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Ep 84: Why Lawyers Struggle with Communication with Briefly CEO Adam Stofsky
79 Plays16 days ago
Is it possible to carve out a meaningful career in law by following your passions? What's harder: building a non-profit or a business? What do lawyers have to learn from animators?
Join Adam Stofsky, CEO of Briefly and founder of the New Media Advocacy Project, as he shares how he used high-production documentary video to advocate for human rights across the globe and started a company to help lawyers better communicate with their clients.
Listen as Adam discusses the challenges of non-litigation career paths, founding nonprofit and for-profit companies, the trauma of human rights work, working with creative professionals like animators and voice actors, the importance of bearing witness to human rights abuses, and much more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-84
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Why Adam wanted to become a lawyer: 2:29
Starting your career at Debevoise & Plimpton: 5:48
Transitioning into human rights work: 7:20
Founding the non-profit New Media Advocacy Project: 10:48
Dealing with the challenges of human rights advocacy: 17:52
Adam’s biggest accomplishments at NMAP: 23:18
Living on a farm in Upstate New York: 26:20
Founding Briefly: 33:38
Helping lawyers communicate better: 43:46
Lessons from creative professionals: 47:26
Expanding Briefly’s customer base: 50:27
Rapid-fire questions: 56:33
Book recommendations: 59:20
Connect with us:
Adam Stofsky - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamstofsky/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Communication Challenges in Law
00:00:00
Speaker
Like in law school, we don't get any comms training of any kind, right? At all. and And actually, I don't think law school particularly trains us to communicate well about law, actually.
00:00:11
Speaker
Putting aside all the other stuff you mentioned, how to write an objective memo. They spend so much time on like citations and how really do this stuff from a technical standpoint, which is important. But they don't talk about they don't talk about the other stuff. How do you actually explain this stuff?
00:00:26
Speaker
to someone who's not another lawyer in one of these very formal settings, here is court in particular, or maybe in a negotiation around a contract or a legislative hearing or something like that.
00:00:39
Speaker
They don't teach it at all. And so like we we really come out of law school ill-equipped.
Passion and Purpose in Law Careers
00:00:50
Speaker
Is it possible to carve out a meaningful career in the law by following your passions? What's harder, building a nonprofit or a business?
00:01:02
Speaker
And I like this one. What do lawyers have to learn from animators?
Introducing Adam Stofsky and Briefly
00:01:08
Speaker
Today, we are joined on the abstract by my friend Adam Stofsky, founder of Briefly.
00:01:14
Speaker
Briefly helps organizations like Zoom, Auric, and Guild distill complicated legal concepts for their business and other non-nerdy lawyer stakeholders.
00:01:26
Speaker
Before starting briefly, Adam was the founder and executive director of the New Media Advocacy Project, which uses video and narrative content to drive change around human and civil rights issues.
00:01:40
Speaker
He started his career in a slightly more traditional way as a clerk at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as a Skadden Fellow at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and doing litigation at Debevoys.
00:01:54
Speaker
A note to be fully transparent on this one, I've been working with Adam a little bit for a few months, advising briefly on my own time because I like the mission. i think he's a cool and interesting guy, as you will learn.
00:02:06
Speaker
And I like working with cool and interesting people. So just wanted to tell you all about that.
Adam's Journey to Law
00:02:12
Speaker
Adam, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Tyler. Interesting, maybe. Cool, I'm not so sure about anymore.
00:02:20
Speaker
Well, cool cool means different things, right? Not everyone has to be a rock star. Literally cool today. It's like zero degrees up here in the Hudson Valleys. I don't always ask this question anymore. I used to ask it more often, but I think it's interesting given your career path and your career journey.
00:02:37
Speaker
Why did you want to become a lawyer? what What drove you to go to law school? Interesting. i didn't want to become a lawyer. Actually, my mom my mom and mom was ah was a teacher right for years. She was a single single mom. I up with just my mom in Brooklyn in ah in the 80s.
00:02:55
Speaker
And she ah I ended up going to St. Anne's, this really nice private school, and she had to be able to record it. And so she changed jobs and became a headhunter, like a legal recruiter, kind of in the eighty s Huh.
00:03:09
Speaker
shit For my entire like late middle and high school years, she was like placing big law lawyers into before that term existed, probably big law lawyers into other jobs at big law firms.
00:03:20
Speaker
And she just told me over and over again how miserable somebody is in my mind. Like, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I can be anything but a lawyer. Because she saw, you know, she she she saw this, frankly, kind of negative. People wanted to leave their jobs.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah. um But so no but so sort to answer your question, after college, I was a bit lost, didn't quite know what to do. Ended up traveling around the world for a year, just me and a backpack. $5,500 I was able to travel around the world for you. This is in the very late 90s. For a year? Mm-hmm.
00:03:49
Speaker
Wow. spent three of those months in India and another month and a half in Nepal. That helped. ah Much cheaper back then. Yeah, it was pretty cool. But ah during that trip, i kind of I ended up finding my way to various kind of volunteering with various human rights organizations or like kind of relief organizations in various ways.
00:04:08
Speaker
didn't Never realized you could like do that as a job and got very interested in the idea of doing human rights work, um partly because you know my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and and I was just kind compelled by the idea of doing this kind of work.
00:04:21
Speaker
And ended up kind of pursuing that.
From Corporate Law to Human Rights
00:04:23
Speaker
So I got a home from this trip. Actually, I was really into rock climbing and mountain biking those days. So I got a job at Eastern Mountain Sports and Columbus Circle. And I was just like selling backpacks um while trying to oh find a job. And this woman stumbled in with her with her her wife and they were trying to outfit themselves for a backpacking trip. And we were chatting and she was the general counsel or I think associate general counsel at the Open Society Institute, which was what is now Open Society Foundations. Sure.
00:04:50
Speaker
Much different back then, but it was the George Soros's foundation, one of the major funders of human rights work. We started chatting and and I said, I was interested in doing human rights. And she said, well, why don't you come in for a for an informational interview?
00:05:02
Speaker
And just for about six months, she became my boss, right? She hired me as a new legal assistant. And I was working in a general counsel's office of a big human rights foundation.
00:05:13
Speaker
Now, I didn't really love the general counsel type work. you know I was more interested in the substantive work, which I got involved in to some degree. But they kind of convinced me, if you want to do human rights work and you don't have a serious subject matter expertise in a particular country or region, the best way to do it is to become a lawyer because the whole world of human rights has become lawyer.
00:05:33
Speaker
legalized right over the over the years. And so that's kind of why I went to law school. I had no particular other reason why it's like want to do human rights work. This seems a good way in. And then when I got to law school, I actually loved it. And I found law just really compelling as a subject.
00:05:46
Speaker
So but that's how it happened. How'd you end up at Debovois? Because that that to me is almost the, that's the, you would think of that as the most traditional part of your whole resume. And yet that's the thing that stands out as almost like the most distinct or like the piece that, hearing this story too, about your interest in human rights way predating law school, which I didn't really know. um That's the thing that's different.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah. that's the awesome right Yeah. So, well, you know, i when I was in law school, I got sort of sucked into it, right? I loved it. I found it really interesting. And, you know, you i went to Harvard, right? There's a lot of kind of, to be honest, the cultural pressure and prestige pressure to do prestigious things. And one of those things is going to work at a big law firm.
00:06:29
Speaker
And so, and I kind of thought, well, I kind of want to do human rights work. Wouldn't it be great to like make a little bit of money beforehand to be able to do that without worrying? And so, So kind of thought, well, I'll just do this. I'll do some on-campus interviews. I just picked like three or four firms that I knew had good pro bono programs and they do the things I wanted.
