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What's a “legal tech pitch night," and how can you get one going for startups at your law school?

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First, please watch the funniest law-related commercials I have ever seen (sorry Saul).  After you stop laughing, I’ll explain why it’s not just a gimmick.

Last Wednesday evening, I was invited to write about a “legal tech pitch night” hosted by the newly formed Harvard Law School Association Entrepreneur’s Network. Launched just over a month ago, this legal entrepreneurship network already has over 600 registered Harvard Law alumni and has hosted startup events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I wasn’t sure what to expect but was very happy that the East Coast lawyers were taking a stand and not just leaving legal innovation to the geeks from Stanford (I didn’t get into either school, so I find it fun to hurl insults crafted of thinly veiled jealousy)!

The HLS Entrepreneur’s Network

The event was the first of the new group — the brainchild of HLS alums Eva Hibnick, Chris Edwards, and T.J. Duane.

“The group’s mission is to provide resources to Harvard Law alums interested in getting involved with startups, whether that be in the form of investing, becoming in-house counsel, founding their own companies or working at a startup in a non-legal capacity,” Hibnick explained. As we at alt.legal know all too well, it is a hard road for attorneys to stray off the beaten path, and Hibnick hopes to “present lawyers, specifically HLS grads, with opportunities to interact and learn about the startup community.”

Moreover, both Hibnick and Duane have walked the alt.legal path, as lawyers turned legal entrepreneurs. Duane is currently the founder of Qollaboration and previously co-founded Lateral Link after practicing law at Willkie Farr. Hibnick took a different approach and first worked for a well-established startup, General Assembly, and then founded ONE400, an innovation lab helping law firms with growth initiatives including software development. “I learned so much in the year and a half that I worked at a startup,” she said. “I realized quickly that startups were a whole new beast. At first, I didn’t even know that product managers and data scientists were jobs! Now I interact with developers, designers, and product managers on a daily basis and am very integrated in the startup community.”

The Pitches

Sponsored

The Legaltech Startup Pitch night featured eight companies who each had five minutes to pitch. A panel of judges asked questions and poked gaps in their pitches, (for the companies’ benefit of course 🙂 ). The judges included Hibnick, Betsy Odita from HBS Angels, Jason Klein from Ongrid Ventures, Adam Nguyen from Ebrevia (who we at alt.legal covered here and has generated more news since), and Salvo Arena, the Harvard Law School Association president.

And the room was hot as hell packed… in fact they had to cap the RSVP list people due to space constraints and were overwhelmed at the level of interest the event received. “It was so rewarding to see that this event actually piqued people’s interest,” said Hibnick. “This definitely proved to us that there is demand among lawyers to learn more about startups.” About time.  In total, leaders from eight legal tech startup companies gave five minute pitches to the judges.  Next, the judges were given few more minutes to interrogate the leaders and try to poke holes in their business models.  Think Shark Tank.

The companies included: Docket Alarm, a legal research tool that provides predictive analytics and that is used by Am Law 100 firms; Clearview Social, a platform that helps firms increase their social media presence; and friend of alt.legal Alma Asay of Allegory Law — a knowledge management tool for litigation teams — who was one of my first interviews for ATL (here), and who has since picked up some of the largest firms in the world as clients.  Finally, I was particularly excited to see Nehal Madhani, founder of Plainlegal and fellow Penn Law alum, representing our alma matter with an intuitive cloud-based platform that automates the preparation and tracking of IP filings.

Now, that hilarious commercial?

While the founders of the above startups are, or were, once lawyers — from firms like Gibson Dunn, Kirkland & Ellis, and Willkie Farr — Nikhil Nirmel, founder of Lawdingo, is not.  Lawdingo is a company that connects potential clients with a lawyer in real time, and Nirmel took a different approach to pitching, laying out the top 10 reasons investors should not invest in his company. Because his presentation made me die laughing, I have recreated his list in full:

Sponsored

Top 10 reasons you should not invest in my company by Nikhil Nirmel

  1. I’m a solo founder who can’t code, with no legal background, and whose team is entirely overseas. If you know anything about startups, you know that never, ever works.
  1. I started working on the company over three years ago. If it hasn’t been wildly successful by now, it never will be.
  1. It’s called “Lawdingo.”
  1. I’ve pitched very smart VCs. They all said no. Do you really think you’re smarter than Andreesen Horowitz? No, no, you’re not.
  1. All the business is, is glorified lead gen. Those businesses never get big. Lifestyle business at best.
  1. Local business marketing subscriptions have notoriously high churn. I’ll never get this off the ground.
  1. People need lawyers, what? Once every two years? What kind of business has that low of user retention?
  1. But seriously, what kind of lawyers are we even going to be able to get on here?
  1. Surely this violates all kinds of bar regulations. Unlicensed practice of law, unlicensed referral service, fee-splitting, and what about liability! Obviously this business will get shut down.
  1. Growing this business will be operationally complex, expensive, labor intensive, and would require detailed planning. Do I have plan, even a poorly formulated one for the future? No. No, I don’t.

This presentation was so funny that I had to google Nikhil when I got home.  He left out the little fact that the company has raised serious money, and that he produced one of the funniest commercials I have ever seen (just go on and click again).  Bravo.

The outcome of this event? A room full of inspired lawyers. A close-knit community of lawyers who have happily pursued alternative careers, myself being included, and two lucky startups that already have follow-up meetings with investors that were in the room.

Personal thanks go out to the host Chris Edwards of Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt LLC who hosted the event — I owe you a number of drinks.

To learn more about this group, go to www.hlentrepreneurs.com. Also, if you are thinking about starting a similar alumni group for your law school, Hibnick is your girl. Shoot her a message on LinkedIn, she’s happy to help and partner up to create a large group of lawyers that will take over the startup world!

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.

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