On today’s Legally Speaking Podcast, I am delighted to be joined by Ruben Miessen.

Ruben is the CEO and Co-Founder of LEGALFLY, a European enterprise legal AI company, building a secure, governed legal operating system for in-house teams in regulated industries. Before founding LEGALFLY, Ruben worked as a senior product manager at Tinder, where he led initiatives and built a team that would later become the founding team behind LEGALFLY. With his co-founders, Ruben identified how legal bottlenecks could slow down businesses, whilst legal teams were strained under pressure and spending time onrepetitive tasks. This led to the creation of LEGALFLY. LEGALFLY is expanding internationally, with offices in Ghent and London and Dubai. 

Ruben has been recognised as one of Forbes Belgium’s 30 Under 30. Today, we are exploring AI, entrepreneurship and the future of legal work. We will explore Ruben’s journey from Tinder to building a legal tech company; the challenges of creating enterprise AI for sensitive legal data; how AI could transform legal workflows and what the legal profession may look like in the years to come.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and Ruben discussing:

– AI-powered legal workflow automation

– Secure anonymisation of sensitive documents

– Unblocking business teams with AI

– Multi-step workflows across enterprise teams

– Expanding globally across regulated industries.

Connect with Ruben Miessen here – https://be.linkedin.com/in/rmiessen

Transcript

We want to be a catalyst in that change. 

We want to leverage the best models available. We want to leverage the best technology available, whether it’s developed in Europe, in the US, it doesn’t make a difference. But we do care a lot about the pre-processing. We do care a lot about in what form of those documents are shared with those models. So that’s why pre-processing sensitive data in those documents and anonymising them is powerful. 

There are workflows, mostly within the business teams, that consist of a lot of multiple steps with different teams being a part of that when that’s when we start building on the concept of the multi step workflows, which we then released now at LEGALFLY two to three months ago. That opens up a completely different level of automation that we can offer to our clients. So it’s amazing to see. 

On today’s Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio, I’m joined by Ruben Meeson. Ruben is the CEO and co founder of LEGALFLY.

A European enterprise legal AI company building a secure, governed legal operating system for in-house teams in regulated industries. Before founding LEGALFLY, Rubin worked as a senior product manager at Tinder, where he led initiatives and built a team that would later become the founding team behind LEGALFLY. With his co-founders, Rubin identified how legal bottlenecks could slow down businesses, whilst legal teams were strained under pressure and spending time on repetitive tasks. This led to the creation

of LEGALFLY. LEGALFLY is now expanding internationally with offices in Ghent, London and Dubai. Rubin has been recognized as one of Forbes Belgium’s 30 under 30. Today we’re exploring AI, entrepreneurship and the future of legal work. We’ll explore Rubin’s journey from Tinder to building a legal tech company, the challenges of creating enterprise AI for sensitive legal data, how AI could transform legal workflows and what the legal profession may look like in the years to come.

So a very big warm welcome to the show, Ruben. Amazing. Very nice to meet you. likewise, and I’m really looking forward to today’s discussion. And before we get into it, we’ve got a couple of icebreaker questions. Firstly, what’s your favorite beverage and what’s your preferred choice of footwear on a typical workday? As a true Belgian, of course, I had to I had to give this answer, but the beer is actually called Golden Dragon in Dutch Gulden Drag.

And it’s brewed in the city of Ghent, where actually LEGALFLY is headquartered. And on the top of the cathedral there is a golden dragon connected to it, and that is actually the icon or the emblem of the beer itself. love that little story. Thanks for sharing. footwear? I’m wearing right now those are my favourites to be honest. Sneakers, Bodgy Italian sneakers. I like them. And then this might be a chance for you to plug something, or you may go somewhere else. What’s one piece of legal tech?

Or everyday technology you now rely on that you would have thought was unthinkable earlier in your career? I absolutely cannot read through any contract before throwing it through LEGALFLY and get an advice and get my questions answered. not even for a one-page NDA, I’m reading it myself. I’m just pushing it through LEGALFLY in 30 seconds. If everything is on green, I I sign it off. Generally speaking, I must admit that I’m using clot very frequently.

for the more complex emails as well as it saves quite quite some time. And I think if you would have told me two years ago that I would be relying on AI to assist me with the more complex matters over email, I would have never believed you. Great answers. Great start to what I think is gonna be a wonderful conversation and teasing there a bit as as well. But Ruben, want to start at the beginning. Could you give a short version of your career journey from obviously studying engineering to working on AI initiatives at Tinder?

