Venture with Grace
00:11:37 · Jake Saper
[00:11:37] S0: Will you make this real to people, Dan, and explain like if you are a customer of versus if you're a customer of Fragomen, who's the biggest incumbent service provider in immigration law. What is the customer experience? How does it differ and what is the role AI plays in making that difference?
00:11:55 · Dan Mishin
[00:11:55] S1: Sure. Well the best use of AI is the one that's invisible to the client. So is anybody here an immigrant born outside of The US? Raise your hand if you are. Okay. A lot of hands. Great. Well, when you hire a lawyer, you typically go through the process of filling manual questionnaires, manually uploading documents. Your lawyer then manually reviews those documents, then they manually draft those documents, and then they ultimately submit them to the government. Average case takes a couple of months on average. There is a ton of back and forth email threads of hundreds of emails asking questions, following up, clarifying, trying to understand what's going on. Imagine a different experience where you are beginning your immigration process, whether or not it's your company who is sponsoring you and Manifest is the counsel to the company, or it's you individually going through immigration process. The very first step is you receive a link. You open your link on your phone, you take photos of six different documents that we tell you you need to upload. Each document has an example and you can chat to an agent that will explain to you which document to upload, what does it mean, what good looks like, provide you examples, answer questions in real time. All the back and forth was just eliminated. You drag and drop those documents in on your phone into the agent and within seconds, that document, we extract all the information from all your documents, pre fill all the questionnaires, and within ten minutes a lawyer has access to your completed file. So lawyer is no longer chasing you, lawyer is no longer trying to ask you the same questions. Lawyers are no longer manually filing anything. Lawyers are led by agents who essentially tell lawyers what the next step is. So when you see that... When an agent knows what a final petition is supposed to look like, that gets filed with the government. An agent tells lawyers what are the specific gaps in your specific case and what information needs to be provided. And what it does really is it reduces time. What used to take two months can now take two days and it reduces cost. What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars can now costs probably at this point 15 to 20% less, over time 40, 50, 60% less.
00:14:02 · Dan Mishin, Jake Saper, S2
And it's much more accurate because when a lawyer is manually filling the information on your immigration case, the error rate is very high. Mistakes are possible. They click the wrong box, they type in the wrong number, that's it. Somebody's life is screwed up. AI is so much better at doing that QA. So to answer your question, I mean for whether or not you're a company or you're an individual, Manifest is faster, better, cheaper, and more accurate. And that's ultimately going to be the case for any company that is truly enhancing the existing underlying industry and service with AI. [00:14:37] S0: So I'm curious if anyone has any questions about this because like obviously we've been pilled on this, but like I know this isn't like structured as a q and a thing, but I'm curious if anyone has questions or like pushback on this business model. Like what are the what are the reasons why you think this might fail? What are the questions you have for me or Dan? [00:14:55] S2: Yeah. [00:14:59] S0: I can repeat the question if you say it to me.
00:14:59 · Jake Saper, S3
[00:14:59] S0: I can repeat the question if you say it to me. [00:15:05] S3: From a business model standpoint, I mean, this looks obviously great. Right? I mean, I'm an immigrant and right right now, I'm a citizen. So, we've all gone through this process. But, still, there is a little bit of a bottleneck from the legal firm. I don't know. I mean, I do respect lawyers a lot. But, like, do you think this is gonna change the mindset of for them to act fast? Because now, they are getting all of these documents. Right? Like, imagine a huge company. Right? Like, I was in Google before. Right? Like, let's say, the company is helping you file for immigration and like all of these people are now submitting it. How does that look like? Right? From a...
00:15:42 · Dan Mishin
[00:15:42] S1: That that's a wonderful question. I mean, I... You nailed it. I think that the single biggest bottleneck to AI native services business model, whether or not it's law or anything else, is human inertia. That will be the single biggest bottleneck. Practitioners who are ready to change. And look, my answer is there is 18,000 immigration lawyers in America. And by the way, funny fact, 11,000 out of 18,000 applied for jobs that manifest at this point, which is kind of ridiculous. But let's say out of 18,000 lawyers, there is 5% that are early adopters, that are truly understanding that the way they used to practice before doesn't make sense. Look at Nicole. Nicole was a practitioner at traditional immigration law firm handling high profile boutique difficult cases. Nicole saw the writing on the wall that the profession is about to change and Nicole joined the company that was three people at that time. Right? And there are other people who are forward thinking. So the other interesting piece here is that because AI enhances productivity by multiple fold, let's say twofold, threefold, fivefold, tenfold, who knows over time. You need less practitioners to service the same number of cases. So the most sort of like advanced and for in attorneys are going join the wave early and then the following group, late adopters of technology, they may get to it at a later point. I guess my answer is there is a subset of lawyers who are there already, who understand the change and we just focus on those. And reality is with a 100 lawyers that currently work at Manifest, we can service so many cases like we're talking tens of thousands cases. Did I answer your question?
00:17:31 · Jake Saper, S2
[00:17:31] S0: Yeah. Good. [00:17:37] S2: Thank you, Dan. You've mentioned that there is a difference between AI native services and AI roll ups, which are becoming very popular. Right? Can you expand on that? How they're different and what the founders who are building AI native service companies should do differently to compete with AI roll ups in the same space? So for example, in accounting, there is a lot of them and I'm sure you're competing with some of the private equity that is doing the same thing with lawyers. Right? With the lawyer firms. So what's the difference and how do you approach it as a founder? How do you compete?