Imagine having a co-pilot powered by AI, revolutionising the way you practise law.

This week, I’m joined by Scott Stevenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Spellbook, the first generative AI designed specifically for lawyers. Scott shares how Spellbok transforms contract review, empowers legal professionals and makes legal services more accessible than ever.

If you’re ready to see what the future of AI in law looks like, this episode is one for you. 

Go give it a listen now!

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and Scott discussing:

– AI’s Potential as a Legal Tool

– Spellbook’s Mission and Growth

– The Co-Founders’ Journey

– The Evolution of Legal Tech

– Challenges in Entrepreneurship and Product Development

Connect with Scott here

Transcript

I think AI is a really good teaching tool.

00:02

It’s very real.

00:02

It may not be all the way there yet everywhere.

00:05

I think there’s a lot of improvement to be made, but you always got to think about this trajectory and state where the puck is going.

00:10

That’s one of our other values at Spellbook.

00:12

You got to think about where the puck is going.

00:14

Our team for only one, one company in this space.

00:16

And so we are seeing huge uptake of stubborn law schools.

00:20

Today.

00:21

We’ve had over 90 or 100 professors sign up to bring Spellbook to their classes.

00:27

There’s actually two parts to our mission statement.

00:28

It’s make legal services.

00:30

Accessible by helping lawyers get rid of the drudgery in their day-to-day.

00:33

On today’s Legally Speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Scott Stevenson.

00:38

Scott is the cofounder and CEO at Spellbook, the first generative AI copilot for lawyers described.

00:44

Like GitHub Copilot for lawyers, Spellbook is dedicated to making legal services more affordable and accessible.

00:51

Scott has been building technology for over 15 years.

00:54

So a very warm welcome to the show, Scott.

00:57

Nice having me, Rob.

00:58

Great to be here.

00:59

Oh, it’s great to have you been a big fan of your your your journey.

01:02

So it’s great to have you on the show.

01:04

But before we dive into.

01:06

All the amazing work and experiences you have in and around the world of legal.

01:09

We do have a customary ice breaker question here on the Legally Speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 1010 being very real.

01:16

What would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law, if you’ve seen it?

01:23

So I, I knew you would probably ask this and I did not prepare.

01:27

I’ve still not watched Suits, unfortunately, but it’s on, it’s on my list.

01:32

It’s on the list.

01:33

And with that, we’ll give a zero and move swiftly on.

01:36

So to begin with, Scott, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and, and career journey?

01:42

Yeah, sure.

01:42

So I’m the co-founder and CEO here at Spellbook.

01:45

I actually come from a product and engineering background.

01:50

My co-founder Daniel Demerit 2 Co founders Daniel Di Maria is the lawyer on the team.

01:56

So he had a lot of frustrations from practising law.

01:57

Andwhen I started the company, I had a lot of frustrations as a as a client and where I was looking, I had this small business previously I had this musical instrument business.

02:11

And one day I got this legal bill that just took half the cash out of our bank account.

02:15

So that was sort of a formative experience where myself as an engineer, I was like, oh, there must be a way to provide services a little bit more efficiently to clients.

02:24

Especially to small businesses.

02:28

Yeah, Other than that, I was the director of engineering at A at a network monitoring company and really just kind of been building all my life.

02:37

I was always interested in law.

02:39

I kind of saw law on programming as sort of the same thing in a way.

02:42

They’re both dealing with legal text and you know, it’s, it’s this detail oriented especially, you know, I was really interested in contracts and and computer programmes.

02:53

You’re dealing with logic.

02:54

If you make one little mistake, it can be.

02:57

Bad and detrimental in either of those domains and yeah I really like the nuance of both of those things but I ended up going the engineering route and now getting to know learn more and more about law from our customers every day and yes public has over 2700 law firms and in-house legal teams on board now so from very large companies like Nestle all the way down to you know solo lawyers user platform yeah and I I love the the the products and I want to dive deeper into to.

03:27

Because I think it’s it’s genius what you’re doing.

03:28

And also you’re one of the first generative AI Co pilots for lawyers.

03:31

So, you know, you are dedicated to making legal services ultimately more affordable and accessible.

03:36

And we’re we’re strongly believers of that of the show in terms of tech for good and also reducing that access to justice gap as well.

03:43

So can you tell us more about Spellberg and a bit about the journey of it?

03:47

So as I said, I had my own kind of frustrations early on.

03:52

And and was motivated to try to create a way to enable lawyers to.

03:57

Get rid of some of the drudgery in their day-to-day so that they could focus more on high value work.

04:00

And my co-founder, Daniel, I went to law school like many lawyers and then was sort of very disappointed at the reality of what practise actually wasas a commercial lawyer.

04:11

You know, he was spending 10 hours a day at Microsoft Word with like 10 windows open.

04:17

Until late at night.

04:18

And that wasn’t really what he had envisioned.

04:19

So, you know, that really inspired me to say, hey, there’s got to be a better way.