00:06:44
Speaker
and And these very charismatic ah partners at Devovois, including this this ah this one guy, Mike Gillespie, who I think may have just either stepped down or taken an of-counsel role. Great guy, very charismatic.
00:06:58
Speaker
He just gave me the hard sell and said, you can do all these wonderful things at this firm. It's a lovely place to work. ah You should give it a shot. And so it really this one guy that kind of talked me into it. and And that's how I ended up there. i did I did interview at some other places, but I think, don't know, once you get locked into a place and get the idea that you could thrive there, that's where you end up going.
00:07:16
Speaker
you know So yeah, that's that's pretty much it. It really down to the end of the person. Yeah. Was it hard to leave and go back to human rights work? How how did that come about? was Was that a gradual sort of, yeah, like, I mean, then then starting the New Media Advocacy Project, was was that a gradual transition? Or was that like, a I, you know, i'm I'm kind of over the big law thing. I need to do something different. i'm going to go and start this organization. how did that transition come about for you?
00:07:45
Speaker
I'm trying to think back to give you like an honest experience. It's interesting, right? like you get yeah you know So I really didn't like big law life. like i really did So I had done – I clerked for the Ninth Circuit and I was actually pretty bored during that job, which is already an indication that certainly at least a hell of a – Everyone around me loved it. I had these brilliant peers, obviously, as wonderful judges.
00:08:05
Speaker
I was not into it. It's not my job. I definitely needed a little more kind of action in my job. um And then I went to the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights and the Staff Fellowship also. like It was much, much better. I was much more in the thick of things.
00:08:19
Speaker
But I found what I was really compelled by was more the non-actual litigation work I
Founding the New Media Advocacy Project
00:08:23
Speaker
was doing. I was doing a lot of Katrina relief work, like legal legal response to Katrina, which happened pretty much right after I started my job, and a bunch of other stuff. Even the fundraising, I kind of found more interesting than like – mean, I had done so many depositions and defended so many by the time I finished my time there. I was just done with it. It was not – And then at the firm, you know i did I really enjoyed aspects of it, but I found like – I knew I wasn't going to last long. And I think it was – it wasn't to do with the people or the work. It was actually just physically – like I physically didn't like sitting still that much.
00:08:53
Speaker
I couldn't sit in their offices and sit still and do stuff. This is why I hated depositions because I'm just like, how do you – it would hurt my body to sit still for that long. I that.
00:09:04
Speaker
coffee in a deposit where people other people love it. They love it. Sitting kills. We know this now, right? Sitting kills, exactly. These are standing depositions. Anyway, sorry, my God, I'm taking slow and answer this question. no i knew I had this idea to start this organization that integrated video and multimedia storytelling into legal advocacy for years.
00:09:23
Speaker
And I think I knew i wanted to do it. And and going to Devovoys was a way of kind of getting some private sector experience, making some money, and kind of just trying this thing before I did it.
00:09:33
Speaker
There were definitely moments in my best moments at the firm I thought, huh, well, actually, like this is maybe you I'll do this for longer. But at the end of the day, i think I knew I was going to leave. And then what happened was the financial crisis ah hit. and And everything kind of stopped, right? Devovoys and the other like elite firms, weren't they weren't doing any lawyer layoffs.
00:09:50
Speaker
They may have done any staff layoffs. and they were really They were really firm about that. and They made it clear we're not laying anyone off. But it just got kind of boring for a while. it was like sure partners negotiating conflict waivers for like four months and like nothing was really going on.
00:10:03
Speaker
And the firm actually – I told um ah some of the litigation partners, hey, I want to start this company that that does this really interesting work with video and litigation. and and they were incredibly supportive. They gave me like ah like ah like a research, like a billing code to like do research on – Lots of evidence and ways of... and So they they were really supportive. And I think they actually... They probably knew I was not going to be like one of their top performing partners. My guess is that for them, like because they like to recruit... everyone They want to recruit entrepreneurial lawyers and interesting people at their firm.
00:10:33
Speaker
Having more alumni go and start companies and interesting social enterprises, I mean, that's a huge win for them. So um um my guess is they were... I don't know, maybe not that sad to see me go. and so I was very happy I was doing something interesting. So they were incredibly supportive actually.
00:10:49
Speaker
Was starting this hard, ah you know fundraising, figuring out how to make it work. I mean, what what were the early days of starting that light before you'd built a team around you or or just trying to get it off the ground? Starting Nmap? Yeah. i mean, was incredibly exciting.
00:11:05
Speaker
I'm going to say it was actually not that hard to start, but really hard to maintain, right? left where I had like too much success early and luck early.
00:11:16
Speaker
So my first stroke of luck, and I say it really is luck. as i got um I got this Echoing Green Fellowship. I don't know if anyone in our audience is familiar with Echoing Green, but it's ah it's ah one of the early when the first organizations that was doing like social entrepreneurship funding and really they thought of themselves as ah that's a kind of startup funder for a social enterprises, both nonprofit and for-profit. So they were an early funder of like Teach for America, for example, and I think Citi and a lot of other really interesting organizations. Wow.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, some some really some really great ones. and And so I got that. It's hugely competitive. I kind of just applauded a whim. They don't give you a lot. of Back then, it was like literally $60,000 over two years. It was a small amount of money, but it was a huge boost just prestige-wise and access to other funders. And just a lot of our early funders saw that echoing green stamp of approval.
00:12:04
Speaker
It's like getting that really good early investor, right? that just Totally. Yeah. Sequoia is on your cap table and like the money just flows in and the customers are like, well, they must be good. and Totally. It's a bit like that. I mean, you might even call like Echoing Green sort of like the Sequoia of yeah that more of that more kind of niche world.
00:12:22
Speaker
So it was great. and also I got to meet all these little entrepreneurs. It was very exciting. I didn't know anything about business actually. And like I learned a ton. So that was a real boost. And then we just started getting all these other funders. We got a bunch of big human rights funders early Our work was interesting. It was visually compelling.
00:12:36
Speaker
But then, you know, got I could go for I can forget a whole podcast on the many mistakes I made. But you're reading long story short, when you're raising money from like big institutional funders, we got funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Hewlett, Oak Foundation, Open Society.
00:12:51
Speaker
i mean, we we got a lot of the big ones and it was exciting, but it's very hard to sustain that. right? Like they wanted like results and data really quickly. when you're doing this kind of, kind of soft intervention and human rights, it's really hard. You're not going to get great data in one year or two years or even maybe five. It's really hard.
00:13:08
Speaker
And so they were demanding what we really couldn't deliver. And then, you know, the, lot of the grants didn't continue. I mean, some did, but, but some didn't. so it was really, really hard to sustain. I, I over hired, know, I mean, I made all the mistakes kind of, uh,
00:13:22
Speaker
Newbie founders make. so it was So starting it was actually, from a business standpoint, not that hard. um Sustaining it from a business standpoint was very hard because you're relying on a small number of larger funders. One more thing I'll say about doing human this kind of human rights work, especially the work that actually emotionally it was really hard sustain as well. right I didn't realize...
00:13:44
Speaker
That it was just – we were editing videos about you know kind of torture cases and gender-based violence and we we did this whole thing about the Haiti cholera epidemic and people are just dying of cholera in huge number. It was just really emotionally difficult to sustain, which is something I didn't realize kind of – I should have, right? It seems obvious, but it didn't.
00:14:04
Speaker
So that was another interesting challenge. And when is this happening? I mean, like, when when are you doing this? And I ask to say, you know, you're creating this video content, or is it like documentaries? Is it like, you know, as social media is emerging to raise awareness on social, like, sort of like, what, what, what, you know, waves are you riding? Or like, how are you trying to generate this sort of awareness and impact?
