Scaling Europe
00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Quddus Pativada
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Sebastian Johnson. Today, we have got some amazing guests on the show. Quddus, founder and CEO of IndexLaw, an amazing legal AI startup, and Dominic Raab, who I assume needs no introduction, but former foreign secretary, justice secretary, and former deputy prime minister, who has just announced that he's joining IndexLaw as a founding adviser, which is very exciting. But before we get on to the news, his role, and why he's joined, Carlos, I was hoping you'd give a a quick introduction to the company and what you've built. [00:00:25] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Seb, so much for for having us on board, and I I always love when I'm interviewed by the court, Dominic. It it sets me off really well. But... Yeah. Maybe a little bit of context on Index and what we're building. So Index is essentially our approach at delivering AI native legal services. I think part of our belief was the first generation of legal AI focused on helping lawyers. We wanna actually help clients directly and reshape the legal experience around the client themselves. So, you know, Dominic and I met a few months ago and we've been brainstorming around what the, you know, the modern law firm looks like or what the AI native law firm looks like, and, you know, have been working closely on on really shaping what that vision is, and we're very excited to tell you more about it.
00:00:25 · Quddus Pativada, Sebastian Johnson
[00:00:25] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Seb, so much for for having us on board, and I I always love when I'm interviewed by the court, Dominic. It it sets me off really well. But... Yeah. Maybe a little bit of context on Index and what we're building. So Index is essentially our approach at delivering AI native legal services. I think part of our belief was the first generation of legal AI focused on helping lawyers. We wanna actually help clients directly and reshape the legal experience around the client themselves. So, you know, Dominic and I met a few months ago and we've been brainstorming around what the, you know, the modern law firm looks like or what the AI native law firm looks like, and, you know, have been working closely on on really shaping what that vision is, and we're very excited to tell you more about it. [00:01:04] S0: Amazing. Well, look. You know, I guess, tell me the news in your own words. You know, you've got Dominic sitting next to you joining as a founding adviser. What does it mean?
00:01:04 · Sebastian Johnson, Quddus Pativada
[00:01:04] S0: Amazing. Well, look. You know, I guess, tell me the news in your own words. You know, you've got Dominic sitting next to you joining as a founding adviser. What does it mean? [00:01:11] S1: Yeah. I mean, so, again, it's still a little bit of a shock to myself sometimes, but Dominic and I have been working very closely for the last six months now on really... You know, since founding before we even wrote a single line of code, really looking at what does new legal services look like. And I'll let Dominic share more on on his perspective on that, but the idea is, you know, could we use AI to really accelerate and help clients in a way that's far more accessible, far more affected than ever before? So Dominic's been working out with us since the very beginning, not just sort of shaping the product and advising us, but really playing a hands on role, you know, not just now but in the future as well. But maybe, Dominic, if want to talk a little bit about yourself.
00:01:46 · Dominic Raab
[00:01:46] S2: Yeah. Look, it's great fun for me as I've made this transition away from government and politics to get some exposure in the AI sector. I thought when I met Quddus, introduced by a friend, an old contact, what he's trying to do is very inspirational. I'm very drawn towards the mission, not just trying. And I... I've worked in law. I qualified in the city. I worked six years in in house law and government even before I went into politics, and I did four tours of duty at various stages as justice secretary. So I've looked at the legal sector for a long period of time and thought it was right for reform. And what Quddus is doing and what the mission of IndexLaw has really been not just to make lawyers 30, 40% more productive by using AI. It's really to redraw and reset the paradigm around the consumer, And that's a really exciting, I think, mission. AI is driving it, but, really, the concept is to put the the consumer, whether it's a business consumer or a private citizen, in the driving seat when it comes to devising their own legal strategy. I think Quddus' story, I... I'm gonna replay, some of the compliments, is pretty compelling. How he set the the the firm up, the personal situations he's navigated, the family law dispute, and how it has really changed his life as well. So there's a bit of heart and a bit ahead, but it's a great mission, and Quddus has put together a really exciting team. So great honor to be a part of it. And for me, that AI exposure in a sector that I know pretty well is really intriguing.
00:03:17 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:03:17] S0: And can you touch a bit on that, Quddus, like Gior? I know it is a really interesting story about how you came to found IndexLaw. Can you share a bit of that story for those who don't know?
00:03:26 · Quddus Pativada
[00:03:26] S1: Yeah. Yeah. No. And maybe a little bit of personal context as well. So, you I'm not a lawyer by trade. I've been fairly tactical my whole life. I've been building products and apps since I was eight years old. You know, my first company I started in my last year of high school before I ended up taking a, you know, I like to call it a prolonged gap year, so I never went back to university after, but I built an AI education startup. We were quite early to the race of building, you know, with LLMs and chat bot interfaces with LLMs. Had this sort of really great two, three year on period where we were, you winning government contracts. We worked with, you know, users and students and schools around the world. Then sort of, know, had this incredible sort of one year down period where, you know, my parents were going through incredibly rough force and still are. A lawyer's mistake ended up, you know, costing me my childhood home that I'd lived in for fifteen years or so because he sort of filed the wrong document. You know, had these sort of, know, issues come up and over and over again and it got to the point where I was probably spending more time with with lawyers than I was with my own family and really started to understand, you know, I'm sure every single sort of lawyer has used, you know, AI, you know, five times more than they have, you know, three years ago or two years ago, but none of my legal bills had changed and none of the experience itself had fundamentally gotten better. And I thought, you know, instead of just selling the service to the service provider, it... There seemed to be this one to two year opportunity to actually displace the service provider or the incumbent legacy traditional service providers. That became a really exciting mission, we started to get with the legal industry as a whole. And and one of the things that... And, you know, Dominic and I kept coming back to this was a lot of the flaws or issues of the client experience weren't a result of domain expertise. You know, lawyers themselves are great, and we're not trying to get rid of lawyers by any way. It was the system around them. It was the structure of the law firm. It's the way the service are delivered to clients. It's the, you know, priority of a client based on what they bill, what they pay.