Technology

How Service, Not Tech, Is Disrupting Legal

I felt like I had my own lawyer to deal with customer service, and the lawyer had taken the deal on contingency!

By  
on

disruptionService (getservice.com) is my favorite new company. In fact, my experience using Service was so positive that it has impacted the way I’m thinking about legal disruption — and Service isn’t even a legal tech company per se. But before I explain the broader implications, first a word on Service.

Dealing with customer service can be a dizzying experience. Just the thought of having to make a call where you know, going in, that you will have to sit on hold with fuzzy music playing on repeat is enough to trigger physical convulsions. Whatever compensation you might receive is never worth the time you spend groveling for restitution.

Like I said: dizzying.

Last year I had a two such  dizzying experiences with Air France (an airline I normally LOVE). First, the airline lost my bag on a flight to San Francisco leaving me in Silicon Valley for the Apttus Accelerate conference without my clothes — and that wasn’t even the bad part! The bad part was that it took six months, eleven phone calls and multiple online forms to get paid back. Then, while traveling this summer with my entire family from Washington, D.C. to Tel Aviv, a pilot’s strike forced Air France to cancel our flight, and we were rerouted two days later on an inferior airline. What made it worse was that Air France had never contacted us to let us know about the pilot’s strike, so we made the two hour trip to the airport with small children. TWICE.

The travel agents at the airport told me — are you sitting down? — to take up my complaints with customer service.

So several calls and case IDs later, Air France offered us vouchers equal to a fourth of the ticket price. Now, maybe because I’m a hyper competitive bastard lawyer, I rejected that offer, but Air France wouldn’t budge.

I love flying Air France, but this experience left a sour taste in my mouth. And compounding my frustration was the fact that I know people who are customer service savants. I have a sister-in-law who routinely gets upgraded and/or reimbursed by companies who simply look at her the wrong way. I once told her that she should start a company where she calls customer service, haggles with them on behalf of other people and takes a success fee.

Sponsored

Well, as it turns out, my sister-in-law missed the boat because that’s exactly what Service does. You submit your complaint to Service, they take care of it for you and keep you updated every step of the way.

And they’re AWESOME at it.

Not only did Service get me full reimbursements for each of our tickets — four (4) times what Air France had originally offered me — but they kept me updated at every turn. Normally, I can’t stand getting emails from companies, but Service had me trained like Pavlov’s dog to emotionally salivate each time I received an update about my case. With Service, I felt like I had my own lawyer to deal with customer service, and the lawyer had taken the deal on contingency! (Note: Service is currently free, but CEO Michael Schneider told me that, after handling tens of thousands of complaints, the company will soon start charging a success fee as well as selling corporate subscriptions.)

Service is amazing because they do your job for you and make you feel like you’re in good hands.

Legal software companies failing to gain traction should take note. Most people are not looking for a new way to run their business or do their job, they’re simply looking to have work taken off their plate.

Sponsored

In start-up lingo, this is known as the “job to be done” framework. The idea is that people don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. In the case of Service, I didn’t want a new way to engage with customer service reps, I just wanted someone else to do my job for me. Service doesn’t just do my job, they also help companies who do not want to deal with emotional customers. And it works: I no longer have beef with Air France and intend to use them again for international travel in 2017.

Obviously, service is not a legal company, but using Service further confirmed what I believe is one of the most significant trends right now in legal disruption, and why some, if not many, legal software companies will continue to struggle until they become more “Service-y.”

I meet a lot of legal tech companies, and I cannot tell you how many great products I’ve seen which I later discover have zero meaningful traction. I’m not the only one. A few months ago, Mark Harris, founder of Axiom, said the same thing in a conversation here on ATL:

Selling tech-only solutions into the legal industry today would be like selling a conveyer belt to a blacksmith in the late 1800s.  You cannot sell the instruments of industrialization to artisans!  They aren’t ready for them and have no idea what to do with them!

So, before legaltech can have its analogous fintech moment, the legal industry needs to make headway on a services-led, but tech-enabled approach to industrialization.  We have to build the factories before we can embrace the tools that make the factory better!

And when I challenged him with the success of some of the tech companies I have covered here on ATL, he responded thusly:

I really haven’t seen meaningful traction by legal tech companies among the large enterprise corporate clients Axiom works with. It may be the case with law firms or smaller companies, but the large corporate segment is a challenged landscape for legal tech in the near future.  That’s partly because it’s hard to establish that channel (took us 15 years to build what we have today) but it’s mostly for the reasons above – the table is not yet set and the offerings are thus unlikely to get to critical mass because of that.

I’ve had this sentiment confirmed, not only by executives in other legal marketplace companies like Axiom, but also law firm decision makers.

Now, to be sure, not all firms and corporate legal departments are created equal, and, over the course of 2017, I intend to publish conversations with many of these more forward looking lawyers. Plus, there are definitely legal software companies with serious traction. Clio, Kira Systems, Seal Software just to name a few, not to mention the entire eDiscovery industry are, to my eye, doing quite well. Apttus and Docusign will likely IPO this year at valuations in the billions of dollars.

But the point remains: selling software to lawyers at big law firms, banks or corporate legal departments is a challenge.

It’s not just lawyers. Selling software to ANY large business is hard and here is why. Most software sales pitches can be boiled down to the following: change what you’ve been doing until now, learn a new system and become so efficient that you can fire half your staff who have been performing these tasks manually. But, it turns out that MOST people like the way they do things right now and have no interest in learning a new system or firing people who they value.

Trust me, I learned this the hard way and my company is certainly not a legal start-up. When we first built ReplyAll, we began approaching writers and publishers pitching them on a new way to publish conversations on their site. We thought it would be an easy sale: improved publishing methods, sticky reader engagement metrics and the product was 100% free. And while we onboarded some awesome publisher partners early-on, I cannot tell you how many leading publishers said “yes,” but then never used our service more than a few times. It wasn’t until we pivoted and began approaching publishers with an offer to create the content for them and bring our own sponsors that we began to see real traction. Here is how we applied the job to be done framework: brands need to create content their customers LOVE, and publishers need to distribute high quality content and find new revenue models. We began succeeding when we focused on getting other people’s jobs done for them, and it forced us to improve our technology to help us get our job done.

There are MANY advantages of selling tech enabled services rather than sell software. Consider Ruby Receptionists, whose CEO, Jill Nelson, I recently interviewed. Ruby hires GREAT receptionists to perform a service, and Ruby builds technology that allows them to operate at scale. They don’t have to worry about shipping software or fixing customers’ bugs because the only user of Ruby’s tech is Ruby. All the customer ever sees is the excellent service in the form of high quality receptionists who answer their calls.

I have been hearing about several legal start-ups who have either already added services to their business model or are considering it, and I know many others who won’t because they want to be seen, particularly within the investment community, as software companies. To those companies, I point to the fact that Service has raised capital from Silicon Valley heavyweights like Founders Fund and Menlo Ventures. Plus, if executed correctly, adding service to your business model can pave the way for self funding a company and not relying on venture capital.

So, as the annual Legaltech show in New York approaches (which, this year, has rebranded as Legalweek), some of the companies I’m following most closely are tech enabled service companies — the kind companies that help lawyers get their job done.

P.S. Planning on coming to Legalweek last week of January? Maybe you have a story about the intersection of tech and service? Or maybe you’d just like to meet and tell me what your firm, corporate legal department or start-up is working on. Email me or hit me up on Twitter, I’d love to meet you and hear about what you’re building.

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.

CRM Banner

Topics

, , ,