04:24

Like many tech companies, the first product we built was actually.

04:28

A templating based product and just like all the way back to I think the 70s you had like your first seventies, 80, maybe early 80s, you had your first kind of like template based products for things like contracts and and legal documents, document automation and we built a document automation product called rally sold it to around 100 lawfirms, great law firms and it did reasonably well, but there’s been a lot of dock automation companies and.

04:56

While lawyers liked it that doc automation for certain things.

05:00

They would always say, you know what the work I’m doing today is to bespoke for templates, It’s too bespoke for document automation.

05:07

And that would come up again and again.

05:08

They’d buy our product, they would set it up and put a lot of time and effort into building the precedence and templates.

05:16

And then oftentimes they would end up saying, you know what the deal I’m working on, the matter I’m working on is just too bespoke.

05:21

I’m going to, I’m going to pull up an old word precedent and just hack on it from there.

05:24

And.

05:26

We saw that over and over, and then GitHub Copilot came out in 2023, maybe late 2020 actually.

05:33

No, sorry, 2022.

05:35

Maybe late 2021 and this was actually the first real popular generative AI application.

05:41

This was before ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot was this tool for programmers that would help you write code.

05:48

And all it was at the time was fancy autocomplete.

05:50

You’d be writing your code and you could hit tab and it would like write the next 5 lines of code for you.

05:56

And it, it was game changing.

05:57

It was the first AI tool as a as a programmer I ever used that was like actually useful because it can work in any situation.

06:04

It didn’t matter.

06:05

What I was working on, I didn’t need a template, I didn’t need to prepare it.

06:08

So whatever I was working on this thing would try to predict, you know, the next 5 lines of code that I needed to write.

06:13

And I remember my first experience where I was very sceptical as mostpeople are of these products.

06:20

And I remember that my first experience where it actually.

06:25

Blew me away and it suggested these 10 lines of code and I deleted it.

06:28

I said oh that’s that’s junk.

06:29

This is AI garbage.

06:31

I deleted it and then probably 20 minutes later I realised.

06:36

Oh crap, The code I wrote was wrong.

06:39

I was overlooking a little bit of complexity and actually what the AI had output was right.

06:44

And I went back and I said, wow, that the AI was smarter than me in that moment.

06:48

And so that was an aha moment for us at Spellbook.

06:53

We, we end up changing the name of the company and, and very quickly launching to our launch.

06:58

It was actually the very first generative AI copilot for lawyers.

07:01

This was in the summer of 2022.

07:04

First commercial one.

07:05

And inspired by GitHub Copilot, we showed it to a number of our customers and it was just instant.

07:13

They were instantly falling in love with it in a way that we had never seen, not just in terms of like, oh, they’re interested in paying for it, but like what we care about is do people actually use it on the day-to-day basis?

07:22

And what we saw when we launched our generative AI product was lawyers were sticking to it.

07:27

They were using it every day in their workflow.

07:29

And they were, you know, we were showing it to them on calls and their pupils were dilating and no one had seen Chachi didn’t exist at that point, so.

07:38

You know, everyone’s mind would just totally blown there.

07:40

And lawyers are like, oh, wow, like finally this is going to be a type of technology that’s actually really going to impact my day-to-day where I think a lot of lawyers were very kind of jaded up to that point where, yeah, they had been sold a lot of solutions that didn’t really end up changing their day-to-day the way that they were promised.

08:00

So yeah.

08:01

And now and now we’re here, you know, a couple years later with 2700 firms and.

08:07

Customers on board.

08:08

And rapidly growing the product.

08:11

We also have this new AI agent product that we launched a couple months ago, which in our view is like the first full-fledged AI agent that you can assign big complex document projects to.

08:23

And it will, you know, chew, chew on them and get you to a result almost like delegating to a colleague.

08:30

Yeah, that’s a little bit about Spellbook.

08:32

Yeah.

08:33

And, and look, it’s great.

08:33

And look, AI agents are absolutely here and, and they’re to stay and they’re only going to get better and better.

08:38

Better and I think that really has an interesting perspective in terms of future work and and roles and what those look like putting my set of legal recruiting talent hats on.

08:46

But I want to talk about entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship is hard.

08:49

You know, building things is hard and you know, spellbook is a great success story.

08:54

But could you talk us through that journey of building Spellburn and you know, what have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome and come across?

09:03

Yeah, it is ridiculously hard and I never would have imagined how hard it was before doing it.

09:11

I think the hardest thing is, you know what you call product market fit?

09:14

Building a product that that people really genuinely like and that, you know, you’re not just kind of shoving down people’s throats with good sales.

09:22

I think there are lots of companies that are good at sales and they’re good at selling products, but people end up just not using the products.

09:28

Actually building something that people use and that changes their habits is one.

09:33

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

09:36

And our journey there, it took, it took years until we kind of hit with the Spellbook Gen AI product.

