The Disruption Of Biglaw Might Come, Not From Startups, But Lawyers Themselves

What happens to Biglaw when no one wants to do it anymore?

Legal tech has been something of a mixed bag for startups and investors.  On the one hand, everyone seems to recognize the high potential of marketing to and/or disrupting law firms. Firms do big business and they have money to spend on products that solve a pain point. I once had a VC tell me, “I don’t want to fund ReplyAll, but I would be interested in funding your startup if you can build a product that you can sell to the legal market.” On the other hand, despite services like Lawdingo and Upcounsel, law firms have remained mostly disruption free.  Many of them continue to use incumbent software like Lexis & Westlaw. In our conversation earlier this year, Lawdingo CEO Nikhil Nirmel  told me that, “I was running the company as if I were going to make some jaws drop… but at the moment I’m running like a real business.” Nikhil’s company Lawdingo was not marketing to law firms, it was trying to disrupt them, and, at least for the moment, Nikhil has decided he does not want to bank his company’s success on those prospects.

Nikhil’s sentiments mirror those of many investors. Last August TechCrunch reported that many legal startups were having difficulty raising follow on capital because investors had soured on the potential for the entire industry. As I mentioned in my conversation with Owen Byrd, companies like Lex Machina, Kira and more recently Lawgeex are figuring out how to make the jobs of lawyers easier and help them to their job better, but disrupting law firms themselves still seems like a fantasy.

Since starting out as a first year associate, I assumed that Biglaw would be made obsolete by technology, but I wonder now if that will come, not from technology, but from the lawyers themselves. Let me explain. For years, lawyers have made really competitive salaries in firms, especially Biglaw firms. Some of my smartest friends went to law school, not because of their passion for justice, but because they wanted to start at six figures. But many current and prospective lawyers are waking up to the reality that they have other options, which explains some of the enthusiasm around my conversation last week with Will Ha, who believes it now makes more sense for would-be lawyers to pursue a career in software development, even if they are not great at math. It is one thing to talk about leaving law for an alternative career, but what I think lawyers found interesting about Will is that he has outlined steps that other lawyers can use to replicate his success.

I do not believe that lawyers sign up for the rigorous and often thankless demands of Biglaw because they think the salary makes it worth the agony. I think they become Biglaw attorneys because they do not feel like they have other good options. The reality of “no other options” will change long before someone invents technology that replaces Biglaw firms with an app. Before it adapts to new disruptive technology, Biglaw is going to have to adapt to the fact that fewer and fewer talented people will continue picking law in the first place.


Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder of ReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.

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