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Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast


Welcome to the Legal Tech StartUp Focus podcast from your podcast host, Charlie Uniman. 

On this podcast, I'll be interviewing the people who build, invest in, comment on and use the apps made by LegalTech startups.

My guests and I will be discussing many different startup-related topics, covering, among other things, startup management and startup life, startup investing, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how users decide to purchase legal tech.

We’re not going to focus on legal tech per se - instead, we’ll be focusing on the startups that develop, market and sell that tech.

So, whether you’re a startup founder or investor, a lawyer or other legal professional or a law professor, law student or commentator who thinks about legal tech startups — sit back, listen and learn from my guests about just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.

And if you’re interested in legal tech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please become a member of Legal Tech StartUp Focus, free online that I mentioned at the outset of this introduction, by signing up at www.legaltechstartupfocus.com.

Apr 23, 2021

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), Charlie Uniman, your podcast host, interviews Jim Chiang, founder and CEO of My Legal Einstein (www.mylegaleinstein.com). As My Legal Einstein puts it on its website, the company " . . . is an online software technology company . . . that leverages the latest AI NLP technology to transform the legal contract collaboration and negotiation process."

The episode begins with Jim describing his professional journey in founding My Legal Einstein. Jim, with an engineering degree from MIT in hand, started his career by working (outside legal tech) on the application of AI to video streaming. This work expanded into Jim's taking an interest in AI's applicability to data beyond the video streaming space. After exploring AI's application to still images and sound, Jim became intrigued by how AI can be applied commercially to written text. And, from there, it was a short step for Jim to understand how, with the law's everyday involvement with large language data sets, AI was a "natural" when it came to helping lawyers wrangle with contract management issues.

Jim next takes listeners on a tour of My Legal Einstein's product offering. Here we learn that My Legal Einstein's mission overall is to make AI, and it application to contract management, readily accessible to lawyers. In fact, making "access to AI" easy and intuitive for lawyers is one of My Legal Einstein's core values.

We also learn from Jim how My Legal Einstein assists lawyers' contract review work with contract clause extraction and collaboration tools that can be up and running within five minutes of a law firm's or legal department's signing into My Legal Einstein. As Jim, explains, shortening "time-to-value" for the My Legal Einstein customer is another core value for Jim's company, with the company achieving this time-to-value acceleration by - among other features - flattening the learning curve for putting My Legal Einstein to use. Jim tells tells us that one of My Legal Einstein's features is a built-in messaging service that sends extracted clauses to the client's business people with no need to "switch apps." As a web-based service, hosted by Google Cloud, Jim notes that My Legal Einstein necessarily takes privacy and security needs very seriously and even adds application-level security features to those that Google Cloud itself provides.

Jim points out that My Legal Einstein offers a monthly subscription for its services (thereby avoiding long-term customers contract lock-in). And, as Jim notes further, his company also offers a free 30-day trial.

The conversation next turns to how My Legal Einstein markets its product. Jim here talks about how the company makes itself known to potential customers by leveraging its AI know-how to provide educational content (in what Jim describes as an almost CLE-style) through various media (including presentations to bar association members) that familiarizes lawyers with AI's use in legal practice and dispels misunderstandings that foster distrust and even "fear" of AI among lawyers.

The podcast concludes with Jim describing how he's most proud of My Legal Einstein's fast achievement of product-market fit and the company's respect for its customers when it comes both to avoiding marketing hype about AI and to educating lawyers about AI.