech software sales and strategic advice, as well as Legal Tech recruitment, our specialist team is a trusted adviser to Legal Tech Vendors as well as In-House and Private Practice Legal Operations departments.” Here are the highlights what Jeremy, Jon and Charlie discussed during this episode: - How did Jameson Legal Tech “grow” out of Jameson Legal? - Just what kind of services does Jameson Legal Tech offer the participants in its two-sided market (as of today, those participants consisting of: (i) legal tech companies that need assistance in their marketing and sales efforts and (ii) law firms and in-house legal departments looking to license legal tech software solutions)? What additional services is Jameson Legal Tech considering offering in the future? - Which legal tech companies currently comprise Jameson Legal Tech’s software solutions platform? - In what markets does Jameson Legal Tech currently offer its services? - What accounts for today’s interest in the creation of, and participation in, legal tech marketing consortiums like Jameson Legal Tech?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ep 029 Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software
05/13/2021
Ep 029 Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software
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.
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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.
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