Scaling Europe
00:11:50 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:11:50] S0: Amazing. Can you talk a bit about the... Perhaps The UK or England and Wales itself? Right? It feels that there's a particularly interesting regulatory framework in The UK. I think I saw that they... There's been approval for, like, an AI native law firm. It feels like The UK's regulatory framework for the legal sector makes what you're building particularly well suited. Can you touch on that a bit?
00:12:13 · Dominic Raab
[00:12:13] S2: Well, I I... You know, I've obviously been involved both as a practitioner back in the day and also as a chancellor. The the the one thing I would say is that the regulatory regime will respond quite slowly, and, again, it will reflect the producer interests. So I think it is amenable to reform. I think reform will happen, and the regulatory system will adapt, but we come back to this quintessential point. We are focused on the consumer of legal services, and probably the regulatory system previously and hereto has still been relentlessly focused on the producer interests. Now I'm not saying they don't matter. I still feel very deeply proud to have come up through the profession, have a lot of contacts within it, but this paradigm shift is is is important. We are we are putting the consumer in the driving seat, and we would expect, I'm very confident, the regulatory system will adapt, will be malleable to that, particularly if you can keep the liability and responsibility of a trusted, lawyer at the, again, at the higher end of the process. And and, ultimately, what what consumers want, and I think the public trust issue is important, and the integrity of what we do is very important. What people want to know that it's a trusted system, so having best in class, error rates. So, everyone makes mistakes. Computers, AI will make mistakes, individuals obviously make mistakes, but narrowing down that to the very lowest level possible, I think that's something we embrace. And also then having the lawyer at the end of that to make sure you've got the integrity of the system. Again, you get to that place where we think, IndexLaw will be at the vanguard of a consumer experience that is more responsible, regulatory friend... Regulator friendly, but just delivers a a change in the mindset and the outlook of the way you approach legal services. And I think it'll be very difficult to hold that back. We we hope to be leading the the charge.
00:14:16 · Sebastian Johnson, Dominic Raab
[00:14:16] S0: And can we talk specifically about the role? So you've been named founding adviser. What are the kind of things that you're gonna be advising on, working on, and what are the things that you're not gonna be looking at? [00:14:26] S2: Well, look. We're feeling our way a little bit. It's an exciting time. We see month by month the the the concept and the index all going from strength to strength. There are institutional, legal, policy, and commercial issues. I think being a a handrail, a sounding board on those issues. I think what what I've certainly enjoyed, and and Quddus can give his own perspective, is thinking also about the medium term strategy. In in answer to a lot of the questions that you've put to us, we've been gaming out how does that work. So a sounding board on issues as they arise, contributing to the strategy, And, ultimately, to make this effective in the way that the the vision that Quddus has set out, we need good partnerships. We need good partnerships with investors, with clients, with larger businesses, and with the legal sector. And so, hopefully, it can contribute and add value to the partnerships that IndexLaw builds. [00:15:21] S0: And could you touch on perhaps, like, how this relationship came about? You know? Like, it's... You know, you're fairly early on in your career. You've been heads down building. You've had all this stuff going on with your family. How did kind of Dominic come into the picture? And then how did the the the role, the real role sort of materialize?
00:15:39 · Quddus Pativada
[00:15:39] S1: Yeah. No. No. I mean, I think to to both echo what Dominic said and to answer some of the questions that you had, I think my biggest concern when I first started, you know, thinking about Index and, you know, the idea of AI native legal services was the credibility and trust aspect. You know, I can sort of envision what a really great client experience looks like, but would I have the first clue on how to get regulated or would I have the first clue on am I allowed to call myself a law firm versus not? How do I think a lawyer? I think that's sort of missing domain expertise. I sort of saw it almost as a barrier to building the company itself where, you know, I had sort of understanding the tech and the AI aspect itself and building the agents around this sort of space, but actually understanding the space deeply and having someone to, you know, guide us through that. That was what we initially were looking for. And then when we came across Dominic through mutual, you know, I I thought it was just gonna be like a really great press announcement. Right? I can announce that Dominic joined the team, you know, probably got some inbound off of it. It's been, you know, months now since we started working together and we hadn't announced it so far because the thing that surprised me the most was most of the value was actually internal. So, you know, we meet on a on a periodic basis. I share thoughts and product updates whenever they go. We we had them, you know, get Dominic's sort of ideas on our go to market. And then the last few months have been sort of a roller coaster. I mean, we're gonna be announcing a lot more, and we work with, you know, government entity. We have live paying clients that we do real services all the way from basic contract review to company setup and new countries are expanding to. So we are working across the spectrum and I think Dominic's played a really helpful role on balancing that move fast and break things, startup sort of ideology with how do you actually build the next big law firm or the next Latham or the next day. And I think that that's sort of one of the things that he's been incredibly helpful with, helping us think through that but then also charting out the path itself. We have an idea of where we wanna be and what the space will look like fifteen, twenty years from now.
00:17:19 · Quddus Pativada, Sebastian Johnson
I think what Dominic's really been helpful is actually charting out what that looks like on a year by year basis. You know? Does that look like I was, you know, today providing contract review for startups, you know, a few months from now maybe handling, you know, other practice areas, whether that's, you know, negotiations or, you know, government and then, you know, really being that, again, that go to legal layer for every star, every individual in the world. But it's been it's been the pleasure of my life working with Dominic Raab again. Pinch myself every time I I sit down and despise optimism. If it feels like I've got the, you know, the the most specialized version of ChatGPT, I'm getting version. Or we're definitely finding the second exchange thoughts, but it's been awesome. [00:17:53] S0: That's amazing. I wanna ask one final question for Eliot and Kasco. What have you got to achieve in the next six, twelve, eighteen months to to get IndexLaw at the next stage of its journey?
00:17:53 · Sebastian Johnson, Quddus Pativada
[00:17:53] S0: That's amazing. I wanna ask one final question for Eliot and Kasco. What have you got to achieve in the next six, twelve, eighteen months to to get IndexLaw at the next stage of its journey? [00:18:04] S1: Yep. I'll let Dominic give his thoughts as well, but the way we see it is we've sort of validated and proven this model of being able to deliver legal service, that's contract review, employee review for startups all the way again to country expansion, negotiations with customers themselves. Our idea now is to validate this at scale. So we have, you know, handful of paying clients. We're now sort of onboarding, you know, founding clients, call them where these are enterprise startups that we can co develop and co design solutions for and then sort of scale past that. We are working very methodically and you have... In a phased approach, we're not irresponsible of expanding your practice areas too quickly. But our goal is really just to work with as many startups as possible. You know, our vision over the next six months but even over the next five years is, you know, can we reduce the number of, you know, startups and individuals thinking about legal problems? And then two, can we increase the, amount of work that AI can do in that sort of end to end workflow? Maybe, Dominic, if you wanna touch on it as well.