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's so interesting looking back now with video being just ubiquitous, right? right so So I got started doing this in law school. So i was my second it was my 1L summer. i met this really cool like doctoral student at Harvard Law School, this guy, Felix Morka, who's a really brilliant Nigerian human rights activist.
00:14:45
Speaker
I want to do something like seriously adventurous my 1L summer. So he ran this human rights organization in Lagos. And I thought, well, wow, that would be really cool. like Lagos, that's like a crazy place to go. Yeah.
00:14:57
Speaker
um So I asked him for a job and he he did all this work on economic, social and cultural rights, so particularly housing. And so they did all this work on these huge forced evictions in Lagos, which there were many during the the dictatorships in kind of the 80s and 90s.
00:15:10
Speaker
You know, there were a lot of just mass demolitions of houses. So I went over there and my job was to write a sort of a do some research, empirical research and write a new human rights report about a community called Morocco, which was a sort of almost like a town of 300,000 people that have been demolished by by the Lagos government and a core group of them and stuck around and had been fighting for their rights for years. Right. So my job is to kind of do some research and kind of develop a new legal theories of why these folks are entitled to homes, basically, or companies. Anyway, I brought this video camera with me. This was like even before digital ah SLRs became a thing. It was like this old school camcorder.
00:15:45
Speaker
And I kind of taught myself how to shoot documentary style interviews. And I actually got some training from some local Nigerian journalists. I sought them out. And I just started interviewing my clients just kind of for fun. i It was like a little fun side project.
00:15:57
Speaker
But they were so compelling on on camera that I thought, huh, well, this is interesting. What if we like actually try to use their voices to pressure the government to like settle this case? So I brought to my boss and he's like, yeah, let's try it. You still need to write the human rights report, but but do the videos.
00:16:12
Speaker
Anyway, I shot like 35 hours of footage. I spent my pretty much my whole tool l year teaching myself how to edit using the like one of the original like Final Cut Pros on my little laptop. Yeah.
00:16:22
Speaker
For any videos, out editors out there, you would have to like wait. Every little five-second crossfade, would just like sit there while it rendered for 10 minutes. It would a while. I don't know am. so anyway, i made a video I made this documentary. It was like an hour long. It was broken up into little chunks, sent back to Nigeria, and we basically scared the pants off the Lagos government and actually began sell out a slice of the case.
00:16:43
Speaker
That's a long story short. That gave me the idea, like, wow, maybe this video thing could really make a difference. for lawyers, right? And so that's where I got the idea of of starting NMAP.
Challenges of Human Rights Advocacy
00:16:54
Speaker
And so that's what we did. We really made, for them we did a variety of things, mostly like short form documentary style videos, storytelling style videos to do several things, like pressure opponents to settle like we did in Lagos, like kind of outside of litigation.
00:17:07
Speaker
In litigation creates sort of demonstrative evidence or other kinds of evidence. A lot of the international courts don't really have evidence rules, and really have hearsay rules. So you can kind of do more storytelling. And then also for community education. So we would do, in addition to doing the advocacy work, we'd of educate communities on their on their legal rights.
00:17:24
Speaker
but Some of that is like the the sort of DNA of what we're doing it briefly now. But the whole idea was everything needed to be either really short, because they we're literally like chasing some African Commission for Human Rights judge and their clerks who have like 90 seconds to watch something, or it had to be simplified for people who had no experience with law, like all those villagers in Haiti who were being impacted by the this cholera epidemic that was spread by the UN.
00:17:49
Speaker
So we simplified things and we shortened things and made them emotionally You talk about this work being emotionally exhausting. I mean, I've gotten to know you a little bit. I mean, I think i think you're actually like a pretty, like, law you're very intellectually curious, but you're sort of like a logical, very rational person who wants to, you know, make things happen and drive things forward. and Like, did you end up liking this work in retrospect?
00:18:14
Speaker
it Was was the that emotional side of it challenging, like really challenging to deal with and... that something that sort of like drove you away from it eventually? i don't know. I'm just curious, you know, who is who is this right for basically? Like, you know, what what personality type is going to go and is going to really for a long time find fulfillment doing human rights, human rights work?
00:18:39
Speaker
That's almost the question. It's a good – I'm thinking of it's a very well-framed question. I mean think I I had to think about how to answer this. So from the – just from the business side of things, so I did not like it, right? I did not like raising money from foundations. It's actually really exciting because you like kind of get to get the money before you do the thing and like they give you a lot of money. but You sell a dream, right? It's a wonderful model.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah. really like It can lead to some incredible results, but I but i ended up finding it kind of arbitrary, very frustrating. i felt like our our funders didn't really have a sense of how our business worked.
00:19:14
Speaker
You know, little things like the way there'd be a big gap between one grant ending and the new one starting. And it's like, I got this payroll I've got to cover every month. I'm like, I can't just ask them to go away for three months and come back.
00:19:25
Speaker
Things like that. That's everyone. I mean, if there's any nonprofit EDs or like, you know, COOs or any manager, they'll know what I'm talking about. Like it's really frustrating, right? So there was that. and And I think that actually also played a feeling of instability, made all the other stuff, emotional challenges worse.
00:19:42
Speaker
um You know, I don't think it's really right for me in the long term, this kind of human rights work. I don't. know that it's really right for anyone. It's really, really hard. You know, there are certainly people who are kind of more thrill-seeking.
00:19:57
Speaker
i think of I have a friend who's a former of Special Forces soldier. have a good friend who's ah like a fire fire firefighter paramedic, and and he's like the late fifty s now. He's been doing it forever, or mid-50s.
00:20:10
Speaker
Folks like that who have a more thrill-seeking kind of kind of personality, I could see them doing well with this. I think it's just – but I don't know. I mean I think about like folks at a larger human rights organizations and they – I think there's a lot of trauma in those organizations too I would imagine. I think there is.
00:20:30
Speaker
I remember i' getting interested in kind of trauma in the workplace. I think it was an organization, I'm probably going to get it wrong, but it's the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma or Trauma and Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
00:20:43
Speaker
and they had published all this interesting research on like the impact of covering wars and and conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, journalist organizations. how did like Especially those editors editing video in Manhattan and and like they never set foot in Afghanistan, but they're getting like these PTSD symptoms.
00:21:02
Speaker
And actually, there was an interesting story about like, I think it was like game developers working on, were, my co-founder at briefly is a former game developers were plugged into that world little bit. And there was, I think it was folks working on like a Mortal Kombat game that the animator ended up because they were looking at reference images of like these horrible, gruesome,
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah, right. We were actually getting kind of PTSD symptoms as well. Really interesting, right? So, yeah. um Anyway, all this is to say is the research I saw indicated that like having like essentially like a stable work environment with predictable like comp, schedule, management, those are the things that built re resilience to to trauma more than moral commitment, more than support from your colleagues, a kind of stability.
00:21:49
Speaker
So I think there's You almost didn't have that either, right? Like you're fighting every every six months to get funded. And yeah. It was just me like and a bunch of people running. It was very loosey-goosey. So I mean, lesson learned, good management, good institutions, good support.
00:22:05
Speaker
and think So I guess I would say, i don't know if there's any like kind of person that's good for this kind of work, but but good organizations are good for this kind of That's really interesting. And you think about the great work that a lot of small nonprofits do out there, but then you also sort of think about how financially precarious that work often is for the, you know,
00:22:25
Speaker
people who are literally going and, you know, they're the ones who are going and bringing the meal or the socks or whatever to the the homeless or unhoused person, right? Or they're the one who's out there in the field doing the field.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, you think about oftentimes those people don't have a huge safety net and I can imagine how that would be really tough. It's cool. I mean, actually, I work with a lot of, excuse me, I know a lot of farmers because I live up in the
Pride and Impact at NMAP
00:22:51
Speaker
Hudson Valley. My wife, Anna, is a farmer.