09:43

With our Dock automation product, we launched over 100 differentweb pages with different messages and angles on that.

09:50

So literally we had almost like 100 basicallyfailed marketing pages before over 100 beforewe actually arrived at Spellbook.

09:59

And so we sold and we tried every two weeks we would take a new angle on what we were doing to see if we could make Laura’s eyes light up a little bit more and or get them using the thing a bit more.

10:11

And yeah, it’s excruciating period of time to and but you we learn so much about lawyers through that and.

10:19

I learned that like, you know, unfortunately.

10:24

You can’t just listen to custom, you have to listen to your customers but also.

10:30

We have to watch our customers to really deeply understand them and, and get in their shoes.

10:35

And even Daniel, who’s a lawyer, it took him a lot of time to really figure things out.

10:38

And like one of the things we learned is like, you know, lawyers love the idea of using templates and setting up templates.

10:45

And they would, and they would say, yes, I need a templating system.

10:48

I can’t wait to do this.

10:49

And then we would watch over and over again, then fall out of love with templates and to build all these templates and not use them.

10:54

And we saw that pattern 50 times.

10:56

You know, close to 100 timesof lawyers wanting to do that and then watching, oh, they thought they could use templates and here’s why it didn’t work.

11:06

And yeah, but it took it enormous amount of trial and error to get to basic kind of product fit, product market fit.

11:13

And that that was a really hard part.

11:15

Nowadays it’s very different.

11:17

We’re scaling, you know, we’ve grown almost 5X in revenue over the past 12 months.

11:22

You know, the challenges are different.

11:24

The challenges now are more about scaling, you know.

11:27

We’re in this huge opportunity.

11:29

How do we capture the part of the market that is?

11:33

Right, for spellbook and that spellbook is best for.

11:36

And so that’s a lot about speed and scale and a different set of challenges today, which is actually, I think a much easier set of challenges.

11:43

Yeah.

11:43

And I always say new level, new devil, right.

11:45

When you when you’ve conquered something else, you’re on to the next.

11:47

And there’s so many lessons in that.

11:49

You you just shared.

11:49

You know, there’s a big element to what I say when I’m involved in business as well.

11:52

It’s like failing fast.

11:53

You said there like a test, test, test.

11:54

That’s great.

11:55

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

11:56

And I always use the acronym.

11:58

Lose, you know, when you lose, which I believe is life offering some experience and like you said, you learn a lot from those actual lessons where you can go away implement and you also rightly said don’t always listen to the customers.

12:09

I’m the butcher, the famous Henry Ford quote.

12:11

He said something along the lines of but I’ve asked my customers what I want.

12:14

They would have said faster horses, which of course it was actually the automobile that was the breakthrough moment.

12:18

So sometimes, you know, you’ve got to think you take a step back.

12:21

So love a lot of that and a famous quote that I think, hey, month from the chief officer at Clio said you’ve got to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

12:27

You know, on product side you.

12:28

Really fall in love with the problems, a lot of what you’re saying there.

12:32

And I want to kind of then move into an interview you did with the Canadian Lawyer Magazine.

12:36

Just to dive a bit deeper because you explained we call assistive AI.

12:40

It’s all about the kind of giving a lawyer an electric bicycle that helps them go as they’re working.

12:46

Love that by the way.

12:47

So when a lawyer actually opens a contract, they’re reviewing how to spell book the system, give us some sort of practical, tactical stuff.

12:54

Yeah, totally.

12:54

So yeah, the the electric bicycle for lawyers is, is a big part of the insights we had from failing a lot was that.

13:01

You know, lawyers don’t necessarily want to have too many different tools to reach for.

13:04

They want to do what they do.

13:06

They love what they do.

13:07

They’re in a habit and building something for them that is a win at their back.

13:11

That while they do what they already do, is a huge part of our strategy and a huge part of, I think why Spellbook has been successful so far.

13:19

And so, yeah, how how Spellbill works today is it is a Microsoft Word add in which we’re lawyers, you know, for better, for worse.

13:26

It’s where they spend a lot of their time.

13:27

And yeah, one of the things we do, I mean, we focus.

13:31

Drafting and review of commercial documents and transactional documents.

13:37

Our contract review is probably our most popular feature and it can basically give suggestions to any on any contract you have open on what the risks are, what might be missing.

13:48

And you can provide a guidance or have a playbook.

13:50

So if you review a lot of this type of contract, you might have, you know, 20 or 30 standard playbook items that you go through.

13:58

And yeah, you can actually trigger it just automatically open and run some of the cheques as soon as you open, as soon as you open up the contract in Word and open up spellbook.

14:08

So it’s very much they’re giving you suggestions as you’re working.

14:13

And then from these suggestions, you can directly insert into words.

14:17

So if you choose, you’d like a suggestion and you can say, hey, let’s make a fix for this.

14:22

It will suggest a fix that you can insert in the word with track changes.