And ultimately becoming the CEO and co founder of LEGALFLY. Definitely. So of technical backgrounds, I’ve been studying mobile app development. Back then mobile apps was was the hype before I even even existed. Well or before Gen AI even existed. then very quickly rolled into my first startup, which was location based advertising month. then COVID nineteen hit

And I developed a social distancing device, so went into IoT, produced tens of thousands of those devices to guarantee a safe work environment, then moved to Tinder. actually, completely different space again. I wanted to build experience building for an enterprise, been responsible together with my team for several parts of the AI roadmap at Tinder and Match Group. And then with the release of Chat GPT, we were all amazed by the impact that Gen AI can have.

on all of our lives and that is when the idea of legal fly started brewing, also because on a weekly basis we were working with those legal and compliance teams at Tinder, at Mesh Group. We experienced the the legal friction sometimes of business teams w wanting to move ahead but being slowed down by legal ourselves. So yeah, th that’s when we really decided there must be a a smarter way to handle legal workflows within an enterprise environment. And hey, that’s how LEGALFLY got born.

Yeah, and and that’s exactly where I wanted to go go next, actually, is sort of the original issue because you you you’re alluding to there and you you’ve spoken about seeing legal teams under significant pressure while working at Tinder. So building on what you just said, what did you observe about the way legal work was being completed, which made you think actually there could be an alternative way to do this? Very good question. I’ll keep it a bit brief on on this one, because there’s a lot to talk about and we have a whole podcast.

to but this is your moment so go for it. So I think to be honest, the the way how a legal team is looking at the the specific process in a business team is is quite quite different. And the tasks of the legal team is really to de risk the entire organization. So even the slightest risk is a priority and needs to be handled carefully. And if it means that the project is slowed down by one week, two weeks, three weeks, then then so be it.

What I’ve seen as a result is that a lot of business teams tried to bypass legal whenever they could. So everyone knew okay, if we can risk it not to involve legal, and the person just moved ahead and they never looked at it, great. So that’s exactly what we want to avoid or what we’re trying to solve, is that if we can build a legal AI platform that empowers the business teams to get top notch legal advice or legal expertise without needing to enter

a manual legal review process which slows down everything. Great. Because then only for the high risk initiatives, legal gets involved. So the legal team can stay focused on the high risk projects. The business teams get unblocked and then only in the minority of the cases legal manner needs to get involved. And for the business it’s great because every project, every process, every deal will now have a legal review, either by the legal team or an AI native one.

Love it. And yeah, I love that you found a problem and you leaned all in on it. You know, that’s what entrepreneurship to me is. You know, you you see these problems and then you get fixated about wanting to solve them and go out there and and do it. And and congratulations on what you’ve done with LEGALFLY. For folks who may not know, tell us the story behind the name of of LEGALFLY and ultimately what is the core mission? The meaning behind the name is basically we want to help you fly through your legal work. It’s as simple as that. It’s the speed of how you can get through your legal work with LEGALFLY.

And of course, as a founder you’re trying to come up with a unique name, a short name that is descriptive enough. DeagleFly, everyone knows it’s about legal work. right. And we managed to get a good deal on the dot com domain name in as well, just prior to the A round. So yeah, I think it worked out quite quite well. We we were debating for a while if we should join some of our competitors and think about movie characters, but then

You know, we we could already see the future where we then had to pay millions to those actors in the future. So we didn’t go for that. And so today then, talking about, you know, Legal Fly, you are the the CEO. What does a role for you look like? Maybe give us a day in the life of of what you get up to. It’s a very good question. I think I have one of the most diverse roles I think within the within the organization and it it it it really shifts in the early days

It sometimes felt like a firefighter role. Like if anything can go wrong, I’m trying to it like I’m brought in and and to fix it. Luckily we have as the company matured, we have around fifty FTEs right now. We have an amazing leadership team that we managed to grow into a record amount of time as well. So my role has become more about very clearly deciding the strategy and the direction of the company and making sure that for everyone that direction is very clear, that we stay ahead of competition, that

