Can Technology Automate Your Rights? Upsolve Thinks So
A story of legal innovation that should tickle the hearts of all you idealists.
Rohan Pavuluri (left) and Jonathan Petts
Ahoy from Florence, Italy! Today I’m coming at you live from the stunning campus of the European University Institute – where I’m graciously accompanying my wife on her study abroad from NYU Law (sigh).
Submitted for your approval today is a story of legal innovation that should tickle the hearts of all you idealists, out to change the world. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been chatting at length with two brilliant, industrious legal innovators who are leveraging technology so that individuals can access their rights from the comfort of their couches – as God intended.
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Their first project is Upsolve, and its mission is to “empower low-income Americans to get back on their feet after they hit hard times [by] making bankruptcy help simple, fast, and free.” Basically, they seek to remove the unnecessary cost and complexity hurdles inherent in the status quo for personal bankruptcy. Unsurprisingly, the paperwork associated with this process is complex, but Upsolve is working hard to create a foolproof system that anyone can use from their computer – without the expense of counsel.
So who are these two talented, non-profit-seeking do-gooders? Jonathan Petts comes from the long, and increasingly successful, tradition of Penn Law alumni changing the legal game (special shout out to Gurinder Sangha, for the recently announced sale of his baby Intelligize!). Before Upsolve, Jonathan spent eight years as a bankruptcy lawyer in the public and private sector, practicing at Morrison & Foerster and Milbank, and clerking for two bankruptcy judges.
Rohan Pavuluri, on the other hand, has an unusual background for a legal innovator. A “non-lawyer,” Rohan has taken leave from Harvard College, where he is studying statistics and computer science. While he rejected outright my desire to dub him the legal Mark Zuckerberg, he’s not writing this article!
Rohan’s technology experience includes projects with the White House Digital Service. At Harvard, Rohan has won numerous awards and accolades, including the Harvard Innovation Challenge, and the Harvard Institute of Politics Gov. 2.0 Grant for an entrepreneurial venture with the most innovative idea to reshape American civic life. He also has received the Liman Fellowship for public interest law from Yale Law School. In other words, he’s a technology heavy hitter.
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Together, Jonathan and Rohan are using technology to try and solve serious social problems, and they share our alt.legal belief that innovation in the legal system could be the most efficient path.
Now I know what you are thinking: “great, more robots coming for our jobs!” Well, maybe, but some of the heaviest hitters in the bankruptcy bar are supporting their effort — and agreed to be quoted for this article (thanks!). Larren Nashelsky, chair of powerhouse Biglaw firm Morrison & Foerster, said, “MoFo is committed to increasing access to justice, and applauds Upsolve’s mission of using technology to make bankruptcy more accessible for low-income Americans.” Judge James Peck, of Lehman Brothers bankruptcy fame, is also a big supporter, stating “Upsolve is easy to navigate and an effective means to deliver self-help benefits to an under-served population.”
Enjoy our conversation.
Joe Borstein: So take me back — how did you two find each other? When and how did you conceive of Upsolve?
Rohan Pavuluri: I’m passionate about using technology to solve social problems. My freshman year at Harvard, I cold emailed a professor at the law school whose research I found fascinating. Through cartoons, he was exploring new ways to help low-income Americans understand the law. He invited me to join his team and, after a year, I realized that we could take the lessons we learned and scale them using tech. That’s how we came up with Upsolve. Silicon Valley companies often talk a big game about “changing the world,” but in reality, most of them aren’t interested in solving serious social problems. Upsolve gave me a chance to use tech in a meaningful way.
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Jonathan Petts: During my eight years of pro bono work, I realized that I was reinventing the wheel with each case. I wanted to put myself out of a job. A judge introduced Rohan and me after she found out we were both trying to solve this problem. We clicked right away because we shared the same vision. We both think it’s ridiculous that four out of five people who need a lawyer can’t get one.
JB: But why this particular problem? Why start with personal bankruptcy?
JP: I’ve been in the business bankruptcy world for years, both in BigLaw and while clerking. Writing briefs for the cases covered in the Wall Street Journal was exhilarating at first, but that quickly wore off. I never found the same sense of satisfaction representing large companies as I did with the personal bankruptcy clients that I helped pro bono. I was helping those New Yorkers transform their balance sheets, their emotions, and their hopes for the future – all in three hours. Now that’s ROI.
Bankruptcy is a lifeline to low-income Americans who hit hard times from job loss and medical illness. It’s absurd that millions of people are too broke to file because they can’t come up with two grand for a lawyer. We want to change that.
JB: Go Jonathan, automating parts of your own job! So how does Upsolve accomplish what lawyers had to do in the past?
JP: Right now, lawyers need to have an hour-long conversation with their clients about what clients earn, spend, and own. Lawyers then enter this info into the bankruptcy official forms. The whole thing is terribly inefficient, especially when you consider clients who have to take a day off from work just to meet with their lawyer.
Our web application automates the intake through a guided survey and populates the official bankruptcy forms based on a user’s answers. Then, and only then, an Upsolve lawyer reviews the forms. All our users need to do is print out the PDF and deliver it to the court. Our model can cut the time per each bankruptcy by 10 times.
JB: So I have to ask, why had this not been done before? Too technically difficult?
Protectionism. The laws have been written to keep technology products like ours away. What we’re doing would be illegal if we charged our users. Also, the people who knew about the problem — lawyers — had no incentive to rethink their business model.
JB: So then I have to ask, how are you funding this operation? Will you ever move Upsolve into the for-profit zone?
We’ll always be a nonprofit. Harvard, Yale Law School, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Morrison & Foerster have helped us out through grants or in-kind support. But we’re pretty much living off of our savings right now because we believe that the world needs our product.
In the near future, we hope to stay sustainable through foundation and state funding. We also hope to gain support from the Biglaw and the tech community. Finally, we just announced a fundraising campaign with our friends at ROSS and ROSS Intelligence.
JB: So if you believe protectionism is preventing innovation, and keeping citizens from easy and cheap access to their rights, where is the outrage? Is it not absurd that it is illegal for you to profit from creating a system for citizens to access their legal rights? I can’t think of a piece of technology more worthy of remuneration.
Yes, yes, and yes! And believe us, we’ve been trying to change this. This summer, we wrote draft legislation and met with the offices of several congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill. Countless regulations around legal tech just don’t make sense. It’s time for the law to catch up to technology.
It’s also crazy that Congress spends $300 million-plus on traditional legal aid each year, yet invests only two percent of that money on tech initiatives. To us, it’s a simple choice. You can either spend money on a lawyer, who can only help one person at a time, or you can spend money on building a technology product that can help an unlimited number of people.
People in the legal world often talk about pro bono hours as a way to close the enormous justice gap. Pro bono is great, but it’s only incremental change. As Cuban baseball coaches say, “You don’t get off the island by bunting.”
Much of our frustration also stems from a larger problem. Donors in the social sector have no risk appetite. Ten times out of ten, a venture capitalist will invest in the team that has a five percent chance of getting 100 million users over a team that has a 100 percent chance of getting 1,000 users. Yet foundations always make the opposite bet. That’s ridiculous. It’s the reason we don’t see many new, transformative ideas in the nonprofit world. More philanthropists need to understand the basic math behind expected value.
JB: Wow, powerful stuff. Please keep fighting the good fight, and tell us at alt.legal how we can help usher in that change. Thanks for the interview!
Joe Borstein is a Global Director with Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, delivering Pangea3 award-winning legal outsourcing services and employing over 1800 full-time legal, compliance, and technology professionals 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 Thomson Reuters legal professionals 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@tr.com.