14:26

But the lawyer is always in the driver seat.

14:28

So there’s no point where it’s like modifying the whole contract for you and you have no say.

14:33

We bubble up suggestions and you decide whether it’s a good suggestion or a bad suggestion.

14:39

And what’s really exciting now about what we’re doing is pernalised suggestions, so sowe’re learning over time.

14:43

That lawyer style, and this is another thing that we learned through tonnes of failure, is that lawyers have their own style that they’ve developed over years of practise with their particular clients and firms have their own style as well.

14:57

So we have to learn that and a lot of these things are very subjective.

15:01

So you know, Spelva can learn your cell over time and give you give the lawyer suggestions that are in line with what they would typically do to make.

15:10

Things like contract reviews, much faster.

15:13

We also do drafting, so if you just need to draught clause, draught a aquick memo or e-mail, that’s something that we’re quite good at.

15:21

We can do an AI based kind of red line review that will, you know, summarise for yourclient like, OK, what actually changed here that I care about?

15:28

There’s like 100 redlines.

15:29

What substantively changed?

15:32

These are all the sorts of tools that we have in the spellbook toolbox.

15:35

And then we have spellbook associate, which is a new thing, But you know, I’m a big fan of the products and you know, you’re, you’re, you’re solving everyday pain points and, and that’s the thing, you know, you’ve really worked hard and this is what again, for any aspiring legal tech entrepreneurs or people in the world of.

15:49

You know, getting that product market fit and then really listening to your customers and getting as client focused and as centred as possible and then everything you’re bringing out is just a real pain relief for these lawyers.

15:58

So tell us more about that.

16:00

Sure.

16:01

Starbucks Associate is our new agent based product and we launched it a couple months ago.

16:06

In our view, it’s the first kind of full-fledged AI agent for law, which means for us 4 things it’s.

16:14

Rather than just doing quick tasks or answering chat messages or doing a quick review like.

16:19

Our spell book add in product as it’s like a co-worker that you can delegate a project and do four things it can plan.

16:26

So you delegated a project, so you’re doing a financing transaction.

16:29

You’re going to need like 10 different documents to close that transaction, maybe more.

16:34

You’re going to have to take a term sheet and cross reference all of these different information to get that transaction together.

16:42

So first public associate has a planning capability.

16:44

You can give it a big project and it can say, OK, first I’m going to go need to look at the term sheet.

16:49

Then I’m going to need to ask the user one other information I need to know.

16:52

Then I’m going to go and update this document.

16:54

Then I’m going to cross reference it with this document and update this document so it can deal with these.

17:00

It can come up with a plan to deal with that.

17:02

Two, it can actually execute so if you give it a big set of Word documents and templates.

17:07

It can open up those documents with Word and start editing them.

17:10

It’s not just like ChatGPT giving you a chat message out.

17:12

It’s actually going and editing word documents for you 3.

17:17

It can check its own work.

17:19

So and what the problem with agents?

17:22

And if you just think about how a human works, a lot of the early agents, they didn’t, they couldn’t check their own work.

17:27

So they would just go off the rails on some crazy path through the woods and you get some wild output and you go agents don’t work.

17:34

The problem was people didn’t have self checking and self.

17:37

Implemented and any human knows like if you come up with a plan on something that you’re doing today, it’s going to go off the rails and that correction is really important so public associate can check its own work and then four, it can correct its plan based on checking its own work and correct its course based on what it’s seen.

17:56

And so that’s you can plan, it can execute it can check its own work and it can correct its course.

18:00

And when you combine all of those things together you get what is basically like an AI colleague where you can assign.

18:07

Complex projects with sets of multiple documents where it’s cross referencing, jumping around, editing, and you actually get a product back that is maybe similar to what you might get from a junior associate in a law firm.

18:19

Yeah.

18:20

And you just think that isn’t going to get tired.

18:23

Whereas an associate, junior associate working those hours.

18:26

And again, thinking it from a people perspective and maybe the modification of what the future of work looks like, you know, that can really remove a lot of that heavy lifting that’s required.

18:34

And I think it’s just an absolutely sweet spot.

18:37

But right now, very needed.

18:39

Let’s talk about your journey, Scott.

18:41

So obviously you’re bringing a lot of innovation from a non legal background, like like like you shared.

18:45

But how have your 15 years plus, you know, building technology, you know, you’ve been a director of engineering, you’ve been a team lead software developer, you know, project engineer.

18:54

How have all these different experience helped what you’ve bought in terms of developing spellbooking, if at all?

19:00

A lot of what I did before spellbook just didn’t work.

19:03

And so again, it takes a long time to figure out.

19:07

How do you really get product, product market fit?

19:10

How do you really get marketing to work?

19:12

I work for a number of startups where they did OK, but you know, most, most startup companies don’t, don’t do particularly well.

19:19

They don’t get to where they want to go.

19:21

And so you think a lot about why does that happen?