00:22:53
Speaker
And farmers, are not they don't run non-mold. Actually, there are some non-profit farmers up here, but those are actually, ironically, the best resource because they're like funded by a philanthropist. all these local farmers up here, at did they live they don't they don't run non-profits, but they live with that same kind of precarity, and they also serve vital public interest. So it's not just a non-profit, for-profit thing. It's more like any kind of small...
00:23:15
Speaker
organization Right. Anyway, interesting. Okay, I want to ask you about the farm in a second. But last question on New Media Advocacy Project. What are you most proud of having accomplished there? That's a good question.
00:23:31
Speaker
i think what I'm most proud of is two things I would say. One is the the team we put together. i just found these this group of incredible people who wanted to do this work and not get paid a lot of money to do it.
00:23:44
Speaker
People who are really creative and real. And we have people who are living in Nigeria, living in Mexico, and living here in the U.S. Those were where our kind of main centers were.
00:23:56
Speaker
And it was just a great group of people. And that's where I really I learned how to develop teams. I learned how to, you know, to some extent, how to how to manage. And so so so I think that's easily the thing I'm i'm most proud of. It's usually what I'm most proud of whenever I do anything. But other thing I'll say is, like you know, I have to look back. we we We had some real impact on a number of cases, particularly this Haiti cholera case, among others.
00:24:21
Speaker
but But just I think the act of bearing witness is really important. And we interviewed hundreds of people. who've gone through terrible situations, whether it's like, yeah, they're serious, serious stuff. You know, that you know that some of the stuff I mentioned, torture, generous violence, you know, disability issues, all kinds of stuff in countries like Armenia, Georgia, India, and Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico. um And so I think just that act of sitting and listening and recording stories um was really powerful.
00:24:51
Speaker
Even if the ultimate impact in some of those cases was not massive on their actual legal case, it's really hard to do that. I think just being there to bear witness is really, um it's just really important. I'm quite proud of that.
00:25:02
Speaker
Someone told the story for that for the historical record. Or someone has listened even in that moment. It's important too. but Do you think of yourself like you're leaving this and and we'll get to in a second? Like, I mean, I want to talk about the farm. I want to talk about briefly, you're moving on to the next thing. I mean, at this point in your life, do you even think of yourself as a lawyer anymore? Is that really the first thing that you would think of or the way that you would describe yourself? Or has your view of yourself changed a bit?
00:25:29
Speaker
you know, I think I always thought of myself as a lawyer, even though I hadn't practiced law in a long time. And it was a central part of what I think makes makes my enterprises interesting, right? It's like um the the sort of very deep merging of of creative professions and law.
00:25:45
Speaker
I think if you lose the law, you lose a bit of what's special about it. And I think so. I've always kind of I still identify as a lawyer, you know, to some degree. I really don't – I'm not a very good lawyer.
00:25:56
Speaker
don't but You want to – I don't know. I shouldn't say that. Maybe maybe yeah but maybe if if I had not been a litigator, I would have done that. But I'm just – you want think about this on you or prosecuting your or being involved in your civil case. It just not doesn't work for me.
00:26:10
Speaker
But no, I think I still do think of myself. well I think I always did throughout this. And, um you know, yeah i think i think yeah. I think I still do think about it. I think I never really lost that. Mm-hmm.
00:26:21
Speaker
So tell us how you ended it up on a farm in Hudson, New York. What what led you there? I think it's one of the interesting things about you. And I think it's also something mean that clearly has shaped briefly in the way that you've built the business. And we'll get into that.
00:26:37
Speaker
Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, all right. So this is, I don't know. it''ve I've been up here 15 years now. It's still kind of hard. mean, grew up in Brooklyn like the 80s, right? like i but i looked at Like Boston and San Francisco and DC New York. It's like, this is kind of It's still crazy. So, no. So i so i left Debovois, right? So, like, i I left after a few years.
00:26:56
Speaker
i um My then-fiancee, we, got be like, got married. We had this, like, awesome loft on 22nd and 5th, know, right by the Flatiron building. It was super cool, you know, with a few other people.
Life Transition to Farming
00:27:08
Speaker
like So I left my job, like, literally, like, got married at City Hall and, like, gave that apartment up, like, in the same week. let Let's just do it all at once. And then we went to this, like, awesome, like – nine-week honeymoon, like but driving around the West because I kind of knew I was going to start.
00:27:23
Speaker
I'd already had fellowship, right? had a little bit of this this Echoing Green fellowship I mentioned. I knew I had a little bit of money and obviously working at Debevoise in mid-aughts was a good way to make some money. So I wasn't like financially worried, but I thought, you know, let's live.
00:27:36
Speaker
My mom had a little house up in the Berkshires and I thought, let's like go crash there for a few months and live rent-free while I kind of get this thing going and then we can move back to the city and do the thing that, you know, normal people do, right? They go, oh,
00:27:49
Speaker
um So wait we... we we we we We moved – we might maybe just crashed my mom's little place. Actually, think she may have charged me rent now that I think about it. And ah my wife was – she's English, so she was waiting for her green card to to clear. So she kind of couldn't really work a normal job, so she wanted to find some volunteer stuff. So we went to – she was interested in in ah in ah in farming and and livestock.
00:28:12
Speaker
We'd actually visited one of my clients at NMAP, actually the guy who would become my first client, this guy Brian Kankanen, who runs the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Amazing organization, amazing guy.
00:28:24
Speaker
We had visited him and his wife. Sorry, the story is going get a little crazy. and Okay, so on our road trip, we went all around the country. he at that This guy, Brian, lived in this place called Joseph, Oregon, which is like this idyllic community in the like the near Hell's Canyon, like in eastern, northeastern Oregon in the Wallowa Mountains.
00:28:43
Speaker
Absolutely gorgeous. i had no idea idea this place existed. We like went to visit him. And he'd had that he had this like ere a half-acre market garden that he and his wife kind of just managed. He like runs a human rights organization in the mountains.
00:28:55
Speaker
It was totally crazy. I'd never seen this before. And I think my wife got really inspired by this garden. She's like, wow. on a half an acre, essentially have a little farm. She was like absolutely fired up.
00:29:07
Speaker
I think she was getting ideas. Fast forward a couple of weeks, we landed ah in and in in the Berkshires. but She wanted to kind of get involved with some agriculture. So we just went to the farmer's market and we're asking around with all these people, hey, do you need help on your farm?
00:29:19
Speaker
And this like one guy, guy named Sean Stanton, who's a wonderful farmer in Berkshires, he said, sure, show up, you know, 6 a.m. on this day. Turns out he actually farms, well, farmed one of the ah Dan and Dave Barber's family farm from like the Blue Hill kind of universe. So he was plugged into this whole food thing.
00:29:39
Speaker
It was all very exciting. Within a week, she was like getting up at five in the morning to go milk cows at their dairy house. and I've never seen a person take to something so naturally. it was kind of ridiculous. married for like two months. I'm like, what are you doing? Like you're going off with this other dude to go milk
00:29:57
Speaker
And Sean is like this very strapping, handsome farmer. But it was great. She loved it. She said she wanted to stay up in the country. She's like, hey, can we stay here? And I was like, are you out of your mind? like live up But really genuinely scared me. I was already feeling a bit isolated, like kind of trying to raise money and start this thing. It was actually scary, like but i'm not having any...
