LegalTechTalk Uncovered Ep 14 – Sean West 

Transcript

Robert Hanna: Welcome to the Legally Speaking Podcast, LegalTechTalk Uncovered mini-series powered by Clio. Please introduce yourself.

Sean West: Sean West, co-founder of Hence Technologies.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, great to meet you, Sean. Loved your energy, loved what you’re getting up to. But first things first, how are you finding the conference?

Sean West: Loving the conference. It is tough to put on a conference like this in a market that already has a number of events going on. I am stunned at the level of attendance, the energy here, the quality of the speakers.

Really been enjoying it.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, I have to agree. I feel like I’ve met somebody who’s been in the legal community, who’s an avid networker. The amount of new people I’ve met is fantastic.

So the testament to the team, how have they managed to get so many people here from all over the globe? I’ve been speaking to people from Singapore, from the US, from India, you name it. So it’s incredible.

Can you describe what you’re currently focusing on?

Sean West: So we’re very focused right now on bringing a product to market for geolegal risk, and that’s the intersection of politics and the law. So we are working on making it easier for law firms and legal departments to track all of the crazy stuff going on in a world that’s on fire, and actually understand the legal risks that they’re exposed to.

Robert Hanna: I love that. So let’s dive a little bit deeper, because I’ve been saying to all of these entrepreneurs, legal AI, legal tech entrepreneurs, whatever you want to call it, whenever you’re trying to do something, there’s challenges, right? Whenever you’re trying to build something, you’ve got to go through challenges in your own business.

But what’s like a key challenge you’ve identified in the legal sector and how are you addressing that specifically?

Sean West: So I think the biggest challenge I’ve come across in the legal sector is just how inwardly focused everybody is. So much, you know, you asked me about this conference. So many conferences I go to are lawyers talking to lawyers about lawyering.

There’s not an external perspective. What we’ve really tried to do is say, everything going on in the world matters. It determines the playing field for you as a company, it determines the playing field for you as a law firm that advises companies.

You need to look up, you need to look out. Now, the response we usually get is, we do and it’s terribly scary out there. So our solution is, why don’t we bring to bear all of these breakthroughs in technology that were so wowed by over the last few years to bear on that problem on reducing the world’s complexity to something that you can actually digest and integrate so we don’t just all have to shelter in place and hide and pretend that the only thing we can do is focus on how to make ourselves a little more efficient in a world that’s falling apart.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, and it’s so important what you’re doing as well. But also from a law firm’s perspective, it’s so much more powerful than it can be with the information you’re gonna be providing, right?

Sean West: For sure, law firms comment on politics. They don’t wanna be predictive, but they wanna use politics to get their clients interested in the services they provide. The challenge is that they’re generally pretty slow at doing so.

So an event will happen and they’ll convene all of their key partners to come up with a point of view. Five days later, they’ll put out some sort of piece of research on it, maybe three weeks later, they’ll have a client event on it. But clients are operating in real time.

If the world is changing around them, their competitors are getting an advantage, they’re exposed to risk. And the reality is that it is knowable. The implications of what a political event today means for your business is knowable today.

You don’t need to delay it. And no matter how good an advisor you are as an individual, you can’t see everything. Software and AI can actually see so much more than we can see as humans, which means that not only can we be faster, we can also make sure we don’t miss anything.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, and you gave a great example internally as well of like the board minutes. Can you just talk us through that example?

Sean West: Yeah, so look, if I’m general counsel of the business, I am increasingly being asked by the board to brief on geopolitics. Most general councils now have one of government affairs, corporate affairs, ESG, ethics, compliance reporting into them. So they’re responsible for this at the board level.

An event breaks, they’re gonna have to brief the board. In today’s environment, they task members of their team to produce insights for them that they then have to turn into a board memo. What we’re doing with our product, just as one workflow, got dozens of these, is when an event is tagged as of interest by the general counsel, the associate general counsel, they can click a button and it’s gonna generate the board memo for them automatically, not just based on the event, but based on knowledge of their company.

So, it’s gonna be tailored to their company. They can edit it, right? Because a big theme of the power of AI in today’s world is that we’re moving from being content creators as humans to being editors, and we need to enable lawyers to do the same thing.

Robert Hanna: Oh, that’s a powerful quote. I like that. Okay, before we finish up, standout moment for you at the conference.

Sean West: So, I’ve really enjoyed all of the spontaneous interactions with people from around the globe, as you highlighted. You know, it’s rare to go to these conferences and not just see the same people. So when, you know, I’m shaking hands with people from the other side of the world, I just bumped into a good friend who lives walkable for me in Los Angeles.

But we’re both here in London. We’re both speaking at this conference. We’re both telling the world about why what we’re doing is important.

I think that community building for me is the real standout moment. I’m really impressed with the way that they’ve done that.

Robert Hanna: Yeah, no, couldn’t agree more. Well said. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, Sean.

Where can people find out more about Hence AI? Feel free to shout out any websites, any social media handles for yourself or the firm, and we’ll share them in this episode for you too.

Sean West: So we’ve got two ways to keep up to date with what we’re doing. One, go to hence.ai. That’s pretty simple.

The other is I write a weekly update on geopolitics, technology and law. We’ve got over a thousand GCs in law from partners following it. It’s geolegal.substack.com.

Subscribe if you’d like.

Robert Hanna: Fantastic. Sean, thanks so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure doing this in person with you in London.

But from now, from all of us on the Legally Speaking Podcast, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub, the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com for the link to join our community there.

Over and out.