Technology

alt.legal: How Not To Get Stuck On Closing Set Duty

A conversation with Haley Altman of Doxly.

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Junior transactional associates know: closing set duty is a rite of passage.  Long conference tables with piles of documents, chasing down terrifying senior executives to get their signatures on various signature pages, substituting pages at the last second, impossibly long closing checklists, standing at the printer all night… these were the hallmarks of being a junior associate in a transactional practice.

Much more of this motion is done electronically now, but walking through any large law firm you may still spot the piles of paper and the long folder-holding file racks that seem specially created for this purpose.

Haley Altman knows the pain of transactional attorneys. She is a former transactional attorney, first as an associate at Wilson Sonsini and then as partner and leader of the VC practice at Indiana powerhouse Ice Miller. Now Haley serves as CEO and co-founder of Doxly, a legal tech company focused on solving transaction management. Previously interviewed here, I caught up with Haley to get an update on Doxly and learn more about what lies ahead.

Ed Sohn: What is the 30-second elevator pitch for Doxly? What’s the need and how does Doxly solve it?

Haley Altman: Today, law firms are under a lot of pressure to close deals faster, at lower costs while providing the best experience. Doxly helps solve this problem by providing deal teams with visibility and precision in an easy-to-understand environment. Doxly automates complete workflows that streamline the closing process, provides real-time checklists based on firm templates, revamps the entire signature process (which significantly reduces administrative tasks), and allows attorneys to create closing books within minutes. We also have on-demand reporting features that capture key deal trend terms.

ES: Why did you believe you could solve this need?

HA: I lived the problem for years. I also understood it from different perspectives: as the junior associate managing the signature pages and diligence review, the senior associate assisting with the negotiation process; the partner managing the deal and the client relationship and as a member of the firm’s finance committee charged with helping to improve profitability and realization rates. I also found myself trying to innovate our product offering in the law firm so when the opportunity to partner with leaders in the B2B enterprise software space with High Alpha (a venture studio), I felt I needed to solve the problem and launch Doxly.

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ES: What’s your background?

HA: I’ve had a unique road to entrepreneur. I actually started out on a science bent, with a chemistry major and summers spent doing cancer research. I took a hard left into the legal world after an internship doing government relations work in the healthcare space. I realized I could do more to help bring amazing technologies into existence by helping companies get funded. I practiced in the transactional space as an attorney for over 10 years with a particular focus on venture capital, private equity and M&A transactions making partner and helping to co-lead our venture capital vertical.

ES: Starting a legal tech company is such a huge step — what pushed you past the tipping point to really do this?

HA: It is really a huge step and one I didn’t think I would take it honestly. When High Alpha agreed to bring the idea for Doxly into their sprint week (a week focused on taking 4 ideas and turning them into business models with a pitch at the end and the winner becoming the next studio company), they asked if I wanted to be CEO in the event they elected to move forward with Doxly. I had been elected equity partner one week before this conversation so I had no intention of leaving practice, but rather being a board member and advisor. From the start of sprint week, I fell in love with building the company. I found myself consumed with thinking about how to solve this problem and wanting to work on it. When we got down to thinking through who should be CEO, I couldn’t imagine anyone else starting the company. I called Daniel on the way home from one of our first company meetings and told him I had to resign from practice. It was incredibly difficult because I loved my job, clients, and colleagues, but I knew I had to see it through.

ES: What’s your greatest personal learning from starting Doxly?

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HA: It’s almost too difficult to narrow it down to one thing. I learn so much every single day in this job. One thing that sticks out is how important it is to have a great team hyper-focused on the customer. It is incredibly challenging to build a business and the legal vertical faces some unique challenges, but if you can build a product that focuses on the customer and what they need, you can really move forward.

ES: How is it going? Is Doxly seeing growing adoption in the market?

HA: It’s going well. We have built a really robust, but easy to use product. We’ve gotten great feedback from customers. It’s still a challenge to navigate the procurement process in firms, but we are working with our customers to help them understand key benefits to purchasing our technology and adopting it into their workflow. We’ve invested a lot in our customer success team. We think it is incredibly important to partner with our customers and understand their business objectives to help them see value in our product right away. We have definitely seen adoption growth with our customer where we have expanded across offices and even into different practice groups.

ES: How do you get people to start using Doxly?

HA: As part of our implementation services, we have a dedicated customer success team that works with our customers to identify key business initiatives that are driving the need for workflow improvement and demonstrate measurable value that can be shared internally to build awareness and with clients to build loyalty. During the implementation phase, we provide set-up and configuration services and training as needed. Our customer success team also integrates firms’ existing checklists during the configuration stage which provides a personalized environment that should be familiar to them already which helps accelerate the speed of adoption.

ES: What’s next for Doxly?

HA: We will continue to focus on building a product that our customers want to use. We just launched Doxly for Closing, a focused version of our collaboration platform that helps internal teams close deals faster. We also plan to focus on key strategic integrations to create synergies between Doxly and those technologies. We currently integrate with DocuSign and NetDocuments and should launch our next major DMS integration soon as well as comparison tools, data rooms and other complementary technologies.

ES: What’s your view on the state of innovation and tech in legal? There’s tons of buzz, and by reading the press or going to a conference, one would think that things are dramatically on their way to a more innovative place. But many of us know that in reality, most of the practice is slow in moving towards greater efficiency and a tech-enabled practice. What are your thoughts? What will it take to get people there?

HA: It is a slow moving process. I think there is a movement to adopt a more tech-enabled practice, but firms need the infrastructure to evaluate, purchase, and launch technology into their practice. Tech companies can be great partners if they can think about how to help firms adopt their products. I think we all have to figure out how to turn excitement into action. I think as more firms start to prioritize tech adoption, you will see others follow suit. I also think it is important to think about how to integrate more technologies together because it becomes overwhelming if people have to log into multiple systems to accomplish a single goal. The easier we can make it for people to use our products and to use them in connection with other products they need we can create systems people feel compelled to use.

ES: What’s your advice for any attorneys out there thinking about a career jump into innovation and tech?

HA: I think it depends on whether you are joining a company or starting your own venture. If you are looking to join a legal tech company, you should start going to different legal tech events. It will give you an opportunity to see different legal tech companies and get to know people in the community. If you want to start your own company, do your research so you can understand the technology landscape. Are there competitors in your space? Would your product be a want or a need? You also should not be afraid to get opinions from trusted advisors on what you are looking to do. That advice can be really helpful when you look to decide whether to make the jump. In the end, if you are truly passionate about the problem you are trying to solve and have gotten feedback that this problem needs solving and that your approach has merit, make the leap. Be prepared to learn quickly, adapt and hold on for quite the roller coaster ride.

Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

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