00:46:23 · Alex Rampell
[00:46:23] S1: to go. We're, like, see, we've talked about how plaintiff attorneys, they're supply constrained, not demand constrained, or many of them are, because they have this infinite influx clients that they can't serve because the math doesn't really work in terms of CAC versus LTV. It's the old fashioned thing for any business. It applies to them as well. Where are your constraints? What kind of holds you back from growing faster? I mean, you're obviously growing incredibly fast. What are your rate limiters? What do you need as inputs to grow faster as an output?
00:46:56 · Jay Madheswaran
[00:46:56] S0: It's really fascinating because a lot of the legal benchmarks, like even benchmarks that you share publicly that Anthropic, OpenAI, many of whom we're working very closely with are working on, care a lot about almost single outcome. Here's the task, did it kinda do mostly okay? And the world is now moving into agentic work. For us, the only thing that ever mattered was the agentic outcomes. So now that is getting more and more. The end outcome here is, today, we're still at the point with technology and processes where there's still a decent amount of human touches needed per case. But by doing more and more work, we've been drastically reducing that month over month, and in our industry, we need to do that per case type. So for every single case, we're learning that like a science. How do you actually resolve this case, and how do you build a mini attorney brain that is capable of crunching all these data points to that resolution, and driving it across the board, and working with all the tools they have access to, including Claude and whatnot, to drive that outcome. And that is a really hard problem. So we're largely limited by engineers at this point. We have a limitless number of things to do to drive this forward, and the other fun part is we have demand. The moment we are able to deliver on, let's say, moving vehicle accident cases end to end, the amount of value that gets unlocked for the world from that is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's just one subtype. Actually, that's
00:48:29 · Alex Rampell, Jay Madheswaran
[00:48:29] S1: a great question. Have you had a fully autonomous end to end case? It's like answer phone, onboard client, get check from GEICO, has that happened end to end? [00:48:40] S0: Not yet, but we're close. That is why we need the engineers. So to put things in perspective, a single case has probably 10,000 back and forths. 10,000? Something like that, because here's how you think about it. A client comes in, let's say it's a PI case, now you have medical records. So now you have to actually outbound call insurance companies and healthcare companies to get hold of the records that the clients already had. So that takes two weeks today. And with Eve outbound agents, where we actually have voice AI that can do the outbound call, and funnily enough, that's an area where we're already seeing agents talking to other agents and learning how to get past each other, which is hilarious. And that is one step that's needed. And then from there, you have to then create a document and actually have a conversation with the other side. So all of these are tasks we are completing end to end. So today, there's a little bit of touch required where someone makes an outcome better, or does something a little better. But exactly what we're building right now is how do you actually drive this whole thing end to end? And we are seeing early signs of that where it's actually live in some customers.
00:49:53 · Alex Rampell
[00:49:53] S1: And have you seen, going back to the defense side and their colossus of information, have you seen their reaction just in general change? So as an example of that, it's like, uh-oh, These guys contacted me with this. I always need to settle because they probably have, like, pretty firm rules about this. They don't just, like, randomly make it up as you go, I would assume, because they're dealing with this tens of thousands of times, if not more per year. So if I'm GEICO, it's like, oh, you demanded this much. Well, my first attempt is gonna settle here. But if their costs go down, maybe that changes. Right? So have you seen any change in reaction of your... Not your counterparty per se, but of your clients' counterparties? I would say largely still,
00:50:36 · Jay Madheswaran, Alex Rampell
[00:50:36] S0: the defense side very much still works on hourly business model. So they haven't quite caught up to the same pace as our attorneys, so there's a lot of, I guess, pricing asymmetry here. What defense used to do for this one law firm that we're working with is they'll wait... They'll push out discovery request dates until a day before Thanksgiving or a major holiday Right. And then send discovery there because they would know the person would go on vacation and be stuck with all this workload over that vacation, and they wouldn't do a good job at it or would rush it. And now what they use, because it was such a repeated tactic by them, they created an agent on Eve to respond the same day. So the next time this came through, they responded immediately with the responses, and the defense were like, What is going on here? [00:51:25] S1: Yeah, the tactics don't work. [00:51:27] S0: And we're seeing, there's so many variants of that that is happening now, which is causing defense to realize, wait. Is this this is what happens when the other side has resources? Right. Oh, crap. Right. And and that's that's what's fun to see. [00:51:40] S1: Well, Jay, this is a fantastic conversation. I learned a lot. Didn't realize there were 10,000 touches every time you went through a a case, but, really fascinating and delighted to be your partner, and bring Eve to the next, the next 10,000 firms. Thank you. I mean, we're... We still have so much more to go.
00:51:40 · Alex Rampell, Jay Madheswaran, Erik Torenberg
[00:51:40] S1: Well, Jay, this is a fantastic conversation. I learned a lot. Didn't realize there were 10,000 touches every time you went through a a case, but, really fascinating and delighted to be your partner, and bring Eve to the next, the next 10,000 firms. Thank you. I mean, we're... We still have so much more to go. [00:51:57] S0: We probably helped a couple 100,000 clients a day, and we have hundreds of millions to touch. And I would love to be making a difference in their life every day. So if that's of interest, please come join Eve. Awesome. Thank you. [00:52:13] S2: Thanks for listening to this episode of the a 16 z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on x at a a16z, and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a sixteen z fund. Please note that a sixteen z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a 16z.com/disclosures.