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Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

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Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#81

Post by r00fus »

yannyu wrote: post #3

There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and firms want, but it seems to have hit a local maxima for one major reason: nearly all the software and tools are written around Microsoft Word and the Office suite. Anyone wanting to disrupt the legal industry (in the US) is going to have to deal with MS Word in o…

I think the "track changes" in Word is the killer feature that's used - if that could be replaced and the editor can read/write .docx you could pitch a wholesale replacement of MS Office.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#82

Post by will_brown »

redler wrote: post #73
will_brown wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year I sold my interest in a startup with a patent application for SLAP (Statutory Litigation Automated Pricing) we partnered with law firms and were consumer facing automating law firm fee calculation and hiring online. After that I worked with Walmart to develop a "self serve legal kiosk" for use in Walmart stores with another vendor. At some point with the former project I was in talks with both legalzoom and…

I'm a workhorse, having ran 27 half marathons last month. Sorry for the off topic question, but... whoa. Can you talk briefly about how this works?

Just a random goal I gave myself (to do 31 consecutive actually) pretty cool experience because for the most part I ran with "Raven", a streak runner who has run 8 miles on south beach every day for 42+ years. [1] Obviously a guy who has run 124,000 miles (nearly 5x around earth or to the moon and back), through pain, through hurricanes, etc... is pretty inspirational. I ran 5-6 miles on the boardwalk on my own before the Raven Run usually having a peanut or almond butter sandwich and water between. I run for fun but that mileage is 3x the month before, all attributable to the somewhat arbitrary goal I gave myself.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#83

Post by rayiner »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
rayiner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of dozens of competitors is the #1 marker of a highly competitive market. I'm not sure what basis you have for raising "the possibility of price fixing on an industry wide scale" (other than that is theoretically possible in any market). In my experience pitching big companies for legal matters, the process is quite formalized. When presented with a new matter, a company will interview several firms to…

Even the worst lawyers still charge 100's of $/E per hour and to get certain services performed you have to go through a lawyer. Now, I've met some - very few - lawyers that were worth their rates (one of which is commenting in this thread) but for the most part it is simply a title that in and of itself seems to make a mediocre performer suddenly worth a very large amount of money on an hourly basis. The funny thing…

In the U.S. at least, Department of Justice antitrust litigation has prevented law schools from artificially limiting the supply of lawyers. There are about twice as many law graduates each year as job openings. If you just need someone with a law license, you can hire them for $20/hour on craigslist.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#84

Post by vqc »

rayiner wrote: post #46
pnmahoney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can vouch for the fact that legal technology as a category does not address the needs of lawyers. And which is obvious to most practicing attorneys. As an example: > "spend less time [billing] on research" is not, and never will be, an effective value proposition; and which would be obvious to anyone in anything but the most niche putt-putt fields of practice. Rayiner is of course authority enough on this subject q…

> "spend less time [billing] on research" is not, and never will be, an effective value proposition; and which would be obvious to anyone in anything but the most niche putt-putt fields of practice. I'll note that for many cases these days, there is an incentive to enhance efficiency. Alternative fee arrangements, e.g. fixed monthly fee irrespective of hours, are getting more and more common, particularly with regard…

I get the feeling Big Law firms are reaching the point where they can no longer rely on increasing hourly rates as a primary source of growth. And I think for the first time in the the history of Big Law, the incentives are such that efficiency might finally be valuable. It might be the only way these law firms can continue to grow revenue. Rates can only go so much higher and there aren't that many more hours in the day.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#85

Post by vqc »

rayiner wrote: post #71
pnmahoney wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really?? The move away from standard billing had always felt like it would "always be in the future"; but I take that back if that's now A Thing in lit heavy on case research. Still assuming that ^ research is better facilitated by pagerank+semantic centrality, as opposed to the boolean features that the attorneys who do the most motion drafting work are already most well-versed in. The most valuable usage I'd heard…

Yes. Even in the context of billable-hour matters, it is typical for firms to write off hours that exceed certain targets per sub-unit of the matter. That is, in effect, a shift towards pricing based on unit of work ( e.g. a motion to dismiss) rather than pure hours. I disagree about pagerank being appropriate for legal research. Pagerank-type algorithms will help you find the seminal, widely-cited cases in an area.…

Law firms are now internally tracking the number of hours spent on units of work (e.g. motion to dismiss, MSJ, etc) so that they can provide much more accurate pitches and estimates of cost.

