Life Imitates Alt: Biglaw Habits Die Hard At IP Startup, Alt Legal

Not everyone leaves Biglaw to improve work/life balance, according to Nehal Madhani, who educated me on this topic – mostly through emails at 4 a.m. I learned that a grueling 2,400-hours-a-year work schedule is nothing when you are working for yourself to make the legal system better – and Madhani’s loving every minute of it.

So how is life imitating alt? A year ago, Ed Sohn and I asked you to stop what you’re doing and take a walk on the alt side of legal, where “entrepreneurs and innovators are changing the legal profession for the better, having fun, and making real money in the process.”

About a month ago, one of our favorite legal entrepreneurs, Nehal Madhani, reached out to us to ask if we would be offended if he rebranded his alternative legal company from Plainlegal to “Alt Legal,” to better reflect his philosophy and vision of the future of the industry. As imitation is the highest form of flattery, we gave this idea two very enthusiastic thumbs up, and a real-life alternative legal business was reborn: Alt Legal.

Alt Legal has created a software solution that is taking on the billion-dollar intellectual property market and can already boast dozens of paying clients, including prestigious Am Law 200 firms and in-house legal departments, as well as smaller and boutique law firms. These clients are now managing thousands of filings every day using Alt Legal. We’ll track Nehal’s path from T-14 law school, through Biglaw, and finally to legal tech founder in today’s column.

Nehal’s Traditional Legal Path

If Nehal’s name sounds familiar, it’s because this column has crossed paths with him at the regular alt.legal hangouts, like Stanford’s FutureLaw and Harvard’s Legal Tech Pitch Night.

Nehal might now be fully alt, but he started on a traditional legal path, with no technology expertise. In fact, Nehal is my fellow graduate of Penn Law (2009), and studied biology and economics at Northwestern. After law school, Nehal practiced law for three-plus years at powerhouse Biglaw-firm Kirkland & Ellis, billing out 2,400 hours per year (they say 2,400 is the new 2,100) in its restructuring group.

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In his “spare time,” Nehal declined to partake in the traditional Biglaw associate pastime of binge drinking/self-loathing, and instead attended startup events, connected with lawyers turned entrepreneurs, and took classes about startups through Skillshare. Eventually, while still grinding away at the firm, Nehal applied and was accepted into the New York chapter of the Startup Leadership Program – a selective program requiring an application, essays and an interview (again, not binge drinking).

Taking the Plunge

Despite his secret love affair with entrepreneurship, Nehal’s Kirkland colleagues were shocked when he gave notice. Some thought he was stupid to leave a promising career as a restructuring lawyer – not to join another Biglaw firm, but to teach himself how to program so he could start his own undefined legal-tech company.

Undeterred, he sold some stocks, cut back on expenses, and rented a desk at a coworking space in Chinatown. That’s when he started teaching himself programming. Nehal emphasized to me that he learned to program solo (i.e., no formal courses, he just kept learning and trying until it worked). While the coding went well, the road to Alt Legal wasn’t as easy.

A few months later, he had built a platform that connected lawyers and businesses and provided productivity tools to help them work together. Initially, it was buggy and slow, but the application – called Plainlegal, at the time – did work. He quickly shut down the platform though, deciding that it would not be a good business due to restrictions against fee-sharing, low customer lifetime value, and high churn.

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He kept the productivity tools though — tools that automated administrative and repetitive work. Next, he recruited a designer/usability expert he had met at a hackathon as well as a former Kirkland & Ellis paralegal turned developer. Together they built new software that makes it easy for law firms and companies to create and manage IP filings. Alt Legal was born.

So What Does Alt Legal Do?

Instead of butchering Alt Legal’s value proposition, I strongly recommend watching Nehal’s elevator pitch, here. In a nutshell, Alt Legal’s software automatically updates IP case statuses and deadlines, collects key details, and generates IP filings. Nehal reminds me that there are 40 million active global IP filings (and growing each year), so it’s taking on a very large, and potentially very profitable, market.

For Nehal and Alt Legal, this venture isn’t just about taking on a large market ripe for “disruption.” They’re already having positive impact by enabling legal professionals to focus on substance instead of repetitive and administrative work. Nehal told me that because Alt Legal’s software saves so much time through its automation, one law firm is slashing its legal fees by 30 percent, putting it in a much more competitive position to beat out other firms for business.

Roberto Ledesma, a former USPTO trademark examiner and Alt Legal customer, told me, “Before I found out about Alt Legal I was thinking of developing my own docketing software. Why? Because all the major players in the field are expensive and require users to manually input deadlines… [Alt Legal is] a huge time and money saver. Plus, [it’s] easy to use software and they offer great customer service.”

Biglaw Habits Die Hard

One of Alt Legal’s investors, Bill Stone (of Harvard Law), said, “Nehal’s commitment to using technology to streamline repetitive legal processes is attractive to me and something I want to be involved with, both as an investor, and as a way of getting up-close insight into ways we can leverage technology in our own business.” Pankaj Raval, an Alt Legal client, said Nehal had built “a great piece of software with a bright future.” Raval noted that he “couldn’t be more impressed with how responsive Nehal is,” questioning “if the guy sleeps.”

Proving that you can take the entrepreneur out of Biglaw, but you can’t take Biglaw out of the entrepreneur.


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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