We remain very close to the clients and to where the market is is evolving in. And it it it of course means that I’m involved in a lot of processes in a lot of different teams, with a lot of travels between the different offices as well, because our headquarters is in Ghent. We have quite a significant office in London, where the majority of the go to market team is focused, and then we have a Dubai office that we opened quite recently as well, to be able to more efficiently service the Middle Eastern market. So I’m traveling around quite a lot

We’re about to open a US office, most likely New York, we’re finalising that as we speak. The good thing as well is that over the last six months I’ve shifted more and more to the go to market side because I love to be very close to our clients and especially like the more complex clients organizations like the European Commission, SAP, NHS. Those are the ones where I love to be spending my my time with.

So you’re helping your clients fly, but also LEGALFLY in itself is flying. You’re going around the globe. Like you say, you’ve got Glenn, London, you know, New York coming. very, very exciting, rapid growth and an exciting market in the legal tech space. You know, LEGALFLY, again, I want to give a chance to tell us a bit more, offers a suite, doesn’t it, of AI agents, including discovery, review, legal radar, multi review, and draft. So could you explain maybe a bit about those agents, you know, what they’re designed to do and how legal teams can ultimately use these in practice? We often come in

As an end-to-end solution, consolidating multiple legal tech solutions across the the the legal tech stack of the client. as long as it’s about in-house workflows, I think that’s quite important. We’re building almost exclusively for the corporate segments, mostly for enterprise. We also see that in our client base, around 96% of all of our clients are corporates and around sixty percent are enterprises. so so that’s great. We’re really trying to build for any

workflow that touches upon legal within any team of the enterprise. So LEGALFLY initially started with the contracting heavy related workflows, automating contract reviews, the process of drafting contracts, drafting legal documents, then we evolved into compliance, running compliance checks at scale on those documents, at Dora compliance. For example, was in Europe one specific use case we went very, very, very heavy on.

And then we kept broadening. Then we built an horizon scanner as well that tracks any changes into the jurisdictions all across the globe. We support now one hundred and forty jurisdictions, or we track any changes in the legal landscape. We can assist with due diligence. And then things got really interesting because we had all of those agents available on the platform to all of our clients, and then we introduced a concept. I think now it was about nine months ago.

introduced the concept of custom agents where our clients could build their own agents with their own playbooks behind it, their own prompts. and we learned a lot because we we have a legal solutions engineering team. It’s a team of forward deployed engineers as well that we can involve with some of our enterprise clients with the most complex legal workflows and they’re collaborating with the client to, in a matter of minutes or hours, build a custom agent on Legal5 for a very specific process. But then we started learning that

In a lot of cases, especially for the enterprise clients, there are workflows mostly within the business teams, that consist of a lot of multiple steps, with different teams being a part of that workflow. And that’s when we started building on the concept of the multi step workflows, which we then released now at LigaFly, I think two to three months ago, to some of our existing clients and we’re now scaling it to all. And that opens up a completely different level of automation.

That we can offer to our clients. So it’s amazing to see. Very exciting because, you know, where where you’re going and building on this conversation is, you know, these platform-wide basically capabilities, you know, you’ve got knowledge, normalization, playbooks, integrations. You know, tell us a bit more about how these capabilities perhaps support agents across the platform and where do things like Word, Outlook, Ad Fit ins basically enhance the user experience? There are a couple of

Decisions we also made on building a LEGALFLY platform, one of them was okay, we want to make sure it’s a more technical one but that were LLM agnostic. So LegalFlies not relying on a specific foundation model. Well LEGALFLY is powered by five models. We use the models of OpenAI, Entrophic, Gemini, Mistral, and then a couple of yeah, smaller models that were fine tuned ourselves that we can even deploy on prem. Then we also decided okay, let’s make sure we become platform agnostic. Majority of the usage comes from the web.