On the latter point: https://www.judicata.com/ understands legal research and has built a legal research tool in the right way.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#86

Post by justin »

Danihan wrote: post #15
justin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still snapping some. It's actually much harder to remember to make social media now that I'm out of YC. When I was at YC, there was a defined schedule, so I had lots of free time to mess around on snapchat. Now that I'm back in the startup world, I spend most of my time thinking about and working on my company, and forget to snapchat. Klaus says hi.

>Now that I'm back in the startup world, I spend most of my time thinking about and working on my company, and forget to snapchat. Shouldn't you have been thinking about and working on YC when you were there?

YC is structured by-design to have time you spend as a partner working with companies, and time to do whatever you want. I liken it to being a university professor.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#87

Post by neom »

PatentTroll wrote: post #61
neom wrote: post #11

This is awesome and I'm really happy to see venture dollars being spent on the legal industry. One of my gripes has always been that quality legal is traditionally expensive to obtain because the "quality" part in legal work tends to come from literally practicing law for a long time and knowledge about many things quite deeply. Over time law firms obviously grow in standing and therefore size, increasing costs. This…

I don't think much legal cost is in research, industry-wide. Most lawyers specialize in one niche and already know all the relevant big cases in their field. More nuanced research isn't all that time consuming really. And a whole big swath of legal work has absolutely nothing to do with researching law, there's a lot more to it. And a huge part of society doesn't need super-experienced lawyers. The under served marke…

Then why does Cooley or WSGR employe near 1,000 lawyers?

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#88

Post by yannyu »

PatentTroll wrote: post #57
yannyu wrote: post #3

There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and firms want, but it seems to have hit a local maxima for one major reason: nearly all the software and tools are written around Microsoft Word and the Office suite. Anyone wanting to disrupt the legal industry (in the US) is going to have to deal with MS Word in o…

I'm actually working on this! Would love to hear your thougts

I worked on this for a while as well! I talked with a lot of people who deal with contracts regularly (both lawyers and laypeople, in-house and in private practice) and all of them acknowledge there are inefficiencies in the way they work. The desire for better tools exists out there, it's just a matter of figuring out the best way to deliver it.

The existence of the MS Word shackles means that an incremental solution is inherently limited by being compatible with the MS Word format, one way or another. Even if you convince one client to move to your solution, everyone else they interface with will still be using MS word, so you must take that into account. Import/export features can smooth the way, but will hold you back on the kinds of features you'll be able to develop.

Building an entire suite that delivers a new, improved workflow is more tempting for the client, but then you're building a lot more up-front and limiting yourself to clients that actually have significant legal-related costs to defray. And again, it's still likely that your client will continue to work with people who won't be using their new tool, so will have to resort to MS Word on occasion.

And to top all that off, there are a LOT of people that need to be able to use this tool. It has to be built for lawyers, sales people, procurement people, VPs, CEOs, paralegals, customer success, consultants, among others. And even if you're only talking about contracts, even contracts vary widely in length, complexity, and importance.

All in all, it's a really interesting space, and I really enjoyed working on the problems there. Someone is definitely going to crack it within the next few years. Would be glad to talk more over email.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#89

Post by yannyu »

r00fus wrote: post #81
yannyu wrote: post #3

There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and firms want, but it seems to have hit a local maxima for one major reason: nearly all the software and tools are written around Microsoft Word and the Office suite. Anyone wanting to disrupt the legal industry (in the US) is going to have to deal with MS Word in o…

I think the "track changes" in Word is the killer feature that's used - if that could be replaced and the editor can read/write .docx you could pitch a wholesale replacement of MS Office.

If that's all it were, then someone would have repackaged Google Docs and sold that to the legal world. While "track changes" is absolutely essential to any product that aims to replace MS Word for legal docs, a replacement will need to have much more than that.

Re: Justin Kan Raises $10M for New Legal Startup

#90

Post by HillaryBriss »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #68

Is there a story behind the team photo on the home page where everyone is wearing white tops?

It looks like someone (Mr. Kan?) stole the shirts right off everyone's backs.

I believe it's a subtle message to people who work in the law industry.

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