alt.legal: Self-Experimentation Fits Technology To Practice

It’s safe to count my fellow columnist Joe Borstein and me among the ranks of Tim Ferriss, serial self-experimenter (this is no uncommon sight with Ferriss) and author of the 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, and 4-Hour Chef. Ferriss relentlessly experiments with various approaches to productivity, fitness, and cooking. He uses himself as the primary test subject, then shares his findings with the world.

And at Thomson Reuters, we see the value in experimenting with clients. Our product teams maintain really close proximity with clients as design partners, even in the early stages of product development, experimenting with them with features and usability.

Like Tim Ferriss, ClientSide really gets this idea of self-experimentation. The company has harnessed this power of experimenting and as a result, new technology with utility across the legal practice was born.

To learn more, I sat down with Yuri Eliezer, attorney and founder of ClientSide, and Mikhail Avady, the chief marketing officer and Emory MBA.

Ed Sohn: First, what does ClientSide do?

Mikhail Avady: Since our inception three years ago, we have developed three solutions to enhance the attorney-client relationship. First, we have an e-signature tool. What once took hours now takes seconds. Upload the document, pinpoint the areas for signature, and immediately send your clients a secure, encrypted link to the document. Our tool tracks and timestamps information throughout the signing process, and both parties receive this information in an audit trail transaction log as verification of the document and the signatures.

Second, we offer a form automation tool. We’ve synthesized the document preparation process so that a document needs to be prepared only once. After that, it becomes a template with fields that can be easily repopulated and reused. Law firms are then able to dramatically reduce error and improve efficiency.

Finally, we have a client intake tool. Attorneys can now aggregate the most important information they need before they even meet a potential client, while also presenting a uniquely professional image to clients. The law firm receives the necessary information without the headache that often accompanies the client intake processes.

ES: How did ClientSide get started?

Yuri Eliezer: To understand ClientSide, you have to understand my journey as an attorney. I earned an engineering degree from Georgia Tech before getting my JD at Georgia State. I got the opportunity to work in patent law for seven years at Merchant & Gould, a leading national IP firm.

As I gained more experience, I realized that there was a huge market for smaller, early-stage companies that needed patents but couldn’t afford the rates of a prestigious firm. I had a passion to help these entrepreneurs. So I started my own firm, Founders Legal, and that’s when ClientSide really started to grow too.

ES: A law practice AND a tech startup at the same time? How did you deal with the risk? Working for seven years at a firm, you probably got accustomed to your salary and job security. Did you win the lottery or something?

YE: When I started, I didn’t have a single client, and I was operating under a shoestring budget. But working with great people like Mikhail, we have taken a unique approach to the market, one that doesn’t require a lot of investment into overhead to be successful. The only way I was going to make it in my practice was if we had technology that enabled our practice to grow and flourish.

Yes, we didn’t have big glass offices with beautiful conference rooms to impress clients. But in a largely virtual practice, technology is what’s going to make the impression. We had to be really smart about what we invested our resources in, and we needed to stay ahead of the curve, knowing that the lag in law firm adoption of technology was temporary. The preexisting technologies were insufficient for our unique needs as a law firm. That’s when we realized that this would be our smart investment: creating tools that met our needs.

Determined to find a way to reduce risk and combat law firm inefficiencies, I led a team of developers to invent tools for my newly formed private practice, and every tool that we created enhanced my practice. I soon started to attract big clients, who also benefitted greatly from these tools – especially the e-signature solution – which allowed our firm to send and receive signed documents up to seven times faster.

ES: It sounds like to me that the tech has enabled your practice to succeed and be viable, but really, the legal practice actually enabled the tech to grow up too.

YE: Definitely. By talking to my colleagues, I learned that these tools didn’t just solve problems for patent attorneys. It was an industry-wide issue. So I decided we needed to share this technology with the entire legal industry. The intention wasn’t originally to be a legal technology startup. It just happened organically.

MA: Fundamentally, our approach is to take existing technology that already has mature application in the business world and modify it to suit the legal industry. Look, we know these tools will pervade this industry. For instance, we know that in five to ten years, electronic signature tools are going to be used by most law firms. They are already an instrumental part of several other industries, but they haven’t been streamlined in a way that suits a law firm’s needs immediately and effectively.

Law firms tend to be late adopters of technology because of the fear of difficult and lengthy integration processes. Our solutions address these concerns, and by tailoring the technology to meet law firm needs we’ve seen a dramatic increase in law firms’ willingness to adopt.

ES: It’s intuitive. For Founders Legal trying to be disruptive and create an attractive entry cost for patent-seekers, tools like this make perfect sense. But how do you sell efficient tech to law firms that are tied to the billable hour? Isn’t saving time really reducing billable hours, and thus, revenue?

MA: A law firm’s revenue depends on providing the best client experience. With ClientSide, clients sign documents at their convenience, have confidence that their attorneys aren’t nickel-and-diming them for administrative charges like printing and stapling, and gain peace of mind that their attorneys are maintaining the security of their documents. These factors produce a happier client, which leads to repeat business. This repeat business is what truly bolsters a law firm’s success. Acquiring more work has much greater monetary upside than the minor gains made in billing for document and signature management tasks.

ES: What lies ahead for ClientSide?

YE: Our vision is to partner with other legal industry players, not just technology players, to devise innovative ways to improve the attorney-client experience. Today, clients of law firms are driving technology with their outside counsel, because of a growing familiarity with technology and the potential to increase the speed of business.

With this in mind, we’re continuing to find new and innovative ways to improve document automation systems and create new tools that are specific to the legal industry, such as E-Notarization.

ES: Thanks for the time. I’m really excited for you guys.

---

Ed Sohn is a Senior Director at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services (formerly Pangea3). After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate and more than two years in New Delhi overseeing the delivery of managed document review, Ed now focuses on managing the new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about e-discovery, legal managed services, theology, chess, Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the Chicago Bulls at [email protected].