ATL alt.legal Innovation Awards Winner: 5 Questions With Nehal Madhani

An interview of Nehal Madhani of ALT LEGAL, winner of the ATL Innovation Awards in the IP category.

alt.legal-WinnerAbove The Law launched its inaugural alt.legal ATL Innovation Awards last year with the goal of recognizing emerging companies addressing legal technology. Competitors were limited to independent or venture-backed companies (no law firms or startups already acquired by big shots). Companies had to be less than seven years old, with no more than $15 million in revenue.

What ATL didn’t expect was the “quantity and quality of submissions,” noted Brian Dalton, ATL’s Director of Research. From 66 contestants in seven categories, 15 finalists were chosen for a live pitch on October 27, at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Judges were Joe Borstein (Thomson Reuters & ATL alt.legal columnist), Mary Juetten (CEO & Founder of Traklight ), Nicole “Niki” Black (Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase), and Monica Bay (freelance journalist).

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!

5 Questions: Nehal Madhani of ALT LEGAL

Category: Intellectual Property

Nehal Madhani is the CEO of Alt Legal, Inc., launched in April, 2013.  The company is based in New York City; it has eight employees, including co-founders Charles Amoako  (chief technology officer) and Gabe Kneisley (head of product).

Nehal Madhani, CEO of Alt Legal

Nehal Madhani, CEO of Alt Legal

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The company’s investors include Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. The company also has individual investors, including Jeff Wald, president, Work Market; customer Pankaj Raval (Carbon Law Group, Law Offices of Pankaj S. Raval); and legal professional Stan Chess (President, LawTV, Inc.).

The Questions

1. What problem does your startup address, and how?

Alt Legal helps law firms and corporate legal departments create, manage and analyze intellectual property filings. Our software reviews millions of IP filings from government databases and automatically updates filings and identifies key deadlines. The software also integrates with government filing systems to instantly create new IP filings with just a few clicks.

2. What is your biggest challenge in attorney adoption of your startup?

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Most of our customers switch from existing software providers. This often means that not only have they become accustomed to their software and an existing workflow, but they have years of data in that software. Over time, we’ve had to invest in 1) intuitive design that makes our software easy to use, even for new customers; and 2) engineering tools that allow us to quickly and painlessly migrate data from other, sometimes antiquated, software.

3. Has your startup changed significantly since the beginning?

Like most early stage companies, we’ve evolved from our initial idea. We started in 2013 as a marketplace connecting lawyers with businesses and offering productivity software to make it easier for both sides to transact. We closed the marketplace in early 2014 after realizing that restrictions on attorney fee-sharing and low customer lifetime values would make the business difficult to scale. However, we kept the productivity software and shifted our focus to the IP space.

4. What do you wish you knew five years ago?

Five years ago, I was an associate at Kirkland & Ellis. Being part of a 1,000+ person law firm meant that there was support available for attorneys, but it wasn’t until I left and started working with attorneys at smaller law firms or legal departments that I realized the value of technology for those organizations that don’t always have enough resources.

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.

Much like we see the print digests and the key number system, today’s legal research methods will be seen as an archaic approach in the next decade. There are newcomers—like Casetext, Ravel Law and ROSS Intelligence—that are rethinking the way legal research is done. Additionally, over the next decade, I expect attorneys to incorporate data into all aspects of their practices, both administrative and legal. You can see a preview of the value with the “Legal Trends Report” published by Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.).

(Alt Legal, Inc. is not related to the ATL alt.legal Innovation Awards.)


monica-bayMonica 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.

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