alt.legal: I Bet You Haven’t Heard This One Before
Why would a tech-illiterate Biglaw associate leave her promising career at a top law firm to work on a startup?
It’s the one about the tech-illiterate Biglaw associate (I know, you’ve heard that one) who walks away from her promising career at one of the most prestigious law firms in the country . . . to invent a new category of software. . . for litigating! A magical software program that makes you better as a litigator and is so cool that you wish you thought of it yourself.
For this next profile in legal entrepreneurship, I’m excited to introduce Alma Asay, creator of Allegory. You may not have heard of Allegory yet, but pretty soon, it will be a household name for every litigator who wants to be at the top of their game.
Alma’s story has a special place in my heart because she is living my dream: bringing her success in Biglaw to the whole legal community through the wonders of technology. I met Alma earlier this year in Palo Alto, where she was embracing her inner Silicon Valley and I was speaking at Stanford Law’s awesome CodeX FutureLaw conference. We chatted over cocktails about the legal industry, law firm shenanigans, and life after Biglaw for those of us who didn’t run away screaming. I loved her stories of adventures in legal startup, and her product. Hopefully, you will too.
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(Did I mention I get paid by the click? I’m kidding, but really, keep reading . . . this is a good one).
Alma’s Legal Entrepreneurship Story
Alma is the type of prodigy whomakes Biglaw salivate. She graduated high school in three years; graduated college, Phi Beta Kappa, in another three; finished NYU Law by age 22; proved herself a rising star in Gibson Dunn’s white-hot litigation group; and had garnered a star litigator as a Sensei, who was actively guiding her toward partnership. Actually, based on these facts alone, if I hadn’t met her and didn’t know what came next, she easily would have a preeminent spot on my ever-growing People-To-Hate list.
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When she started at Gibson Dunn in 2005, Alma had just turned 23 and was as clueless as every young first-year associate (other than being well versed in all-you-can drink benders and endless steak lunches, standard in pre-recession summer programs). However, unlike many young lawyers making the rough transition from summer to actual associate, Alma “loved practicing law,” seeing “every case as a puzzle to be solved” (further evidence of P-T-H status). She even admitted to me proudly that she was one of those nerds who thought the logic puzzles on the LSAT were fun.
Over the next few years, Gibson Dunn’s litigation department sizzled, winning high-profile cases and earning prestigious awards, such as the American Lawyer’s Litigation Department of the Year (an unprecedented two times in a row). One of Gibson Dunn’s stars was (and is) the Deadliest Lawyer in Tech, Orin Snyder — consistently ranked as one of the top trial litigators in the country, a go-to lawyer for big companies such as Facebook and Starbucks and celebrities such as Bob Dylan and Jerry Seinfeld.
Two months into the job, Alma got her first opportunity to work with Orin on a high-stakes trade secrets matter for IAC/InterActiveCorp. She vividly recalls one of their first meetings when Orin asked to see “every document in the case . . . not just the ‘hot’ documents . . . every document.” Alma didn’t dare say no, but her gut instinct told her that hauling in a war-room-full of binders would be a bad idea. Instead, Alma considered what Orin actually wanted and put together a custom Excel spreadsheet, typing out key evidence, tracking and commenting on every possibly relevant document in the case. Orin and the clients were ecstatic; suddenly, they had the entire case at their fingertips. Ultimately, that team achieved the impossible– over 100 trade secret claims dismissed on summary judgment — a victory in large part owed to an uncanny mastery of the complex facts.
Alma became Orin’s go-to associate on complex matters, including cases for the likes of NBC Universal, Cablevision, and AMC Networks. Orin and Alma’s teams (including an indispensable and incredibly well-dressed paralegal, Corey Barnes, whom Alma insisted I mention here) made it their business to stay on top of not only the law, but all the evidence (even as it was being rapidly developed from one deposition to another), giving themselves an advantage over adversaries bogged down by archaic and piecemeal processes. As far as I can tell, it worked . . . Gibson Dunn won every one of the cases they handled.
As new junior associates came asking Alma for advice, she channeled, and mangled, a quote by hockey great Wayne Gretzky, telling them to “think ahead, to where the ball will be.” That got her thinking.
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Answering the Call to Entrepreneurship
In early 2011, Alma’s wanderlust kicked in and she wondered if she should have one last fling before heading down the aisle toward partnership. That wanderlust has taken her on trips across the world, from Alaska to Antarctica to every continent, but this time, it was directing her frustrations at “why doesn’t great software for litigators exist” into the crazy notion that she would just go build it.
At the time, Alma knew nothing about the world of startups or software or legal tech, but she knew change was needed, and she wanted to be where the ball puck was going. So in February 2012, she took the plunge and quit! (As proof that she didn’t run away screaming, Alma showed me her goodbye e-mail, individually thanking and sharing inside jokes with more than 150 people at Gibson Dunn.)
