ATL alt.legal Innovation Awards Winner: 5 Questions With Ian Nelson
Ian Nelson and Chris Wedgeworth founded Hotshot to apply the insights of "EdTech" to the legal industry.
Above The Law launched the alt.legal ATL Innovation Awards in October to recognize emerging companies that are addressing legal technology. Fifteen finalists pitched their startups at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Judges were Joe Borstein (Thomson Reuters and ATL alt.legal columnist), Mary Juetten (CEO and Founder of Traklight), Nicole “Niki” Black (Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase), and Monica Bay (journalist and ATL columnist).
For the next several months, we’ll be posing five questions to the winners. Our goal: To show you a quick look at the startups—and people behind the tech!
Ian Nelson is the co-founder of Hotshot. He previously was the head of marketing at Practical Law (before and after the acquisition by Thomson Reuters). Nelson received his J.D. at the Hofstra University School of Law, and worked as a corporate attorney at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel before leaving practice to help start Practical Law in the U.S. His co-founder is Chris Wedgeworth (previously Managing Director of Practical Law’s U.S. business). Hotshot won in the education category.
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1. What problem does your startup address, and how?
Hotshot addresses the need to improve training in the legal industry, which has become a significant issue due to client demands and increased expectations from associates and law students.
We apply the concepts of “EdTech” to legal. People now want to learn at work the way they learn in their personal lives—short videos and other resources that they can turn to exactly when and where they need them. It’s a shift away from a “just in case” mentality to a “just in time” approach.
For example, if you want to learn how to make a good martini for a dinner party, odds are that you watch a YouTube video an hour before the party starts. The same process can apply in the legal industry, where there’s a need for better, modern training across legal and professional skills.
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Hotshot videos average 10 minutes and are broken into short sections. They include animated examples, document walkthroughs, training exercises, downloadable outlines, and interactive quizzes (e.g., spreadsheet-style quizzes that help people practice “venture math” calculations and financial statement concepts). We currently offer videos and related materials on accounting and finance, the basics of mergers and acquisitions, and venture financing, with more to come this year.
Ian Nelson
2. What is your biggest challenge in attorney adoption of your startup?
Probably awareness. Because modern learning tools are common in everyday life (YouTube, Khan Academy, Lynda.com, etc.), people understand why and how to use our content once they see it. However, we’re still new—so we need to make sure that lawyers and staff at our subscribing firms and organizations are aware that Hotshot is available.
Many subscribers build Hotshot content directly into their formal training programs (or law school classes) and have people watch the videos before live training sessions. Not only does this make the live sessions more engaging and effective, but it gets people to come back to the site to access other materials.
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Hotshot also helps address how different people have different learning styles. A senior partner said he didn’t think that his firm would be interested in videos because he likes to learn by PowerPoint slides. That style may work for him, but it’s a safe bet that others at the firm like to learn in other ways.
3. Has your startup changed significantly since the beginning?
Our core mission has stayed the same but there have definitely been some changes, largely in response to market feedback. For example, we changed our timeline for the development and release of some content and features. We didn’t think we’d be getting into accounting and finance for a while, but the demand was so strong that we prioritized it and launched it late last year.
4. What do you wish you knew five years ago?
Being a founder involves a level of intensity and stress that has nothing to do with the actual work itself. Knowing that before I started Hotshot may have been helpful, but I’m actually not so sure.
As part of the team that helped start Practical Law in the U.S., I’ve been through the startup cycle, but I wasn’t the founder. I’ve learned that being a founder feels totally different from being an early employee. There’s probably no way to know what it feels like unless you do it.
Of course, along with the stress comes the rewards— seeing how this business is helping people learn and feel more confident. There’s nothing like seeing user feedback from associates and students telling us how they watched some of our videos and felt better prepared to tackle their projects.
5. Name one technology commonly used by lawyers today that will be obsolete in 10 years—and one we will be using in 10 years that they don’t have today.
What I do think (and hope) will become obsolete is the idea that the legal industry is somehow “different” when it comes to applying technologies, practices and methods used in other industries to help drive efficiencies and modernize the way things are done.
I’m a big believer in designing and building technology and products around how lawyers think and work (or how lawyers could and should be working with the help of technology). There are loads of great ideas out there, some of which aren’t quite ready for prime time. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be built or introduced, but to the extent they can be introduced around how a lawyer operates, the more chances they’ll have to gain adoption and success.
Earlier: ATL Alt.legal Innovation Awards Winner: 5 Questions With Nehal Madhani.
Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and a freelance writer for Above The Law and other media. She co-hosts Law Technology Now (Legal Talk Network) and is a member of the California Bar. Monica can frequently be found at Yankee Stadium. Email: monicabay1@gmail.com. Twitter: @MonicaBay.