Platform of Legafly, but very early on we already released a native Word add-in. we now recently released an Outlook add-on as well. I think it was two months ago. We have integrations with Cloud Cowork, we have integrations with Teams, with Slack, with email. So now there are seven different platforms that you can use to engage with Legafly’s agents because we really want to be completely embedded within the existing workflows of the clients. And it may very well happen that

The legal team, for example, is using the web interface because it’s the most the most complete. The procurement team is only using Legafly for automating contact reviews based on a playbook of the legal team, so they’re using it within Word, for example. And then you have other parties like DHR team, maybe that is using LEGALFLY purely on email. As soon as a specific complaint comes in and an about an employee or about how an employee has been sanctioned, they forward it to a legal fly email address and a full legal review kicks off as well. So

Yeah, we’re we’re really trying to become as agnostic as possible to the client. And we want to make sure that the client will never have to adapt their existing workflows or way of working for LEGALFLY, but that’s we can adopt to fit in exactly to how the client is working today. And I love how exceptionally client centered you are. It’s what I’m very much gleaming.

from from this conversation and hence why you’ve been so successful and had such rapid adoption indeed global expansion. You know, okay, so LEGALFLY very much focused then on helping these legal teams become more efficient, automating repetitive work, getting that time consuming task off the desks. So what do you think legal professionals should be spending more time on then if AI is taking the routine tasks away from them? Being aspiring partner for important critical business decisions, and and managing those relationships

within the business. and I think there we can we can often make a split where we can take off all of the the boring legal stuff, the commodity legal work out of their hands of the legal professionals and free up their time to focus on less matters but go way deeper on on those for the business. I think that is where we really can make the difference. Another element as well is that by our decision to build for those in house teams

Another benefit of working with Legafly is that the outcome is that we will reduce your dependency on the cost the external council. So actually we’ll make the in house legal team even more important and relevant than it was before. We’ll make sure the team focuses on the riskier, the more complex internal projects, and also make sure that this team is now capable of doing a big portion or all of the work that would have been outsourced in those cases, anyways. So let’s look forward then to the future.

You’ve said basically AI is fundamentally going to transform the way the li legal sector operates. I think we can all agree with that. What areas of legal work do you think will be transformed first? And what tasks do you think humans will continue to contribute to? I think the areas of legal work that will be transformed first will be the more transactional legal work, so anything in relation to contract reviews, contract drafting, but also answering on RFPs.

For example, tenoring processes, summarizing documents, answering legal questions, but based on internal knowledge of the organization. So it are tasks that by itself are not that complex, but that are sometimes tasks that appear in the highest volumes possible and that are most mostly pattern based. we believe humans and legal professionals will remain essential wherever judgment carries a specific consequence. For example, for

negotiation for litigation strategy, novel risk calls, etcetera. An interesting point, isn’t it? This the sort of AI versus lawyers argument or debate that goes on. You know, the idea of AI replacing lawyers, it garners a lot of anxiety around the legal community. So what do you think is the biggest misconception then about AI and the future of the legal profession? I think the biggest misconception of all is that AI will create more legal work and we heard quite often that people are saying it now.

that yeah, if everyone is going to use AI in a legal context it will only increase the legal work. We quite strongly disagree with it. As yeah, doing legal work will become much more accessible to everyone as well. So the efficiency gains will be balanced out by the increasing amount of work. So w we do think that the in house council will remain very busy, but that they will be able to do their work in a much more efficient way.

Do do you think that’s a big threat to law firms then? That’s one of the main reasons why we’ve decided not to focus on the law firms, is that the in the incentives are also not that well aligned, right? the the business model of the billible hour. Good luck trying to convince a law firm to become more efficient, to be honest. Like it you’re going to cut directly into into the profit margins. So it they they would effectively need to productize their services and not like law firms that are productizing their services now, they’re making good money because they’re becoming so much more efficient with the same team. They can handle a much higher

volume of projects and if then for those projects are not built on the time spent but they’re built on the value on the outcome, amazing. but yeah unfortunately most of those firms are still very much bound to billing by the hour and therefore incentives are not really lined to make them more efficient. Yep. Well said. Okay. One big conversation around legal AI which comes around is is trust.

You know, the legal work involves very highly sensitive information, confidential documents, lots of commercial risks. So what are the biggest challenges in building AI that legal teams can trust? The biggest challenges in building legal AI that teams can trust. I think twist isn’t a model problem, to be honest. I think it’s more a a governance problem. auditability, data control and explainability matter much more than raw capability from what we’ve seen.