The years that followed were, at times, full of all the promise and excitement of how people imagine building a startup should be (see, e.g., beta testing Allegory on a real trial; raising more than half a million dollars; finding mini-Zuckerbergs; and onboarding the first customers)! Other times were a nightmare and had her missing even the worst days in Biglaw (see, e.g., the first tech team set Allegory back months; inability to pay bills; and, of course, the rite of passage for many startups . . . a lawsuit). The highs and lows came at her fast, but the payoff was her dream actually come true: Allegory, finished and ready for primetime.
So Will Allegory Make an Impact?
When I first saw Allegory, I saw how it was built around how litigators think and work, and what’s more, it connects everything we need at our fingertips in ways that most of us haven’t even dreamt of. And it’s zombie lawyer-proof. You don’t have to cry over files and folders and process when you’ve got bigger things to cry about. It almost made me excited enough to become a practicing lawyer again (well, maybe not). At the risk of not doing it justice here, it’s a real-world example of the clichéd “you have to see it to believe it.”
Full disclosure: I work for a highly successful legal startup in the legal managed services market. Part of my reason for joining was all of the talented attorneys I saw struggling under the crushing weight of ever-more-complicated knowledge management and failed collaboration. While my company focuses on solving that complexity in the realm of discovery, there is no question that litigation teams also get bogged down trying to manage and communicate about facts, issues, witnesses, documents and everything else they need to know in order to win their cases, instead of spending that time practicing law by putting key knowledge to work.
Bottom line, there needs to be a better way of passing down and codifying best practices and knowledge than simply transmitting them orally from one generation of burnt-out associate to another — we’ve come a long way since Homer.
Orin, now an investor in Allegory, has seen (and used) it in action, calling it “a game changer.” He believes it provides “an edge over my adversaries and enables my teams to focus on winning our cases rather than wasting hours chasing after the same information over and over again.” Before investing, he used a prototype of Allegory in a high-stakes and high-profile jury trial in the Commercial Division of New York State Supreme Court. According to Orin, “this was a complex case with many twists and turns that required everybody to be on top of the voluminous record at all times, something Allegory gave us the power to achieve.”
The general counsel of AMC Networks, Jamie Gallagher, recognizes Alma’s personal value and the promise of her product: “One of the keys to our success in this huge litigation was Gibson Dunn’s total command of the facts in an extraordinarily complicated and fact intensive case. This command was made possible by Alma Asay, both as an individual who mastered the facts so completely and contributed so much to the theory of our case that we insisted she go to trial with us after she left and through her development and contribution of the Allegory prototype, which was used to keep the team in sync, prepare witnesses, and quickly find key evidence in the courtroom. I genuinely believe we wouldn’t have gotten the very favorable result we achieved without Alma’s contributions.”
Allegory’s clients extend from Biglaw to a growing number of smaller firms excited to embrace technology to support their excellent legal work. Cynthia Arato, a former Gibson Dunn partner and a founder of the well-respected litigation boutique, Shapiro, Arato & Isserles LLP (one of Allegory’s first customers), has been a believer from the beginning, explaining, “Allegory is an invaluable tool, providing a seamless way to integrate critical case information and to provide clients with more effective data management. It’s great to be on the cutting edge of litigation technology.”
There will certainly be challenges. Allegory is new to a crowded (but fragmented) market of litigation tools. But it represents the promise of enterprise and process, the promise alluring to many legal startups. Associates are candid with Alma about the problems they’re facing in the trenches, and they express excitement at the opportunity to spend more of their time focused on being lawyers. Once more attorneys begin using Allegory and other litigation tools to manage their cases (and especially when they find themselves on the losing end for not using it), they will never go back to the world of boxes and shared drives, just as I’m never trading in my iPhone for a fax machine or a flip-phone.
If you happen to be one of those lawyers who would rather be lawyering than banging your head, computer or coffee cup against the wall in frustration, you know where to reach me: joe.borstein@thomsonreuters.com. And you can reach out to Alma about Allegory at alma@allegorylaw.com.
(Disclosure: My company is working to put meat on the bones of a partnership deal with Allegory as we speak.)
Joe Borstein is a Global Director at Thomson Reuters’ award-winning legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which employs over 1,000 full-time attorneys across the globe. He and his co-author Ed Sohn each spent over half a decade as associates in Biglaw and were classmates at Penn Law.
Joe manages a global team dedicated to counseling law firm and corporate clients on how to best leverage Pangea3’s full-time attorneys to improve legal results, cut costs, raise profits, and have a social life. He is a frequent speaker on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, please reach out to Joe directly at joe.borstein@thomsonreuters.com.
