Your first attempt is not supposed to work...
What I wish I knew before starting Lexoo (particularly as an ex-lawyer)
It’s now been over 9 years since I left ‘big law’ to start Lexoo. A few years in, I realised that a bunch of things I had learned at the law firm were actively holding me back in building the business.
So I had quite a bit of ‘unlearning’ to do.
For example, I remember when I was new to the law firm it was drilled into us by the firm’s senior partner how the professional indemnity insurance worked, and the dire consequences if the firm ever needed to claim under it.
The solution? Simple! He said: “Don’t make any mistakes — just… don’t”.
Is it any surprise that lawyers experience more acute emotional pain when they create something that isn’t quite right, even when it’s non-legal work? We go through extreme lengths to avoid it.
That may be the right strategy at a big law firm, where the status quo is just fine, so managing the downside is the main thing. Most top firms are still printing money year-on-year, so the upside is basically taken care off!
For new companies or for in-house legal teams who are drowning in work, the status quo is absolutely not ‘just fine’. If they don’t innovate, they’re dead.
The ‘better-not-mess-up’ mindset in that case leads to serious problems:
You’re too slow, as you’re tinkering until it’s perfect
You build features that YOU think are needed but actually aren’t
You don’t build the features that ARE needed because you weren’t aware of them to begin with (that’s topic for another day)
Because you spent ages on it, you will be hesitant to make big changes after launch, when you inevitably realise it doesn’t work as you thought it would!!
The right mindset is:
Ship the smallest possible solution to the problem (‘minimum viable product’) fast:
doesn’t matter it’s not perfect and you feel a bit embarrassed, just call it a ‘beta’ and launch it to a small group to get feedback.
so for example, if you’re an in-house legal team wanting to create a ‘legal front door’, just spin up a Typeform/Google Form and ask four folks in the business to try it for a week. You’ll learn where it’s broken within days.
Tell yourself before launch that your v1 isn’t going to work:
Really feel that in your bones. This means you’ll be way more primed and interested to learn in which way it’s not working, as opposed to either deluding yourself that all is fine, or getting deflated.
It also means that you don’t see your v1 as a failure, but rather as a necessary step to learn as quickly as possible in which direction to take it.
Once I learned this lesson, things became easier:
It became emotionally easier to pivot the business to where it needed to be (I still did it way too late though, read more about that here).
We ended up building new solutions (like our contract playbook tool LexPlay) at a much faster pace. Basically launching very early, then deploying changes to the software on a daily basis, based on what our customers and internal users are telling us.
Thanks for being here,
Daniel
P.S. If you need help with any of these things, we’d love to help out :-)
Commercial contract negotiation: fixed fees + fast turnarounds. Work done by our in-house lawyers.
Contract playbook solution: create detailed contract playbooks in LexPlay (a smart MS Word plug-in) and:
Train up new and junior lawyers to a high and consistent standard.
Empower sales team to negotiate their own contracts.
Multi-country and repapering projects: such as localising T&Cs, employment contracts, answering regulatory questionnaires as well as Data Protection remediation (SCCs etc).