Th hence why when you’re using LEGALFLY, we’re trying to ground every answer that you get by the AI with a re reputable source, in most cases government sources. We have a lot of partnerships with publishers as well. and we’re going to announce a couple of mo a couple of more publisher partnerships over the next weeks as well. and then I think yeah, the the the approach towards data security and processing is key. We’re quite skeptical in

giving AI and the LMs powering the AI solutions direct access to the sensitive data in those documents. So that is why we make sure that all sensitive data is removed, is redacted, is anonymised in anonymization framework. It’s a fine two model that we can deploy on prem prior to the LMs accessing it. And we’ve seen that for a lot of our clients, enterprise clients in highly regulated industries, think about banking, think about insurance. For them it’s it’s it’s very problematic if

a legal vendor that is powered by an open AI model would directly read into all of the sensitive the data that’s in those documents. So first this was really a prerequisite that we want to build that anonization framework completely embedded and make sure that every document, every prompt is anonymized prior to that processing. And we’re lucky as well that one of the founders, Dennis, he has a very strong data security background, so it was always at the forefront.

of all the product decisions that we’ve made. Yeah, and it it is great that you really emphasize that that that point as well, ’cause it it is so important given the nature of the work. I I guess doubling down on that then for in house legal teams probably listening to this, you know, how should those companies, those legal teams think about the trade off between adopting the most powerful AI models and maintaining control over sensitive legal data? We think data sovereignty is a subject that is coming up more and more, which is great. And in

Twenty twenty five European governments really moved their work away as well from Microsoft. I think the French government was one of the first who has made that decision because they were very worried about the reliance on a sp having a specific US vendor in an uncertain political situation. that I don’t think got that much better in twenty twenty six. So let’s see how it how it evolves. Now the challenge is that yeah those US models are more the most developed in the world, they’re the most powerful.

as well. So of course if you decide that you’re not using those US models, then you’re missing out on on efficiency. So then you put yourself at a significant disadvantage if you decide to cut yourself off from them. So that’s why we want to leverage the best models available. We want to leverage the best technology available, whether it’s developed in Europe, in the US, it doesn’t make a difference. But we do care a lot about the pre processing. We do care a lot about in what format

Those documents are shared with those models for processing. So that’s why the pre-processing of the sensitive data in those documents and anonymizing them is powerful because it really allows you to benefit from the best models in the world without that your data is going anywhere. Today’s episode is brought to you by Clio. If you’re spending more time managing your practice than practicing law, it’s time for a change.

Clio is the intelligent legal work platform built for modern solicitors, combining context-aware AI with trusted legal research to help you work smarter, not harder. Switching is easier than you might think. Clio’s dedicated migration teams handles your client and case data every step of the way so you can focus on what matters most your clients. Plus award-winning support 24 5 by a live chat, phone and email.

Means help is always on hand when you need it. Visit Clio.com forward slash UK to find out why thousands of UK solicitors trust Clio. Now back to the show. There are still individuals out there who still think AI as chatbots, just answering questions. You’re obviously building something broad, an AI-native legal operating system for enterprise teams, particularly. So what is the difference between adding AI to an existing legal workflow?

And actually redesigning the way legal work is completed. So when you’re adding AI to a workflow, it makes the old process faster. But in a lot of cases, redesigning the workflow makes the old process obsolete. So that th that’s why in certain cases we will want to just apply AI to an old to an existing workflow, but in a lot of cases let’s have a look at redes potentially redesigning that workflow itself as well to really get efficiency in the process. And

yeah, most companies are doing curly the implementation of AI into the old process and then calling it a full transformation that that they went through. So one of the key things that we do is we really want to help teams already during the first discovery session to fully understand how the existing workflow looks like, and then we bring them together with our legal solution engineer to see how we can recreate that workflow with AI, potentially most likely change.

certain elements of the workflow to really get the efficiency and the automation in it. Because the the way how you can execute legal work with AI is a lot of cases completely different than if you’re doing it manually or then a legal tech solution that you’ve used in the past. Interesting insights. We’ve talked about being client centered throughout the the conversation. I want now to put yourself in your client seat. So imagine you’re building the in house legal department from scratch in twenty twenty six in b and beyond.

