kevin-oconnell

That's a great point. That's why we built it to work and add value even if the other guy has not been onboarded onto the system. This made the engineering lift way bigger, because the system needs to be able to accept and process whatever the other guy sent you. This makes it an open-ended problem, and we needed to be able to handle any possible edge case that the other guy's docs could introduce.

Juro and others make the other guy onboard because that limits the scope of the engineering problem. You can only create what the platform lets you create, so you know in advance what the system needs to handle. This approach makes it easier to build. But the problem is that it is really hard to get the other guy to onboard. As a result, your MVP is not really an MVP.

Our approach required way, way more engineering work up front. But it put us in a position where getting the other guy to onboard is a "nice to have", not a requirement.

It really depends on the firm and their existing approach to file storage. In legal, they call this a Document Management System (DMS). Some firms have a loose process, so they use this as a standalone app. Other law firms have 20+ years of files in their DMS, so they use this as an integrated feature.

The DMS providers have a great business and their product is stickier than glue. Fortunately, they are very startup friendly and have built out a whole app store ecosystem so other companies can layer on new capabilities that deepen the value of the DMS and make it even stickier.

One hundred percent! And you can already see this playing out. More and more large law firms are spinning up technology and innovation teams. This is a huge investment on their part, indicating they're incentivized.

Also, the billable hour is somewhat misunderstood. It is more of a process tool than a hard reality. Repeat clients expect the bill to end up within a certain range. And law firms expect their people to work a certain number of hours.

Thanks for the encouragement! We actually went a step further and designed it to provide value if only one person is using it. To your point, getting two counterparties to use it turbocharges the value and creates network effects.

If using git as the backend were an option, this problem would be hundreds of times easier to solve. Legal documents have a lot of complex formatting and include elements like tables, images, and footnotes. The diff function needs to handle all this, so it needs to be custom built from the ground up.

A lot comes down to timing. More and more law firm partners these days are digital natives who grew up using computers. They're accustomed to using really good software, and they expect the same in their workplace.