alt.legal: Take A Walk On The Alt.Side (A Profile In M&A Innovation)
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Since the launch of alt.legal, Ed and I have received a lot of very interesting emails and feedback. It is apparent that many of you read ATL literally all day love working in Biglaw, but most many have considered taking a walk onto the alternative side (sounds far more erotic than it is).
What we hope to prove to you through this ongoing column is that legal entrepreneurship is exciting, prestigious, lucrative, and, most importantly — to the many resilient lawyers out there who have remained idealistic in the face of back-to-back all-nighters — your best chance to change the legal system for the better. Moreover, despite what you think, innovation in the law is NOT just in e-discovery. Turns out, there are problems worth solving associated with almost every practice, and with each, there are entrepreneurs and innovators ready to change the game. (My co-author, Ed Sohn, is planning to write more on this underground world next time.)
Today, we profile one such entrepreneur, Adam Nguyen, who saw inefficiencies in the always-exciting process of contract review for due diligence (hey litigators, it turns out M&A lawyers have to do document review too), and leveraged $150,000 worth of Harvard Law-branded problem solving to create an innovative technology solution called eBrevia.
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What’s most exciting to me about this story is that its star, Adam Nguyen, is not a tech geek, or child prodigy (I mean, really, he didn’t go to Yale Law). In fact, he studied Economics and Political Science at Columbia . . . does it get any more liberal-arts/I-need-a-law-degree-to-make-a-living than that? (Correction, he finished premed too . . . damn you, I’m trying to make a point here.) Instead Regardless, Adam’s a natural hustler, who used hard work and diligence to hunt down existing technology and tweak it for the needs of lawyers.
Adam’s Legal-Entrepreneurship Story:
In 1985, at the tender age of ten, Adam came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a political refugee, settling in suburban Houston. After studying at Columbia and Harvard, Adam practiced law at Shearman & Sterling and Paul Weiss (both of which he really liked) and focused his practice first on mergers and acquisitions, then on private equity and hedge fund formation.
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Next he moved on to an in-house role at a massive hedge fund. He then did a two-year stint as the chief of staff of a 350-person real estate investment company, where he did everything from structuring a PE fund, to setting up a call center for tenants, to picking out artwork for building lobbies, to testing CCTV cameras in elevators.
Finally, in 2011, the stars aligned and fate came calling. Adam and a law school classmate (Ned Gannon, of Harvard Law and Paul Hastings) founded eBrevia, a legal software company that uses artificial-intelligence technology — specifically, natural language processing and machine learning – licensed from Columbia University’s Tech Transfer program (haven’t heard of it? I hadn’t either) to dramatically reduce the time required to review contracts.
Specifically, the AI technology is able to extract and summarize important contract provisions. In his chapter in Lawyers At Work (affiliate link), Nguyen talks about eBrevia’s abstracting power: “If you are conducting legal due diligence and looking to understand whether a contract — actually a data room full of contracts — contains indemnification obligations and what the obligations entail, eBrevia would quickly and accurately provide you with an abstract of the indemnity provisions.”
Adam is quick to emphasize that eBrevia does not replace, but augments, the human user. He adds, “You should consider, if I have to review hundreds of contracts under time constraints, will I be better off with the software assisting me or without the software?”
Today eBrevia is ready for prime time and has begun the sales process in the U.S. and EU. Users include not just law firms but also in-house legal departments.
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So Will eBrevia Make an Impact?
In an environment where BigLaw lawyers bill $300 to $500 an hour for routine, high-volume contract review, eBrevia promises its customers that its AI will revolutionize productivity. But you may be asking, “Is this product helping people like me? If so, then why did I stock up on all of these flags, highlighters, rubber thumbs and gussets? And how am I supposed to get my 8 p.m. Seamless.com meal now?”
Look, the lawyers at Bailey Duquette, P.C. think that eBrevia “cuts down significantly on time by performing 50-60 percent of the work up front and then you work from there.” Is this dramatic claim true? I have no idea, and if/when I learn it will be a cold dark day for us all (mostly me). However, I do know that if I was a law-firm based M&A practitioner, I would lock myself in my closet and cry want to test these claims ASAP, because all of sudden law is a real business, and if I don’t take this tool seriously, I know my competitors will. If I was an in-house lawyer, I would demand that my law firm become well-versed in this tool and others like it.
Most importantly for you corporate associates and aspiring rainmakers, there is blood in the water in the M&A world, and the leanest sharks will likely be getting fed. This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that smaller law firms are, in fact, winning more M&A work. Entrepreneurship can be complicated, like the building of an electric car or AI product . . . but it can also be as simple as a lawyer shaking up the status quo with material efficiency gains and cost reductions.
In my business, I have seen small, midsized and even Am Law 50 firms partner with alternative legal providers to undercut competition and win new business. Next month, I’ll tell you their stories.
How Can You Make an Impact?
So maybe you’ve seen a problem in your practice — and have already proven beyond any doubt that you have the ability to complain about said problem — but don’t know how to create a business out of the solutions? Adam’s story reminds us that we aren’t born trailblazing entrepreneurs, and we don’t need to have all the answers and skills from day one. We can partner with specialists and leverage some of that endurance we’ve built up working ludicrous hours to make change real.
Until then, keep sending the ideas, comments, and (PG-13) snap-chats to [email protected].
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 [email protected].