What would it look like? What role, skills, technologies would you prioritize? It’s a good question. I think one of the first things to decide is the breakdown of which work we want to allocate to AI. which work do we want to allocate to our in house legal team? Which work goes to the business teams, and is there any work that we’re still looking to outsource to either law firms or alternative legal service providers? And where are the thresholds for that? And to give you a very simple example is

We’re talking about contract reviews that are coming in. do we want to introduce a specific cap of the value of the contract? Let’s say any contract below 25k is handled by the business team itself. We don’t even need to involve legal, we just give them a legally trained AI model that they can use for their review. As soon as we go over the 25k, the legal team is is running it and is leading. And as soon as it goes above the 100k, maybe we’ll need to have an external law firm to to review it as well. It’s a very basic

example but this could perfectly be a workflow that we create and this the purpose of this is give more autonomy to the business teams, build out a strong, potentially leaner in-house legal team, and again ideally outsource nothing or a very small portion of the work to those yeah to to those external

law firms. I think the legal ops team would become much more central as well, and the legal ops team would work much closer with the innovation teams of the business as well. Newer graduates can make up for fewer years of experience by being AI sevy. So I think the way how you would look into hiring for your in-house legal department would also be quite different. I think experience now becomes a little bit less important. I think you rather bring in some very eager juniors.

that are very AI savvy and that could build out custom agents, custom workflows very quickly within the legalized version. For juniors listening to this, because we have all ages and ranges of people, when you say AI savvy, give us like maybe a practical example if if you’re thinking about that, that maybe they should be thinking about to get AI savvy or if they’re already kind of c conducting it. Give us an example you think which would make them potentially stand out to be valuable. Definitely something they should prepare for, like for any role, by the way. So n not just if you’re looking to

To get a position as a legal professional in a in a corporate, but for any role that you’re being hired for today, I think there is a high chance that you get the question, okay, how are you using AI in your work today already? Because that’s something we ask to anyone we’re bringing in, whether it’s someone of the engineering team, product team, one one of the the account executives, it doesn’t matter. We’ll ask the question to the person. And because it it really depends on the role. I think specifically for the in-house legal team, I think what is advised is

Try to get experience with a verticalized, specialized legal AI solution like LEGALFLY or like Harvey or Lagora. If you don’t have access to one of those, make sure that you’ve worked in Clot, that you’ve built your own skills to be able to automate compact reviews to some extent, that you’re able to perform legal research to some extent. Because I think on on some of those use cases, you will definitely want to prove to your future employer that you have some experience and that you have realized.

efficiency gains by by doing so. There we go. I think some really sound advice there. Thanks for sharing. You know, we’re talking a lot about, you know, agents, automation, you know, efficiencies, etc. etc. freeing up more time. But let’s really double down on the role of human judgment here. Which human skills will become more valuable and why? The league loss function is becoming a an even more important one, because you basically become the the AI engineer

for legal within the organization. So we’re seeing smaller teams that already start to invest much earlier on in this role. And the lawyer itself within the business almost becomes a business strategist or the orchestrator of the work. So that’s I think an interesting change where the legal ops role is even more important because they’re really setting up the entire environment for legal to reap the full benefits.

off adopting and implementing AI within the organization. and then the lawyers, instead of doing all of the work, they’ll be more be overseeing and orchestrating most of the work and being much more focused from a from a strategic perspective. It all sounds great. So it’s been a great journey. You know, you’ve expanded LEGALFLY since twenty twenty three. You know, you’ve taken the company global, you’re you you know, you’ve got exciting plans. But entrepreneurship ain’t that easy.

So, you know, what have been some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome when scaling the company in a very competitive market as well? And maybe some tips for other legal tech founders that are trying to get their businesses off the ground? A lot of challenges, of course. and and I I don’t wanna make it sound easy. It’s been it’s been it’s been quite a roller coaster, I think. and we’re very happy to be able to work with such amazing organizations and with such an amazing team and amazing investors on on our side. I think the

the key challenges that we’ve had to overcome in a highly competitive AI markets, we have kept our heads down and very much focused on the product, which is key I think, and it’s it’s not always the most straightforward thing to do, because we’ve seen a lot of others in the space have thrown literally millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising and brand awareness. And on one hand we don’t have the luxury to do so because we didn’t raise a billion

dollars or a billion euros. So we need to be more capital efficient in how we’re scaling the organization. On the other hand, the founders have a different philosophy and approach on how you’re building out the best legal high solution in the market where we’re incredibly customer centric and incredibly product focused. And we really want to build out the best product in the market. And yeah, we we we took a lot of time and founder focus in figuring out what exactly that product should be.

