The Lawyer and the Machine
What six years of building legal tech taught me about being a lawyer.
In 2012, I started my first law firm that became Innove Law.
I was 4 years out of law school.
I had no anchor clients. It took me 6 months to find a niche, another 6 to build relationships. And 18 months before I had enough work to hire my first associate.
Even after that, it was a game of chance. Word of mouth, a few key relationships, and my writing drove most of our business.
We fumbled too, even when the service was great. We fired a client that would turn into a whale. Training colleagues to replicate what I could deliver was satisfying, and often successful - but it meant letting them burn their fingers without letting clients get burned.
It all compounds. There are only so many clients you can serve, only so many associates you can hire, only so much value expanding the partnership will bring.
Now let’s look at it from the client’s perspective.
I fought for them. They trusted me. I had no fear - no matter how big the counterparty, how influential, how much they disliked me. I was proud of my independence and cared about my clients to a fault.
But the infrastructure was as traditional as they come.
If a client wasn’t willing to wait for us to put our mind to it. If they didn’t understand we had other clients. If they wanted something yesterday and arrived tomorrow. If they expected me on every document, every call, every piece of advice no matter how routine. If they didn’t treat my colleagues right. If they didn’t like to pay by the hour. The ifs were long.
When you can only take on so many clients and everything is handcrafted like it was centuries ago, this is the only model that works.
I found this limiting, and that’s how I started spending more of my time on language processing, machine learning - the things that, in 2020, seemed to hold some hope for this to change.
Six years on.
I built platforms and automations for lawyers that I am proud of. Things we put out are used by over 500+ lawyers now, and in the past three years, by five times that number.
This journey has required me to sit at the cutting edge of two specialised fields simultaneously - the business of corporate legal work, and the world of language models and AI. At all times having to know both: how great lawyering looks today, and what needs to happen for software to work well in production.
It has now come full circle.
I always put my money where my mouth is. And I am doubling down.
The point of it all - then and now, is to deliver legal services of the highest quality, at scale. Without the ifs. Without the buts.
The lawyer and the technologist were never supposed to be different people.