00:30:17
Speaker
you know entrepreneurs, there's a reason why most of them live in big cities, right? Thrive on that kind of community support. But I said all right, well, let's look around. Her idea was to live closer to Hudson where ah Amtrak train is. And so we found yeah this ah this farm called Kinderhook Farm, where we still live, in a little town town called Ghent.
00:30:37
Speaker
And I called them up and said, hey, we're looking for houses in your area. Can we take a tour of your farm? And they said, Ashley, we have a house for rent on the farm. Why don't you come take a look? And it turns out that the manager of the farm, this guy, Lee Rani, I'm introducing all these characters here.
00:30:50
Speaker
He um but me was, well, no, but seriously, like this whole time my life, it's like, how was my life this? How did it get so interesting? them All this stuff just happened.
00:31:00
Speaker
you could have You could have just been living in Chelsea and working in a skyscraper. And instead, yeah. I know. Oh, my God. I think about it sometimes. Anyway, so this guy, Lee, ran the farm. His wife, Georgia, they ran this farm.
00:31:15
Speaker
Turns out Lee was ah is an ex-lawyer. So he, like, went to University of Michigan and practiced as, like, a pretty, like, serious corporate lawyer in Detroit, like, in the 80s, doing, like, leveraged buyouts and just doing all kinds of stuff.
00:31:27
Speaker
And then at the age of, so I felt safe with him, right? It's like, he's like his lawyer. So then in, ah and then around the age of 40, he just like quit to go raise cattle. He grew up on a seat on a you know you know, in in the ah Western part of Michigan.
00:31:41
Speaker
And he was like, you know what? I don't want to do law anymore. So he and his wife moved to West Virginia and they started raising calves basically. And so they had cattle. Yeah. Anyway, they had ah another friend who was an investor, bought a bunch of land up in the Hudson Valley, and then decided to start this farm and called Lee in Georgia and said, you want to come farm this with me?
00:31:58
Speaker
And thus they started Kinderhook Farm up here. And so I felt very safe with this guy. i was like, wow. And so the idea of living on a farm, like with a community around, some people that I was comfortable with was very compelling. So we rented this place.
00:32:11
Speaker
And within a year, my wife Anna had created a job for herself on the farm. They had a bunch of sheep. She was interested in sheep. And then she ended up getting a job as a shepherd, literally, other things but but and and and grew this operation into one of the kind of most impressive kind of grass-fed lamb operations in the Hudson Valley.
00:32:30
Speaker
So that's kind of how, and we're still here 15 years later. And I mean, well, my only experience, to be honest, with farming is I watched the show that Jeremy Clarkson did called Clarkson's Farm. i don't know if you've seen it.
00:32:42
Speaker
Being a farmer is hard. This is not like easy work. And also somewhat emotionally challenging is animals get sick and die and you have to make decisions, you know.
00:32:53
Speaker
day They're making life and death decisions all the time. i mean Yeah. yeah oh yeah absolutely i i i've seen a bit of the show actually i mean it's a little unrealistic because he has a backstop of a lot of resources obviously well yeah i mean the yeah the guy's super wealthy so it's kind of a yeah but i think i think he does raise a lot of the issues that commits really really hard but i will say like as an entrepreneur right i'm now but an entrepreneur for i don know fifteen eighteen years however long it's been I mean, when you live around farmers, you live around like ultimate entrepreneurs, right? right um They live and breathe it. They're hustling all the time.
00:33:24
Speaker
So that was really exciting. And that that has been I think my view of what entrepreneurship is has been really exciting. i mean, it might be one of the reasons why we're we're still bootstrapping briefly, right? It feels more possible seeing what these farmers do.
The Evolution of Briefly
00:33:39
Speaker
Being an entrepreneur is not all about going to Y Combinator, although that's great, or raising $7 million dollars and then $25 million dollars and then $50 million. dollars There are a lot of other businesses, great businesses that you can build ah in a very different way. Well, most businesses really, right? Most businesses, yeah. Probably 99.5% of businesses, I'm guessing, I don't really know, but something like that, right?
00:34:03
Speaker
so So where does briefly fit in and where did where did where did briefly how did briefly come about? Where did this idea to help, you know, and and I mentioned at the outset some of your corporate clients, but you also work with a lot of sort of legal aid organizations.
00:34:19
Speaker
it Where did this idea to take somewhat complicated legal concepts or processes turn them into fun animations, trainings, um distill them for people who are not lawyers or who do not want to, you know, dig in deep and understand the concept of an indemnity, right? Where where did this idea come about?
00:34:45
Speaker
um Yeah. So it came out of, I think it was a natural kind of our crew out outflow, outgrow, grow, and map, right? So we were doing, we were like explaining legal issues to try to win cases. Yeah.
00:35:01
Speaker
And I think we just got really good. I just got good at it. I got really good at like at explaining this stuff quickly. I got really good at putting together teams of creatives to make these a little short explainer videos. That's hard to do, right? And I was like, oh, I can actually find these people. And like that's mushed together the peanut butter and jelly of kind of technical, legal and business knowledge with kind of this exciting...
00:35:22
Speaker
all these creative skills. So I kind of got good at it. And then, you know i got frustrated with some of the advocacy work we were doing. Like it's really hard to win big human rights cases. It takes forever. yeah But actually like educating people about what their rights are, preventing these issues, that was really compelling. So the, i already had, even just a few years into NMAP, I had this idea that we could kind of,
00:35:43
Speaker
do this. and And then we ended up getting a project with a coalition of legal aid organizations led by ah sort of a lee a clinic at Fordham Law School.
00:35:54
Speaker
And by this this really wonderful lawyer in law teacher named Dora Galicados, who I thought don't know if she still runs the Furex Center over there. Really great group of people.
00:36:05
Speaker
They were having, so after the financial crisis, there was a huge epidemic of, as you would imagine, like consumer debt cases in the in the and the courts in New York. Literally hundreds of thousands of cases.
00:36:17
Speaker
And these organizations, ah the law for law school clinics and legal aid, did set up this kind of coalition of groups to to kind of show up in court and just try to help people. Because usually these these cases, right, the the debt collectors use the courts kind of as like a ah debt collection system, right, to help Right.
00:36:32
Speaker
collect on these deaths. They're often the third forcing function of sorts. Yeah. Right. So it was just, it was just all a bit, it all felt a bit lawless and weird. And usually if like someone just shows up to court, like the case gets dropped. Cause that's not how did these guys thrive on default judgments. This is like, I never how this works. Right. So like they, they sue like a thousand people at once, most don't show up. They're able to collect some of the money and then they make a bit of money off the debt that they bought.
00:36:59
Speaker
I think that's how the model worked. Anyway, so, but they were like drowning and like thousands and thousands of people. And so we put together this idea of actually creating video content to help the lawyers educate people about their rights kind of before they met with them or provide public information.
00:37:15
Speaker
So that, that was a, that still remains ah it's a really cool project. And that's kind of how this whole idea got started and thought, well, actually maybe if we're clever about how we teach people about law,
00:37:27
Speaker
we can solve a big problem at scale, right? Not like trying to win this one case, but like if we can just take, get 1% of people who are being sued for consumer debt to to actually just show up or answer their complaints and the case gets dropped.
00:37:41
Speaker
That's a huge ah ROI for what whatever this project costs, a huge impact. Right. So it kind of came out of our work. it It wasn't the natural kind of work we did at NMAP, but it was kind of came out of it.