for those in house teams before we start scaling from a go to market perspective. So I I think definitely there were some challenges around that. And D AI landscape is moving so fast. So our product capabilities and the capabilities of our competitors they’re developing so quickly. So we’re constantly evolving in our messaging and and brands positioning as well. It’s it’s crazy. It’s like every quarter legal fly is really really maturing.

I think maybe a third challenge is that of course when you’re raising capital in a market, in such a highly competitive market, it can also become challenging because there is been a lot of money that has been going around in the market. And we have a lot of inbound interest that is pushing us to to do a Series B raise and and and and keep on raising. but also there you want to figure out which investors have not placed their bets yet and decide to partner with those that share exactly the same

mindset and the same strategy that that that we have, which is quite differentiated from the others. It comes down to, you know, that probably value alignment as well in terms of the way that you want to go about this and what you want to be known for in the marketplace and, you know, some of the other things that you were you were very nicely saying there. You touched on earlier, I I was sort of touching on on sort of

Recruitment, talents, you know, these businesses still do need high quality talent into to flourish to to expand. And you’ve built a team with strong backgrounds in AI and indeed product development. So what qualities do you look for in individuals when hiring them on work problems that are very complex and specialised as sort of legal AI? Curiosity and and comfort with ambiguity over the number of years of experience. I think the years of experience is really becoming less relevant now.

we’re really looking up for someone younger with a with a very young aggressive mindset to become the best, that is very quickly adopting at the changing landscape. also because the the the the problem space changes every quarter. So I think someone who is very quickly to adapt, very eager to learn, and very eager to help us become the best in the space, those are the kind of individuals that that we’re looking for. Someone who is hungry to learn, smart and

with AI savvy. So tha that’s why to get back to one of the earlier questions you asked, for any role that we’re looking to to hire someone for at LEGALFLY, we definitely want to make sure that that person, by his or her own interest, has already implemented AI and used AI itself to to boost her or his own efficiency. Get out there, get testing, get get used to it, play with it, be curious, or all of the things that you’re

you’re referencing there. Let’s look again to the future. I know it’s hard to predict because as you said there, you know, things change by the quarter, month, week, sometimes in the world of legal AI. But looking forwards, what changes do you think will shape the way companies buy, use and interact with legal technology? Let’s have a look maybe at at the predictions of of Gardner where they said that legal tech budgets are expected to double by twenty twenty eight. And

We believe that that money is moving from external counsel to adopting legal tech, and specifically legal AI. That’s what we’re seeing in the market, what we’re seeing with all of our clients, and that’s also why we’re betting on solving the legal workflow, solving the legal needs for those corporate teams. So it’s definitely a shift that we’re seeing and a transition that we’d love to be to be part of in the market. Budget will go more and more towards enabling those non legal team members.

To use legal tech so business teams will get a lot more autonomy to get their their work done, even if it involves the execution of some legal tasks alongside the the the job. And we definitely want to be part of that shift. We’re also seeing a shift from a collection of legal point solutions to platform decisions. So buyers are becoming more mature, they’re kicking off RFP processes where they’re looking for

a consolidated end to end solution and not just a tool to solve one specific task. This also comes back to data security, for example. If you’re working with four or five different legal AI vendors, I’ll focus on a very specific task or sometimes a subtle. It’s quite risky for the business to to to be leveraging all of those tools or using them. They’d rather decide to go with one provider that has a much more broader offering for

a a wider variety of the the legal needs that the organization faces. Yeah, and I can hear the the sort of passion in your voice throughout the conversation about, you know, Legal Fly and what you’re trying to do. What most excites you about the future? What most excites me about the future, I I I think the speed at which everything is changing, to be very honest. It’s it’s incredible. And and the the speed at which those organizations are evolving

How legal is being democratized in a way as well, I would say. It’s it’s I really think it’s incredible. And the get what we thought was possible to build with LEGALFLY, what we built today, two years ago, we would have never believed it. So the underlying models as well are evolving so quickly that it allows everyone in the application layer like us to build and to keep pushing the bar for what’s for what’s possible. And maybe one day we’ll we’ll reach AGI.