19:24

And you learn over time what, what are those like really nuanced things you need to figure out to make a product work and, and, and what are the really nuanced things you need to figure out to get marketing the work and product marketing.

19:36

80% of what I think about and how to get them really right and, and they go hand in hand.

19:42

And I think, you know, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is you’ve got to make a product that cut like, it’s such a noisy world today.

19:54

If your product doesn’t cut through and in like basically one to five seconds blow someone’s mind, like you’re just, it’s going to be too expensive to acquire customers and it’s going to be too slow.

20:06

Like it’s such you’re competing with TikTok, you’re competing with Netflix, you’re competing with Suits, you’re all of these other things that people can be doing that you have to really focus deeply on creating these truly magical experiences.

20:21

And that’s spelled part of our name spellbook.

20:23

And one of our values of spellbook is find the magic.

20:25

It’s like if you were building a feature that is not actually like magical, making people’s pupils dilate, almost giving them this, like we call it like a physiological reaction like some.

20:37

Your product and the marketing for that product has to be so magical that people get a neurochemical response to it where they almost see their life flash before their eyes.

20:46

And like, holy cow, you know, the next five years and the rest of my life working is going to be way better.

20:51

It’s going to be different.

20:52

And I can’t wait.

20:53

And that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned.

20:55

And unless you hit that bar, that level of magic, I think in this day and age, it’s just too noisy a world to cut through and and to make people care.

21:05

And.

21:06

And number two things, so that’s actually that’s number one.

21:09

Number one is you’ve got to just keep hammering on the product and marketing until it is absolutely magical and ahead of the game.

21:16

You know, one of the things we’ve done again and again is show things to customers that they haven’t seen before.

21:20

So we were early to Gen AI, early to agents, and then #2 is habit formation and slipping into people’s workflow is as important as the product itself.

21:32

People are overwhelmed.

21:33

They have.

21:34

Often too many different apps they’re going to.

21:36

So it’s as important to have a good product as to figure out how do you get your customer to actually change the day-to-day habits because it’s it’s hard.

21:44

We’re also busy lawyers particularly just have like the most ridiculously busy and chaotic job in the world, especially a lot of transactional lawyers that we deal with.

21:54

So you really have to think so deeply about how do you not change their, how do you not change their habits and slip in like an electric bicycle or like wind that they’re back, that they just turn this thing on and they’re immediately running.

22:06

Comes faster without without really changing their habits.

22:09

I think that’s something that’s somewhere where a lot of companies are not doing well.

22:13

They come up with cool products, but the lawyer has to change their habit way too much to use it and it sort of doesn’t work out.

22:20

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Now back to the show.

23:09

You know, I talk about this all the time.

23:11

We’re in the attention economy.

23:13

Like you need to get people’s attention, like to say it’s a nanosecond.

23:17

If you can’t get that attention, then you failed.

23:19

And you know, you’re actually talking about magic.

23:21

And my favourte quote I iuse all the time is the magic you are looking for is in the work that you’re avoiding.

23:25

And I think it’s absolutely true that, you know, if you’re not doubling down on that to create that magic and not really getting in behind the scenes to do the work, then you’re not going to make the impact that you’re looking for.

23:35

I know that something that is very important.

23:37

To Spell Work and myself and the other organisations I’m involved is in terms of the broader making legal services more accessible.

23:43

So I really want to give you the chance to talk from your perspective on Spellbook in terms of how does that align with the broader vision of making legal services more affordable and accessible.

23:53

Yeah, that’s our mission.

23:55

That’s why I’m here.

23:58

As I mentioned, I had that experience early on of running this small business.

24:01

I was straight out of college, I didn’t have a lot of money and I got this legal bill that just took half the money out of bank account.

24:07

No other accountant or other service provider had ever sent me a build app.

24:11

I had never seen a build half that big in my entire life.

24:15

And now I see it as normal.

24:17

As a larger business, it does make more sense because the risk at our size now we’re 70 plus employees soon will be 100.

24:24

Youknow, the, the legal bills actually start to make a lot of sense at this point.

24:28

But as a small business, it was really difficult to, to figure out how to, how to pay, you know, those hourly rates.

24:36

Because there wasn’t that much on the line and the risks weren’t as high.

24:40

And so it’s all of it’s, it’s what brings people to our company.

24:45

And, you know, there’s, there’s actually two parts to our mission statement.

24:48

It’s make legal services accessible by helping lawyers get rid of the drudgery in their day-to-day.

24:53

So lawyers are customers.

24:54

Lawyers pay for a product we only sell to lawyers.

24:57

There’s a lot of drudgery at my co-founder Dan did not want to do.

25:00

And that didn’t that he did not see himself doing when he, you know, went, went through law school and picked up all these, you know, student loans for law school.

25:08

So.

25:09

Yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely core to what we do.

25:11

That’s what makes it worth it.

25:13

You know, like running a company like this is an enormous amount of work.