00:37:51
Speaker
And then I thought, well, this feels like a company. People should pay us to do this. And also I was getting really sick of like foundation fundraising and getting really interested in tech. had a lot of friends who were starting tech companies at the time.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so I thought, all we're going to, I'm going to do this. And so I kind of, so, so I, so I decided to leave NMAP. I handed it off to an amazing, wonderful guy who was our successor, Steve Stein, and um and and moved on ah to start ah to start briefly.
00:38:19
Speaker
So, okay. So going back to this fundraising idea. So I was like this nonprofit dude. you go to donations and you go say, hey, I need half million dollars to do this exciting thing. So I kind of thought that's what how i'm going to do briefly, right? That's what I need to do.
00:38:30
Speaker
Yeah. ah hi I very quickly learned two things. One is that it doesn't really work that way. i guess it could. I don't know. I've never – I've not raised VC money, right? I've raised a lot of non-foundation.
00:38:44
Speaker
So like you know it's kind hard to just sell a dream. You have to like show an actual – you have to show the – Product, revenue, customer growth. Yeah. Incredible.
00:38:55
Speaker
a credible path. I had none of that, right? I was like selling dreams and yeah I wasn't actually raising money. It was more just having individual conversations with folks. And I was really being told, yeah, that's not going to, that's not going to fly. You've got to really change the way you're thinking about this.
00:39:10
Speaker
And then I just kept hearing all these kinds of horror stories about people raising too much money. And then like the laws of economics crashing hard. And so when we started briefly,
00:39:20
Speaker
I think this was the first, my first real lesson in entrepreneurship, like real and that nonprofit entrepreneurship is not real entrepreneurship, but like, you know, real starting a for-profit company. So we had this, I just had my first child at the time and I was trying to think through, okay, how this legal information thing, how is it actually going to make money?
00:39:37
Speaker
How are we going to actually get paid to do this? So what we landed on was this idea of making legal content around life events. This is how it all got started. So thought, did you know this, Tyler? I'm not sure.
00:39:49
Speaker
So still think these ideas are really cool. So we but the idea was, okay, like the way the legal profession is kind of works, it's all based around these like very legalistic practice areas. You have estate planning lawyers and family lawyers and education lawyers. They're very cabin in their practice area, very specialized areas.
00:40:07
Speaker
And also kind of laws often separated from like things like personal finance or benefits, employee benefits. My thought was, excuse me, let's unify all of that stuff, but around actual life events, like the the way people live their life.
00:40:21
Speaker
Having a kid, becoming a caregiver to a like disabled parent, returning from yeah Yeah. Like you're going through a natural disaster. These things, let's pull together law, ah all the different legal areas, personal finance, employee benefits, and sell it to companies as a kind of benefit kind of advisor, right? So I think,
00:40:40
Speaker
So we actually had some really promising leads. It was really interesting. and But like I knew I was going to have to raise VC money to actually make and to get an MVP to make it really credible.
00:40:54
Speaker
and But I was already getting the idea that I wasn't really sure I wanted to do this. or I don't know if I want to like – because i just I just wasn't sure it was going to work. I wasn't sure it was going to work. And I just didn't feel comfortable taking money.
00:41:06
Speaker
If I didn't have, but if I wasn't, I mean, not sure is too strong, we but if I didn't, if I was really uncertain that this was conviction. Yeah. And I was like, ah, I don't feel, that feels weird to me.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah. So we we're still plugging away at it. We had a couple of really good potential customers. And then I, but it turns out at at the same time, we were, like I mentioned that consumer debt,
00:41:28
Speaker
project we did, we were kind of getting, this is me and my co-founder who I had met. He Scott is a former, he was, as as I mentioned, he was a video game developer and UI UX designer for many years, wanted to get out of that, do something creative.
00:41:41
Speaker
He got excited by this. He had done some animation work for us in the past. And so he got excited about this. ah He became my co-founder. So he was the art and design guy and I was the law guy. And then, and we started, we were kind of doing just some side hustle projects with,
00:41:56
Speaker
the new york ah The New York State courts, the New York City Small Claims Court, to help them. They paid court users about their new online dispute resolution system. couple of legal aides were giving us money to like make some explainer videos to help educate the public.
00:42:10
Speaker
And and a sort I remember it was and it was in September of 2019. I'm going to say looking back, this is definitely the correct call to make. Looking the public. It's like, you know what? This life-in-one thing is cool, but like why don't we like do more of what we're already making money doing? like People are paying real money to do this.
00:42:25
Speaker
Let's do more of that. And that was like the the pivotal moment that I think made briefly into briefly. right Instead of chasing ah an idea that was never going to happen, really, um we started doing more of what was actually making us money. And so I did a webinar.
00:42:40
Speaker
the multimedia content crash course for lawyers, which we still all the time. And I like tucked it away in like late December. I was like, if I just do, I want to like screw it up the first time, but just a few times. i jump people I sent the invite out to a bunch of listservs, especially with delayed access to justice world that I was plugged into and 450 people signed up for the thing.
00:43:03
Speaker
Whoa. I like panicked. I didn't know what to do. i was like, oh my god i have to buy a new webcam. I have to like figure out how to do this. I have to upgrade my Zoom account. Like, what do i do And it went really well. And that just kind of things were off and running. we had that We had a list. We had all these interesting organizations interested.
00:43:20
Speaker
And so we kind of shelved the life event stuff. Thankfully, because like two months later, the pandemic happened and HR folks were not concerning themselves with buying expensive, new, innovative benefits. They were trying survive.
00:43:33
Speaker
um And then meanwhile, everyone was trapped at home needing more content. And so we started making legal explainer videos, mostly for legal state courts and legal aid organizations. And that's kind of how it really got going about five years ago.
00:43:45
Speaker
So that's an interesting thread to pull on and something that you and I have talked a bit about before and have some ideas around, which is ah I think a lot of lawyers that we both know are trained to be persuasive or trained in argumentation.
00:44:05
Speaker
um But you talk about you know a multimedia crash course. law school, law firms, the practice of law doesn't necessarily train you to be a great sort of like broader communicator, i to have the instinct to write three bullets for your CEO instead of three-page memo, or to make sure that you're well lit and your audio is clear when you're speaking on a zoom call with your colleagues, recognizing that like maybe a bunch of your coworkers are a little bit scared of you because you're the general counsel of the company. And they think that not all the time, but sometimes when the general counsel is on the call, that means that something's going wrong or someone's going to get in trouble. Right. um Those are just two sort of like cliche examples, I think, but yeah, let's,
00:44:59
Speaker
like Let's talk about this a little more, this idea of briefly, not just sort of distilling complicated legal concepts, but also helping lawyers communicate better and communicate with people broadly in like ways that they actually understand or that resonate with them or that are empathetic to them.
00:45:19
Speaker
Right? Right. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, right? Like in law school, we don't get any comms training of any kind, right, at all. and And actually, I don't think law school particularly trains us to communicate well about law, actually, putting aside all the other stuff you mentioned.
00:45:39
Speaker
Like, for example, um but we're working on this incredibly cool project with Albany Law School now. We're helping them build their new FlexJD program. They mostly online JD. Super innovative. It's a great group of faculty, a great group of people.
00:45:52
Speaker
And we're working on this. We're we're doing the first-year lawyering class now. It's basically the same first-year lawyering, like legal writing and research class I had you know when I was a 1L. and And they're like... They're still teaching a lot of the same stuff, how to write an objective memo, like how to distinguish a case, all that stuff.
00:46:09
Speaker
And I do think that's important. I actually think even though like not many objective memos are going to be written by humans in the coming years, because that's probably one thing that Gen AI is really good at. I do think that the discipline is still important, right? I and don't know if photographers like still learn to use dark rooms. This is what they're doing.
