Scaling Europe
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.
00:05:03 · Quddus Pativada
It's the model itself which makes it a system design problem and not a legal problem. And when we start to combine, you know, AI researchers and, you know, systems thinkers with, you know, legal experts like Dominic and, you know, others, we started come, you know, come across this really powerful combination where we think, you know, every business will have access to really high quality legal support for a fraction of the cost. You know, our end vision is that, you know, any legal trouble gets sort of abstracted away, nobody has to go through the same thing that I had to go through when I was 22, you know, balancing my first business with the, you know, the family situation itself. So I think it's a it's a mission of... You know, you can think of it as a vengeance in a way, but at the same time, it's like highly motivating, know, mission of abundance. You know, I think once you start your abstract legal way, and if you can get contracts turned around in in an hour, and then you can, you know, know, resolve disputes in an hour, you sort of, you know, lead to this world that's far more trusting a world where, you know, people aren't thinking or aren't under the pressure of leader force, but they're actually able to do more and and and be more. So I think, you know, that's a vision that Dominic and I shared from the from the very beginning.
00:06:00 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:06:00] S0: And why do you think it's... Why do you think the big illegal tech companies that we've seen with this, Harvey or Legora, have focused so much of building a product for lawyers themselves as opposed to your mission, which is all about kind of consumers or end users, whether that's businesses or individuals?
00:06:13 · Quddus Pativada
[00:06:13] S1: No. I mean, we think Harvey and Legora are great companies. I mean, the way we think about it is that was the... You know, that... That's the first generation. You're selling to law firms, you're essentially a margin expansion exercise, you're making service providers far more effective. What we sort of see ourselves being is the second generation of legal AI and legal tech, which is actually delivering the service itself to the client. There's companies that are doing this now that you know, we look up to and we were inspired by, but I think, you know, being able to deliver the service directly to the client bypassing... And and, you know, I wouldn't say bypassing is the right word, but working together with that middle layer of, you know, licensed lawyers, licensed professionals, I I think will lead to a far better experience. And, you know, the way we see it is the lawyers are still very much as part of the process, and and I I can let Dominic touch on this as well, and he's helped, you know, shape our strategy around this. Our, you know, lawyers are both providing the final pass. They're still providing final judgment of any of our outputs, but the AI just took the first pass to allow it to be a far more cost effective and just effective solution for the client. But Dominic, maybe if you want to talk something about that.
00:07:09 · Dominic Raab
[00:07:09] S2: Yeah, look, and I had not the same story as Quddus, but when I set up my own consultancy when I moved out of politics, there's a whole suite of legal issues from professional liability to contract review to tax. And I wish that there'd been something like IndexLaw there at the time. I would have managed to work out those issues in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost. But it's worth perhaps just walking through what this experience would be like for the consumer. We see this as about AI emancipating, liberating, empowering the consumer, whether that's an individual like me or Quddus or anyone else or a business consumer. And if you like, you go there and you plug into IndexLaw the details of your challenge, the wider circumstances, and what the the regime, the the the model will do is give you a legal strategy. So already, the IndexLaw USP is not again just making lawyers more efficient. It's it's giving the consumer the ability to devise and execute their own legal strategy. So you would get a checklist of problems, a roadmap of how you go through with them, and then IndexLaw would, through the algorithms and the knowledge, start to answer those questions. At the same time, where and when you get to that stage where it's at a level more serious or more intricate, that you just need that human touch, the care, the attention, responsibility that can only come with a trusted lawyer, we also then connect the client, the customer, with that trusted lawyer. And that's where I think the niches that IndexLaw and Quddus have found. And if you think about it, it's not just about cutting through the inefficiencies of the current system. It's about empowering the consumer to get to the answers quicker, more efficiently, but not losing sight of that, again, that human care touch and responsibility. And I think it's that that makes IndexLaw unique.