Technology

Ready To Leave Law For Legal Disruption?

I can't help but remember my own frustrating OCI experience.

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At the end of this post, I have an offer to help lawyers who want to get into legal tech start-ups and other disruptive legal companies. If you’re a skip-to-the-chase kind of person, I won’t take it personally if you scroll to the bottom of the post. For those who would like a little more background, continue reading.

As on-campus interview season begins at the schools fortunate enough to still have law firms show up to recruit their rising 2Ls, I can’t help but remember my own frustrating OCI experience. I went to NYU Law School in order to begin my career, but I didn’t want to practice. I just naively assumed that a law degree from a top school was this flexible piece of paper that could catapult me into any organization. It never occurred to me that I was dropping $150K on a degree that got me no closer to my goals (apparently the male brain takes a little longer to fully form). But what I found even more frustrating was that the career center didn’t have any kind of blueprint for people like me other than applying to work at McKinsey. The problem is common: not all lawyers want to continue practicing inside a law firm or a legal department, but companies don’t love hiring lawyers to do much more than, well, be lawyers.

Which is why I’m excited about disruptive legal companies: legal disruption offers a new career path for attorneys.

Everyone keeps asking… what the lawyers of tomorrow will look like? I say there’s a pretty good chance they work at innovative legal companies. Some of the most disruptive legal start-ups were founded by lawyers, Kira Systems, Ironclad, Axiom, Allegory, Casetext and Doxly, just to name the first six off the top of my head. And these companies, like eDiscovery vendors before them, are hiring attorneys in management, sales, product strategy and customer success roles. Anand Upadhye is a former practicing attorney and VP of business development at Casetext; Joshua Lenon is Clio’s lawyer in residence. It’s not just the early stage companies either. Thomson Reuters is constantly hiring talented attorneys like ATL’s own Joe Borstein who want to utilize their legal education to design and sell products and services back to their lawyer pals. I even know of start-ups that are considering showing up for on-campus interviews.

Lawyers are beginning to figure this out too.

Now, more than ever, I have attorneys reaching out to me because they want to join innovative legal companies or they’re working on a disruptive idea — in both cases, many attorney just aren’t sure how to get started. Sometimes, I’m able to refer them directly to developers or companies that I know are looking for talented, outside the box attorneys; other times I let them know what’s lacking in their experience and how they can fill it in. I’m not a journalist covering legal technology, but I pride myself on advancing the conversation about legal innovation and I love to act as a connector in our industry.

So, here’s my offer. Are you a lawyer who’s identified a problem, but you’re just not sure how to take the next step e.g. tell your firm, build version one etc? Or do you want to join a disruptive legal start-up, but aren’t sure how to make the transition? Email me, we’ll set up a brief call, and I will either connect you to the right people or let you know what you would need to do first. I’ve been helping attorneys with this for a while already, but there’s no reason it should be a secret. Get in touch and look out for future posts on how you can make yourself more attractive to the next generation of legal employers.

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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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