Jan 27, 2022
In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), podcast host Charlie Uniman interviews Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of Dublin, Ireland-based Trialview. As TrialView puts it on its website (www.trialview.com}: "Quickly and easily digitise the trial process and save time, effort and money. . . . [Moreover,] TrialView’s unique synchronising technology enables document led hearings to be conducted remotely."
We learn from Stephen how his founding of TrialView began, as is the case with many other legal tech startup founders, with frustrations he faced while practicing law. Stephen explains that, as a junior trial lawyer working on long-running litigations, he wondered why his and his colleagues' wrangling with many thousands of documents couldn't be handled better with the introduction of digital technologies. As Stephen's developed his thinking about the "digitization of trial work," he came to realize that it it went beyond just the digitizing document review (a step that was already being addressed by e-discovery companies). As Stephen came to see it, digitization tools could also be applied to the task of coordinating, in real time at trial: (i) the presentation of trial documents and (ii) the collaboration among the parties to the litigation in dealing with those documents and their presentation in court.
Stephen goes on to discuss, among other topics:
(A) How TrialView went from its first, very minimum viable, product to the initial funding round for the company and the company's development of a fully-featured trial management tool.
(B) The way in which the COVID pandemic accelerated TrialView's development of video features in support of trials and other dispute resolution mechanisms that were required to be conducted on a fully-remote basis.
(C) Stephen's belief that, even post-pandemic, we will witness a hybrid approach to conducting trials, mediations and arbitrations (where much of what was formerly done in-person will be carried out remotely, but with a core set of dispute elements more frequently than not being handled in-person).
(D) What marketing approaches TrialView has taken successfully, especially in the face of getting both judges and frequently litigating parties (such as insurance companies) "on board" with TrialView's use (with Stephen also pointing out here how TrialView has partnered with companies that handle trial-related tasks outside of TrialView's purview to call attention to TrialView's offering) .
(E) TrialView's penetration of markets outside Ireland and the UK, including especially its targeting of the deposition-taking market in the US
(F) How Stephen and his TrialView colleagues are most proud of the role TrialView played in keeping Irish courts functioning at the outset of the COVID pandemic.