25:17

In my opinion, is very, if you want to make money, it is not the right direction to go.

25:23

It’s not, it’s not worth it for that.

25:26

Yes, you might make money, but there’s easier ways to, to make money than than starting and running a business, much easier ways.

25:32

I think what makes it worth it is the mission for us.

25:35

That’s what motivates us and the legal system is so important.

25:40

Making access to legal services really seamless.

25:45

Is I think really, really motivating to us yeah and a mission focused companies are absolutely the the future.

25:52

Those who have a North Star and stick to it are they thrive People summit earlier this year which is all around the future of work.

26:00

And there’s an alarming statistic that within the next 5 years over 75% of the workforce will be millennials.

26:06

They are looking for purpose LED organisations that focuson that human touch, that focus on innovation, focus on collaboration and.

26:15

The things that you know are important to to that type of labour skill set.

26:20

So I think what you’re building, absolutely there are other ways to to go out there and make a make a living.

26:25

But if you have a real mission or a purpose, you know, there’s something that keeps getting you up every day that drives you to want to, to make sure you can look back and actually have a legacy.

26:32

That’s something to be proud of.

26:34

So let’s talk about actually getting people involved with the product because you offer prospective clients the opportunity to trial spell book.

26:40

So what do they actually, what do they actually get during a trial?

26:44

Yeah, super easy to get set up with the trial.

26:47

Many of our customers actually we do this really seamlessly.

26:50

Many of our customers they you can go to our our website spellbook dot leak dot legal sign up for a trial and you can just book it on boarding and you’ll within 20 minutes be set up with a trial fully trained on the software and off to the races.

27:05

So and it’s a seven day trial, sometimes extended depending on the circumstance.

27:10

If it’s a much larger company or in-house counsel team, sometimes that’s.

27:14

Longer evaluation period but yeah we it’s very simple to sign up for and to get using and yeah the vast majority of those who trials public end up using it long term.

27:27

Yeah absolutely.

27:28

And I know that through lots of people that for in my legal services use and, and and rave about spell books.

27:33

I think what you’re producing is is great.

27:36

Let’s talk about the future sort of generative AI.

27:38

You know it’s powered by I believe open AIS and GP TS.

27:42

So you know how do you foresee.

27:44

Of AI changing the legal ultimately landscape and and and legal services moving forward.

27:50

Probably quite a big question, but love your thoughts.

27:52

Yeah, we’re powered by a number of different models.

27:55

GBD 4 is 1 and a number of others as well.

28:00

Yeah.

28:00

I mean it is a huge shift.

28:02

I don’t think law has seen this kind of game changing technology since maybe e-mail and word processing.

28:08

That’s the last two things that were maybe have this kind of impact.

28:13

I think.

28:15

Some of the junior associate drudgery is going to go away for, for humans like completely.

28:23

Those, you know, especially those early years of just like pure and utter drudgery that a lot of lawyers have to go through, They will disappear and there will be some resentment maybe from some of the senior lawyers like these.

28:35

These young lawyers don’t have to do what I had to do, but that’s just how the how the world tends to evolve.

28:41

We’re going to have to figure out how to educate younger lawyers if they don’t have to.

28:47

Go through this sort of drudgery.

28:50

I think AI is a really good teaching tool.

28:53

So we are seeing huge uptake actually Spellbook in law schools today.

28:57

We’ve had over 90 or 100 professors signed up to bring spellbook to their classes.

29:03

So I think AI is actually a really good teaching tool if you set it up the right way.

29:08

So I’m optimistic that while lawyers may not learn the way they originally did, the AI can be used as as a teaching tool and a learning tool for them.

29:19

I think, you know, the kind of effective hourly rate will go up basically because you lawyers will be able to do a lot more in less time and clients will get the same value for less effort.

29:32

And that’s a good in most of capitalism and that’s a good thing.

29:37

It’s going to be a little bit I think challenging and large law firms where they’re really tied to the hourly billing model versus say value based billing.

29:46

But I see, I think you see those large firms adopting regardless.

29:52

I think for the small and mid sized firms, we’re seeing rapid adoption, a lot more value based billing.

29:58

A lot of our customers are coming from these smaller firms who are just, you know, evolving past pure, pure hourly billing and ultimately still getting a really good effect effective hourly rate.

30:08

And I think that’s what you know really matters.

30:11

I think you’re going to see a lot, a lot of small firms succeed at one.

30:16

One thing we’re seeing is like.

30:19

More lawyers going out on their own and acquiring spell book and.

30:23

Firms that you know small, being a solo lawyer or a small firm is really difficult because you don’t have, you know, if you get a big workers lumpy and if you get 5 clients asking for something at the same time, you know, you’re staying up late, you don’t have a lot of support staff.

30:39

I’m working these small firms really use AI quickly to to get better work life balance, service more clients, be more efficient and not to have say the same overhead of, you know, the same number of support staff.

30:51

So I think it’s really good for.

