Scaling Europe
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.
00:09:14 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:09:14] S0: Oh, that's really interesting. Dominic, you've been in the legal sector for such a long time, both kind of before your political career and then in politics and justice department. What do you what do you think about it, the legal sector, that makes it so ripe for disruption in the age of AI in a way that actually some professional services aren't seeing this? Like, accountancy probably is not quite there yet, but we are seeing a lot of amazing use cases where people are using AI to help with legal matters. Like, why do you think the legal sector is so ripe for disruption?
00:09:44 · Dominic Raab
[00:09:44] S2: I think there's two fundamental reasons, and it's changing and evolving all the time, and some of the AI models will definitely make law firms more efficient. Again, we're we're looking at a slightly different paradigm shift. But why is it right for reform? Partly because as a sector, it is very producer interest oriented. If you look at the structure, the lockstep partnership structure, I know that it's evolved, and and The US firms coming in in the nineties made a big change. But still, it's quite a a sector that's governed around the producer interest. I think still. I think you you you look at the billable hours. I mean, when I first joined and did my articles in a law firm, you would bill the client on five minute chunks of time, and lots of things follow from that, sentence structures follow from that. We've switched this round. Everything is about empowering the consumer to devise and execute their strategy. Yes. There's a bridge to the trusted lawyer at the right moment, but it's about the results and the impact that the system and the model the IndexLaw will use for them. And I think it's that combination. You can also see... I mean, when when I was a training solicitor in the late nineties, '98 to 2000, you could see also that the combination of legal executives, first, second year qualified solicitors, trainee solicitors, paralegals, that whole chunks of due diligence work was done by them. I I think there's gonna be less of that in the future, and that's because AI can do a lot of those things. What you're left with is still that design, that need, that premium level, support. So what we've got is we think the fusion of the efficiencies of AI with the human touch and the expertise that that that in truth, at the end, only a lawyer can provide. And I think that's why law is particularly susceptible to this paradigm shift. By the way, I also think accountancy will end up there. But but it's an interesting time in all of these professional services and that space.