00:46:27
Speaker
yeah I don't know. Like you can imagine that still being useful as part of training, even though it's, you're not going to use it as a professional, but like, and ah but they don't really go, they don't really, you learn that stuff really rigorously in law school, how to write an objective memo, how do they spend so much time on like citations and how to really do this stuff from a technical standpoint, which is important, but they don't talk about it.
00:46:50
Speaker
They don't talk about the other stuff. How do you actually explain this stuff? to someone who's not another lawyer in one of these very formal settings, here is court in particular, or maybe in a negotiation around a contract or a legislative hearing or something like They don't teach it at all. And so like we we really come out of law school ill-equipped to talk about this, what we have expertise in.
00:47:15
Speaker
In fact, we we kind of become like it changes our language, right? We start using all kinds of funny words without realizing it. I think law school really changed how I talked for a time.
Learning from Creatives
00:47:26
Speaker
I mean, I know that you like, you have a personal, you like games, you like video games, your co-founder is a video game developer. um I'm curious what you think. and And then you have this ability to not just talk to lawyers, right? But that to work with the animators or work with the voice actors to make these videos. Yeah.
00:47:47
Speaker
I'm curious if there's anything that you think that lawyers have to learn from, you know, folks who are in those more creative disciplines or the the animators or voice actors of the world.
00:47:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many things that I think lawyers have to learn. It's kind of, and I think, but I think lawyers know that, right It's why like these webinars we do. I'm always amazed at how many people show up to them. There's a thirst for this of knowledge. thursday yeah Part of it's like just wanting to learn to communicate better, but also it's using technology and interesting ways to communicate better.
00:48:18
Speaker
him So yeah, I think there's a lot, there's so many things that lawyers have to learn those are a bit of a softball question. But yeah, like, so for example, we have this wonderful slide we use where we show like a legal document.
00:48:34
Speaker
It's like a big blog. It's like a law review article, I think. And it's just huge blocks of text and it's great writing, right? It's really interesting. but then But then we show what a graphic designer sees, like learning what they learn on their first day of their graphic.
00:48:45
Speaker
And it's just these ugly boxes that are disorganized and awkward. It's like anxiety-inducing, right? Yeah. So I think all the ways in which words... exist beyond like the words themselves, how they're presented, where you're seeing them.
00:49:00
Speaker
It's really important to like the level of, of um of like stress or comfort you're inducing into whoever's watching And that's really, or or reading them or listening to them. and That's really important for persuasion, right? I think like,
00:49:13
Speaker
you know when you I think the best litigators understand they need to like communicate with some like in their briefing or whatever, their motion with some like busy clerk who's got a million other things to do. And so they know how to like really write concisely and persuasively knowing like almost the physical environment in which this clerk exists, right? They know, all right, clerk's got two minutes. I've got this time.
00:49:35
Speaker
I want to make it as easy as possible to say yes. Right. So I think kind of taking that way of thinking and broadening it out into really engaging with how are you like, you're you're in the business of communication. You're in the business of persuading.
00:49:48
Speaker
How do you do that in in the universe of everything else aside from just the legal argumentation? been And that's what think. And I think especially, i mean, think all creative professionals are good at this, but I think video video games in particular, I think are good at a real concise argument.
00:50:06
Speaker
like economical communication of ideas, often complex ones. So that's why I like this. I love that we work with these game game devs on this. It's a really cool skill set they have. um The ability to communicate something arcane and, you know, video games are weird, right? There's all this complex stuff and they can communicate it often in three seconds. And think that's really interesting.
00:50:28
Speaker
How have Briefly's customers evolved over time? um And sort of, you know, where do you want to take the business over the next year or two?
00:50:39
Speaker
So we started off working primarily with state courts and legal aid organizations to do more of the stuff we were doing in that consumer debt case, right? So we were that we were like you focusing on public education, kind of scaling the work of of of what these lawyers could do.
00:50:59
Speaker
And then we pretty quickly saw the applications of this for the private sector. So we started working with with more in-house teams, as you mentioned, some of the wonderful clients that we have that you mentioned. um and law firms as well, tackling a whole variety of other problems.
00:51:12
Speaker
How can we improve, speed up the B2B sales process in a whole variety of ways by improving understanding of contract terms, either by by customers and counterparties or by sales teams, procurement teams? Can we kind of avoid the many mistakes that can slow down a deal?
00:51:27
Speaker
Sure. Particularly around things like, and do you mentioned indemnities. I mean, that that's going to be a thorn in commercial lawyers and salespeople's size for a long time. like Just at the margins, like speed things up, and there's a huge amount of value there.
00:51:43
Speaker
Better compliance training. We live in an increasingly complex world. Like can can we can we make the sort of often unfun business of compliance training and education just much more engaging and more useful and actually reduce risk There's a gajillion different use cases that we're exploring um in our work. It's really, fine now i remember we're focusing now on um things like law firm profitability. Can we educate? So lawyers don't get educated in comms.
00:52:10
Speaker
They also don't really get educated in business. At least most them, right? So trying to, this is a real problem, right? Like helping Helping lawyers get a set of both soft and hard skills, actually, to better communicate value to their clients, to understand how to do things like billing and invoicing, just understand the way law firms make money and operate as good businesses.
00:52:33
Speaker
That's another use case we're tackling now where I think there's a ton of value. So I think where where but where we are now is in a period of great growth and creativity, really engaging with customers on business. but what what are What are all the things that good short information can do to make my business better?
00:52:46
Speaker
It's really fun. We're also in the legal aid side of our work, really trying to not just create better public education and do those wonderful things, but really make the work of lawyers more efficient. Can we actually help these organizations represent more clients because their meetings are a little shorter because they're not explaining like stuff over and over again? Or can we make their meetings better so they can focus more on the actual facts of that client's case instead of explaining the basics? We can offload some of that to kind of a client onboarding experience, all kinds of stuff. So wherere but that's where we are now, right? Is in this period, I think of real, and it has it has um challenges, right? We're not, it's not like we have our contracts product and we have our, yeah we're kind of doing a lot of, we're really operating almost as a kind of tech enabled agency now, right? Thinking through these very deep problems.
00:53:35
Speaker
So, okay. So then to go to the the rest of your question, like sort of where are we, where do we see the business going? So I think, there are several things that we're trying to do. One well, say that, but I'd say the main thing we want to do kind kind of platformize this to some degree, right? To to make it, partly just to make it make it a little more scalable um for us, but to also give our, ah when we make all this wonderful custom content, right?
00:54:03
Speaker
and And we think because all these AI tools are making our process cheaper and easier on the production side of things, we think we can like beat the price of many subscription-based like video libraries, compliance libraries,
00:54:15
Speaker
over a time window of, say, three to four years. Our work is a bit expensive, but it's fully customized and begins to pay for itself very quickly. And we our hope is to build ah kind of get a bit of a platform environment where ah clients can much more easily manage their own content, integrate the content they make with us, integrate the content into pretty much every SaaS platform they have, whether it's their software, their CLM, their CRM, their internet, their LMS, whatever it is, to make it seamless.
00:54:45
Speaker
And also to edit and update content easily, right? So an executive leaves, it's very easy for us to like slot a new person in, you know, give them a very easy way to do that.
The Role of AI in Legal Communication
00:54:55
Speaker
That's very affordable. So kind of really productizing and and kind of, um yeah, platformizing. These are like kind of cheesy words, but you get what I'm saying.
00:55:04
Speaker
I think that's where we're looking for the next next couple years. And I think AI is going to make some of that customization or, you know, if not annual, even more frequently sort of updating easier, ah which I think is a huge tailwind to ride potentially over the course of the next year or two.