30:53

Those solo lawyers and small firms, I predict we’re going to see a lot more growth in that segment and, and more lawyers going on, going it on their own and, and building more of these small firms being successful and taking on a wider variety of matters, things that maybe they wouldn’t have been able to digest before and now suddenly digestible.

31:11

And yeah, I think that’s that’s really exciting because I think the small firms are also really good at servicing the small businesses.

31:16

And that was one of my original frustrations was getting that support as a small business.

31:21

And I see small firms servicing small businesses.

31:25

Everyone’s happy, small firms making good money, good, good margin, the clients happy and they’re paying what they want.

31:31

So really excited about that.

31:34

Yeah.

31:35

And I agree, I think there’s going to be a huge shift.

31:39

And you know, one of the takeaways I’ve taken from a lot of the legal conferences this year that’s going to enable that, you know, with breakout and we’re seeing here of the UK, there’s the likes of Keystone Law, there’s going to cut these big dispersed firms where people are rejoining or going out by themselves and you know, ultimately with.

31:54

As well that can really help so on top of that, you know, automation was a lot of what was discussed in some of these conferences and how that can really help.

32:01

So you can be small but mighty.

32:03

And I think that’s going to be super exciting for those that do decide to branch out and be able to, you know, take take a lot of work with them and be hugely successful.

32:11

And I think, you know, I’m pro that.

32:13

OK, let’s talk about people that might not be quite on the bus yet Scott.

32:18

So in terms of, you know, maybe certain legal professionals who are sceptical about, you know, the role of.

32:24

In their work or how can they start engaging with tools like spellbook and and and see the benefits?

32:30

What would you say to the to the sceptics?

32:33

I would say there is a very clear pattern in history of what happens when new technology and game changing technology comes out.

32:42

There is a pattern of scepticism that’s happened with e-mail, with word processing, with computers, with the Internet, with document automation.

32:52

And the sceptics have almost always ended up, you know, kind of being left behind in the dust eventually so.

32:59

I mean if it is a low probability that AI is suddenly.

33:04

Going to be, you know, it’s just hype and not there.

33:08

We see people you actually using it on a day-to-day, week to week basis constantly to provide clients value.

33:15

And yeah, I just think if if you were betting that, you know, AI is not for law, you’re betting that this is going to you’re betting against history basically.

33:26

And, and the pattern that has generally happened with the adoption of technology and you’re betting against, you know, the the 2700 customers that we see using this stuff.

33:35

Daily and weekly basis are very, very consistently.

33:38

So I think it’s real.

33:40

It’s very real.

33:41

It may not be all the way there yet everywhere.

33:43

I think there’s a lot of improvement to be made, but you always got to think about this trajectory and skate where the puck is going.

33:48

That’s one of our other values.

33:49

That spellbook is like, there’s no point in skating where the fuck is.

33:53

You got to think about where the fuck is going.

33:55

Our team and we’re only one, one company in this space.

34:00

Our team is improving this stuff on a weekly basis.

34:02

We push out updates every single week.

34:05

You know, we’re going to have 52 updates over the next 12 months.

34:08

And so if you have an experience that’s not quite where you want it to be or you see some kind of flaw, just consider there’s going to be 52 more updates over the next year and then there’s going to be 52 more updates the year after that.

34:19

And the foundation models underlying GPT 4, you know, GPT 5 is going to come out like.

34:26

All a lot of the issues and uncertainty, like even hallucinations, this stuff is really rapidly improving.

34:32

So betting against that title wave I think is probably not a good bet.

34:37

I I I’d say it’s a very, very high risk strategy betting against that.

34:41

And you know, we’ve had Piers Lenny who’s been on sharks tanks the equivalent over here in the UK.

34:46

Come on the show.

34:47

Good good buddy of mine and he talks about the the ship has left the harbour.

34:50

And so you won’t ever be able to catch up with that chip because it’s already left.

34:54

But you can get as close to it.

34:55

You can get working to keep close to it or else you can stand on the shore and be just assured that you’ll probably be one of the only few left there.

35:02

An obsolete that is the velocity of this and AI of today is going to be.

35:07

Actually better the next day.

35:09

And like you said, 52 updates, like those updates are exponentially better, not just a little bit better.

35:13

You know, everything that’s happening at the speed of change is, is, is really improving and, and, and solving real world problems and, and shaping our, our futures.

35:22

And, you know, I heard a quote the other day, AI isn’t a once in a revolution opportunity.

35:26

It’s a once in a species opportunity.

35:28

And that’s a really big statement, but I believe it, you know, you actually look at, you know what my young children or maybe maybe lives they leave would be very, very different to any.

35:37

They’re great primates and et cetera, et cetera.

35:39

And I think you just have to be curious, you have to be learning.

35:42

And I guess that leads Leicester to before we wrap up advice for next generation of of of lawyers.

35:47

What would you give to those that are interested in pursuing a career in law, but also maybe specifically legal technology and legal services, which perhaps might be a little bit more your bag?

