00:18:03 · Jay Madheswaran
[00:18:03] S0: the field, what was my software stack? This is the unfortunate thing about plaintiff law and institutions is historically, plaintiff law really didn't need more than a cell phone email address. Honestly, even Microsoft were. Some people on the solos would not buy it for cost reasons, No. Other It's because if you think about it, you actually don't do that much redlining. It's a trust boundary situation. So your one side is kind of opposition to the other side, so you're not really collaborating in the same way that you are when you're doing contract review or something along those lines. So that was kind of it, And no software really solved their core problem, which is exactly what you mentioned. They're labor constrained. That is the core of how they do anything at all. And because they have labor and they're good at managing their labor, they found a way to solve, and every problem to them looked like solid labor, and that's how they've grown up. And as a result of that, what ended up happening was a lot of resources on software went towards defense institutions, because that's where the budgets were. For Harvey, really any company, honestly, legal software companies today, vast majority of them are on the defense side, because that's where the budgets are. And that's what's easy to build for, easy to get money for. And on the plaintiff side, these are small businesses that are watching their pocketbooks every month. If you're not driving outcomes for them from day one, you're out. You're not getting renewed, they're gonna curse you out. Anything they can do, they're going to come after you. And that's what's made things so difficult. But what we realized is, well, their core problem is, we know what their incentives are, they want to represent more people, they want to win, and we can do that now. The beauty of software today is once you do a task manually, even tasks that include crunching new pieces of data and transforming it, that's kind of what AI is really good at, you can now encode it as a process. That is a fundamentally new shift that has never happened before. That's what they were trying to do with people operations, but never worked, because every single case is still different enough that you can't do it. It's still bottlenecked on hiring smart enough people to be able to handle it.
00:20:27 · Jay Madheswaran, Alex Rampell
And now one smart person can actually handle, like we talked about, 500 different cases of very different facts, very different situations, and how do you even keep that in your brain? Like, it's hard. But now you don't have to. And I guess one of [00:20:42] S1: the things that a lot of founders are thinking about right now at the application layer is like, uh-oh, maybe I'm roadkill from the big guys. Right? Like, the labs that produce the intelligence, maybe they're gonna go tackle Myspace next. And I'm I'm toast, and there are many ways of defending against that. But defending kind of sells it short because if you're able... Like, if you have a network effect or if you have data that actually nobody else has, you can deliver better outcomes. So, you know, who cares if everybody uses ChatGPT or or Claude behind the scenes or on their own. But maybe talk about, like, I'm sure you've thought about this a lot. Why is Eve better than just raw intelligence, and how does it get better, because it does, the more practitioners that use the product?
00:21:28 · Jay Madheswaran
[00:21:28] S0: Yeah, we're betting on these models getting better and better. And our value is exactly that. If you have thousand Albert Einstein's to work with, to do litigation, or the best attorney ever to do every single task, we would take it. The problem is if you drop Albert Einstein into a law firm today, he will not be productive for quite some time. And that is a general problem that Eve is solving. And why won't that person be productive? Well, it's due to a number of things. I think one is in plaintiff law, the vast majority of data is actually non scrapable. About less than a percent of cases actually settle and get turned into case opinions. Vast majority settle pre demand or pre litigation, And some even before that, right, where it's actually just negotiation of, hey. This is how I was wronged. Please fix it. And to
00:22:20 · Alex Rampell, Jay Madheswaran
[00:22:20] S1: make that concrete, it's like, I'm in a car accident. I'm not at fault. You know, the adversary, if you will, like the other side's insurance company is like, oh, you weren't that hurt. We'll give you a dollar. Right? They always try to, like, deny, deny, deny. Like, rule number one of of an insurance carrier is deny. Rule number two is deny. You know, it just goes on. Those That's are all the rules of insurance carriers. So now I hire a lawyer and... To actually get what I'm owed because I actually am injured and my car is actually totaled and they just don't wanna pay me. You get a settlement. Doesn't go to case. It doesn't go to actual trial, but you know That's right. Right, that GEICO actually did pay $29,000 and that's very, very useful information, I assume. [00:23:01] S0: That's right, because insurance is the one that's dealing with 100,000 different [00:23:04] S1: laws. They have the shared community, they know all the cases, because it's sharded across all the different local firms, they don't know exactly GEICO's every single move. That's exactly right.
00:23:14 · Jay Madheswaran
[00:23:14] S0: And they even have ominous sounding software like Colossus, which tracks... They try to basically say, A broken thumb? This is how much we think it's worth, which is a hard thing to do, for in their defense, it's a hard thing to do, but they are doing that, but also saying, this is how much we can get away with giving them away for, and irrespective of that individual's actual need of their particular situations. And that's what the legal system is meant to fix. That's what it's there for. And what now is happening is, and this is the interesting bit and the challenge, is if you go and Google, how do you write an amazing demand letter against State Farm for soft tissue injury cases? That today exists nowhere. Even for a new paralegal that is joining a plaintiff firm, this is something they have to learn. And on top of that, it gets more complicated, because when you're in local jurisdiction, the local environment, like the court systems, your opposing counsel, they all behave a little differently, and that context matters too. So what Eve is doing is it's turning this historically incredibly difficult to utilize multi attribute, multidimensional information that is basically, what is the best thing I can do at this particular moment to improve the outcome of the case? Yeah. And that same question is repeated thousands of times during the case, and a human brain is just not capable of keeping all of that in mind. But AI is. And that is the type of data we help build for law firms, and they're seeing the immediate value from it. And the first place where they see value is, of course, intake. Who do I even take on? Who am I good at representing? And maybe start there, and keep getting better.
00:25:02 · Alex Rampell
[00:25:02] S1: Right. And I imagine because these aren't giant firms, right, like if I'm a lawyer in New Jersey with a four person, four attorney practice, And over there, there's another lawyer in Arizona with a seven attorney practice, but their counterparties tend to be State Farm and GEICO and and and whatnot. At The Limit, it's actually fine to share information. I guess, how do you think about data? Because I met... This is always a... This is always, you know, hard for companies when you're getting off the ground. It's like, no. No. This is my data. But there's also... There's a give to get, I assume. It's kinda like, you know, I I work with a a dental AI company, and it's like, well, the dentist in Iowa can't serve patients in Florida, but they want to learn from the collective actions of each other. But I guess how do you think about, you know, just data sequestration and and whatnot? Does that ever become an issue, or how do you think about using it?