00:55:24
Speaker
Look, we've gone to 56 minutes and now we're first mentioning AI. Yeah, that's pretty good, actually. It is worth noting that it's like we use a lot of AI tools and it's like,
00:55:36
Speaker
For a little while I wondered, well, is this is this like a major threat to briefly? Like are people gonna be like making their own videos using AI? And I actually really think like what we do is really hard to do well.
00:55:49
Speaker
one's going to be going into like some video app that comes out next year and say, make me an awesome video explaining the indefinite provision in my contract. not going to happen, but it's pushing our costs down okay significantly and making our ability to respond, to change things.
00:56:04
Speaker
it's great It's amazing actually, but we're able to offer our, and I think the move towards custom is really interesting. and And that's where I see things going. I think it's going to go that way with apps as well. Like, it's you know, it's going to be much, much easier to make your own kind of custom LMS or whatever you want to make, you know, in the next, i don't know if it's two years, but five years, I would imagine.
00:56:23
Speaker
A widget for every problem and every company and every need. Yeah, I think so. Right. I mean, we don't know yet, but it certainly seems much more possible than ever did before.
Reflections on Meaningful Work
00:56:33
Speaker
All right.
00:56:34
Speaker
Some fun questions for you as we start to wrap up. The first one, and I ask these pretty much all of our guests, your favorite part of your day-to-day? my God.
00:56:47
Speaker
There is there room there like is no day-to-day. It's always so different. um I think my favorite part of my day-to-day is when I get to like talk to our customers about customers about a new idea, right? It's really fun, right? or like Or like the project kickoff meetings, right? yeah Everything is like a blank slate.
00:57:10
Speaker
And a lot of these folks are lawyers or they're kind of legal ops people or like a COO kind of person. And and they don't if don't know how this works. And it's really exciting. We're gonna be making cartoons or we're gonna be doing these cool videos.
00:57:23
Speaker
So there's something incredibly fun about that. And we can often take people out of their legal work into something that's a little more creative. um to solve a big problem for them. So I think that's something they did today. Those don't happen every day, unfortunately, hopefully. every day but But I think that that's the most that's the most fun part by far. it's it's really ah It's really a blast.
00:57:44
Speaker
Do you have a professional pet peeve? Oh, God. So professional pet peeve. Okay, so you're taking some risks here.
00:57:55
Speaker
Okay, so like I'm the CEO, right? So it's like my job to like stress out about all the things that no one else stresses out about. Yeah. So be we, so when you're in the process of like selling a product, it's especially if you're the founder, it's kind of your thing. It's really emotionally charged. It's stressful.
00:58:11
Speaker
And we, I often, there's certain people who are like email responders like me. I'm always like, Hey, got your message. Thanks so much. I'll get back to you, whatever. But some people, they just don't do that. It's not. bad thing. It's just a style thing. yeah but I feel like there's so many times I'm just like, I send this, I send the contract over or I send the proposal over and I just get response.
00:58:31
Speaker
There'll be seven other things they have to do before, like, close the deal with briefly. Yeah, yeah, But it's it's all fine. It's just a style thing. But like the not sending of like simple email acknowledgments, that drives crazy. I don't know. you like I'm a stress ball and I worry about deals falling through at the last minute. yeah But yeah that's I think that's like a little bit of a...
00:58:53
Speaker
Just send a quick email. email said Oh yeah, got the contract. I'm real busy, but I'll get back to you next week. Oh my God, that would make my life so much better. Maybe I should do more of that. That's fair. Yeah, i I feel like I'm pretty responsive. I try to get through my inbox, but that's fair. Like even a, I'm not going to get this to this for two days. It's probably too much to ask folks to send those emails. It really is. is I think it's just like saying, please assuage my anxieties. But ah but but it's it's ah it's a thing that works me.
00:59:21
Speaker
a book that you'd recommend to our listeners. You can take this any way you want. Yeah. You know. Okay. I have, oh boy. Yeah. There's so many, there's so many really good ones.
00:59:34
Speaker
All right. I'll take this in a, since we were talking about video games, I'll take this in a slightly nerdy direction. Actually, maybe it's not that nerdy. So I got – I used to read like fantasy books as a kid. And then for like 20 years, I didn't read any.
00:59:46
Speaker
And I kind of got back into it during the pandemic. There's all this great new um ah modern fantasy. so I'm going to recommend two. ah One that are very different but but equally awesome. One is called The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.
01:00:00
Speaker
I love this book. it's it's ah and I don't want to recommend any like big non-fictions, but you're getting like fun fiction books Yeah. oh this is a book about a a group of like master thieves living in this this kind of fantastical version of venice and they're not but they're not normal they're not like burglars or pickpockets they're conmen right so your hero is this ro yes almost robin hoodish kind of con man who runs these elaborate columns stealing huge amounts of money from the elite of this city And it becomes this gets involved with this crazy conspiracy and there's lots of adventure.
01:00:31
Speaker
It's really, really good. It's a series, but the first book can just be a standalone. So The Lies of Locke Lamora. And then similar genre, but a very different book. um ah It's ah a book called The Fifth Season by N.K. Jonathan.
01:00:44
Speaker
she's ah she i think she's like the most decorated one of the most decorated science fiction writers. She won, like I think, the Hugo Award for all the novels in this trilogy like three years in a row or something like that. um It's called The Broken Earth Trilogy, but again, the first book can kind of be a standalone.
01:00:58
Speaker
And it's a book that manages to tackle a lot of really politically charged issues, particularly things like climate change and racial justice in a way that's like incredibly compelling and exciting and not kind of preachy hear any way.
01:01:14
Speaker
And it's just a brilliant novel. So The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I'll be honest. I'm not a big fantasy reader. I mean, I mostly read nonfiction and those both sound very interesting. I will. think they're good books for folks who are like a bit put off by, you know, elves and dwarves and magic. They're kind of cooler. They're cooler fantasy.
01:01:40
Speaker
Awesome. All right. ah As we wrap up my traditional closing question If you, Adam, could look back on your days as a young lawyer just getting started, just out of law school, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.
01:02:00
Speaker
I wish I – well, I think I knew this in my kind of heart but never really was able to live it. is that Is that the – when you get into the, quote, real world, the kind of trappings of prestige matter less than you think they do.
01:02:17
Speaker
Right? So like – that Ninth Circuit clerkship I took that I really but should not have taken because it was not a good job for me. You know, a lot of the things I did that were to kind of chase prestige rather than just do the things I wanted to do and were good at,
01:02:33
Speaker
I think that's what I wish I'd understood better. And what I'd advise most you know young lawyers or really any professional coming in do good work. Sure, does having a fancy law school your resume help? Absolutely. But it's not going to help.
01:02:46
Speaker
What's really going to help is like getting getting out there and providing great value ah Being good person, I think that stuff matters way
Closing Thoughts and Future Engagement
01:02:54
Speaker
more. Life's too short to make decisions based on what anyone else wants you to do in terms of, well, I shouldn't say that. We should do what other people want us to do, right? We're not, we shouldn't live our lives hedonistic in some ways.
01:03:05
Speaker
You know what I mean, right? Like, don't do things because, like, you think it's going to look on your resume. Mm-hmm. I'll do that to a little bit of a degree, but really focus on what um what you're good at, where you can provide the most value. And I think that that's what I wish I'd known as a young man. This is especially bad, I think, in the legal profession. So that's what I would that's what i wish I had known.
01:03:26
Speaker
And someday move to the farm if it will make you and your wife happy. Right? Yeah. Even if even if it slows your career down, these are the choices that make life kind of rich and interesting.
01:03:38
Speaker
Adam, this has been a lot of fun for me. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. Yeah, same here, Tyler. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. And we hope to see you next time.