35:58

Yeah, sure.

35:59

So, you know, first just to touch on what we were talking about and about, you know, the ship moving so fast.

36:05

I think one saying we have in our company and I think something for lawyers to think about too that’s actually quite intuitive is we we say it’s it’s time to chop trees with the blunt axe.

36:16

And where this comes from, you know this Lincoln quotes like, you know, if I had six hours to cut down the tree, I’d spend 4, four hours sharpening the axe.

36:25

And this has been the history of knowledge work.

36:26

The history of knowledge work has been sharpening and mastering our tools.

36:29

And if you think about the acts, there was 8000 years between the axe and the chainsaw.

36:35

So if you sharpened your axe, you mastered your axe, you had the best axe, you got paid dividends for that mastery for thousands of years, many multiples of your human lifetime.

36:45

The challenge that’s happening right now is tech is changing so fast and this upward trajectory is happening so fast that there’s actually not time to master anything before the next thing comes out.

36:55

And this is true for us as developers.

36:57

This is true for people using our software, you know, but we might have 50% mastered GPT 3 and then GPT 4 comes out and then, you know.

37:05

The 01 model comes out and so I think there’s this unique unintuitive thing that whether you’re a lawyer or a technologist, you have to be really comfortable picking up tools that you haven’t mastered yet.

37:16

Because by the time the chain you might pick up the accident and then chainsaw is coming out up tomorrow.

37:22

You can’t just sit on the sidelines and say, well, I’m not going to I’m not going to pick up anything until I’ve mastered it because you’re going to be waiting around a decade until that time comes so.

37:31

Nothing is what I tell to our team.

37:33

This is what we tell to our customers.

37:34

Like you just got to pick up and you might be a little unfamiliar, you might not feel like you’ve mastered these tools, but.

37:40

If you’re waiting for things to stabilise, you’re goingto be waiting, I don’t know, maybe maybe for the rest of your life for that moment.

37:46

So you might as well kind of dive in.

37:48

So that’s my advice to, to lawyers and, and that’s how we think of it at our team, with our team as well.

37:55

In terms of lawyers getting into legal, legal tech, I think there’s a massive opportunity.

38:00

You know, we’re really interested in hiring more lawyers under our team.

38:04

It is really hard for people outside of law to get the inside of what it’s really like to be a lawyer.

38:09

And that is really valuable.

38:11

We see lawyers performing really well in our amazingly well on our sales team because they’re just so good at that.

38:19

I mean, they don’t have to fake anything.

38:21

They know exactly what the pains of the customer is.

38:23

They face it themselves and they can speak to it really authentically.

38:26

So I think sales and marketing are great paths for lawyers to go who want to get into legal tech.

38:32

I think product is also interesting as well.

38:35

We you know, we have a set of lawyer advisors that.

38:40

You know, help us understand how our product helps lawyers in different practise areas.

38:47

And that’s another, you know, really promising route as well.

38:50

I think there’s there’s a lot of opportunity for motivated lawyers who want to get into legal tech.

38:55

Yeah.

38:56

And it’s a very, very exciting time and I love that.

38:59

And I think just one of the things I would close on in terms of a trend is, you know, it’s the Clio 2024 legal trends report, which is quite interesting.

39:07

You may find interesting that, you know, cloud adoption basically took.

39:10

Years and years, nearly 1015 years for law firms to move away from bricks and mortar, where actually I think from 2023 to 2024, the statistics from AI adoption was something like the low 20% to now nearly up to 79%.

39:22

So actually a lot of legal people and people within league fashion are seriously getting curious about this and diving in.

39:29

So there really is no better time to start getting around and actually testing products like spellbook checking if it’s right for you, getting yourself out there, getting to conferences, learning from great people and around there because that trend is only going to continue going.

39:40

Like that, Scott, this has been an absolute master class.

39:42

Really enjoyed learning about your journey, the great things you’ve been doing at Spellbrook.

39:47

If our listeners want to learn more about your career or indeed spellbook, where can they go to find out more?

39:51

Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles.

39:53

We’ll also share them with this episode for you too.

39:56

Yeah, sure.

39:57

So you can learn more about supplicates spellbook.legal

40:00

That’s our website.

40:02

Yeah, there’s all sorts of information on there.

40:04

You can sign up and and try the trial very quickly if you’re interested.

40:07

And yeah, we’re very active on on social as well.

40:11

On LinkedIn, for instance, yeah, absolutely.

40:13

I would encourage folks to do so.

40:15

Scott’s great thought leader in building something magical with his team over at spellbook.

40:19

It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today from all of us on the Legally Beaten podcast sponsored by clear, wishing you lots of success.

40:25

But for now, from all of us over and out, thank you for listening to this week’s episode.

40:30

If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub, the Legally speaking Club over on Discord goes.

40:41

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40:43

www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com

40:45

for the link to join our community there over and out.