And let’s see where we end up then. But I I think it’s amazing how fast technology is evolving and how eager because of that the businesses are to adopt it and to boost their processes. And I just gleam the entrepreneur on you that you you get excited by change. Some legal leaders get a little bit scared or go into inaction with change, thinking, Do we actually have to do this? So if you were advising general counsel or legal leaders currently unsure

where to start with their AI journey. What would be three tips you would give to them and why? I think the first one is let’s start with one painful, ideally high volume workflow. let’s start with a real problem where you know there is a good ROI if this can be solved with a legalized solution and and not just develop a company wide strategy. The second one would be involve the team doing the work in the tool selection.

I think that’s that’s key. Make sure that it’s directly that team reviewing those tools, that it’s not just the innovation team leading it. And make sure to appoint the champion while doing so. Someone needs to have very clear KPIs on making the the implementation and the discovery process around that legalized solution a success. And then the third tip I would give is make sure that incentives are aligned. So measure reward the team based on their successes.

Using AI. So having clear KPIs in place for those teams, I think, is is key. And what gets measured gets done, as they say. And that’s some great advice for the legal side. What about some advice for the for the founders now? You’ve obviously gone from leading AI initiatives to founding and scaling your own company. What one lesson about entrepreneurship do you wish you’d learned before starting LEGALFLY? It’s a good one. I I think

And this comes back to the philosophy of the founding team being completely obsessed with having a product first focus, I believe. So really focus uncompromisingly on the product before you even think about scaling organization, before you even think about sales. And if the product isn’t truly compelling, even the best go-to-market strategy will not help you. And if if you look about how we did it with LegalFlies, we spent the first year to year and a half on

really perfecting the product to find the amazing product market fit. Then we spent the next year and a half on building out an amazing sales team and finalizing the go-to-market playbook and and having a very strong direct sales motion, both inbound and then trading that outbound muscle as well. And then now, let’s see if it’s not a cycle of one year and half, but building out a very strong partnerships channel as well. But also here

Don’t waste any time on building out partnerships or strategy around it if you didn’t master your direct sales process first. So I I think doing it in in a faced approach where you’re obsessed and focused on the product first, then you look into direct sales and then you look into partnerships is is the way to go. And then then the best investors in the world will reach out to you themselves. The best candidates or people will be at your door to to be able to work for you. So everything will come your way if you build out the best product.

Master Direct Sales and then Master a very strong partnerships channel alongside it. Sticking with the school of thought slightly, you have a skill toolbox. Let’s say your tools all go missing. You know, all the skills that you’ve acquired as a founder, as an entrepreneur over the years, to running Legal Fly, but you can only get one of those skills back. What’s the key skill that you would absolutely categorically not want to lose and continue to refine that you think would make you a top tier?

legal tech founder now and moving forwards. It’s a good one. It’s a really good one. I think the ability to get on a stage and very clearly push the industry in a way to change. And and what do I mean with this is that it’s a dinosaur industry, right? Like the law firms have not changed their business model ever. They have no incentive to become more efficient. We do want to be

a catalyst in that change and be very vocal about look, we need to democratize legal, we need to make sure that those corporates and the enterprises have a much more efficient way to get their legal work done. We need to solve the legal friction and b because it’s that vision and delivering that vision in a very appropriate way that is going to help you to find the right team around it to convince the first clients to do the first trials as well.

and and to get more attention in a very competitive space on your specific business and your specific strategies. So I think being able to be very vocal on the direction you’re going in and direction that you feel the industry should move in, and being able to clearly pitch around all of that is is one of the key strengths that I found her in such a highly competitive industry that is changing very rapidly. yeah, should possess.

And like I said all the time to our listeners, specific is terrific. And I think that’s really good example about being lasered in there and being that trailblazer and genuinely believing and you know, being the change. If you don’t see the change, be the change. And you absolutely believe that. And you know, credit to you. And I’ve I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And just a couple of quick fire quiet questions before I let you go. perhaps a a final piece of advice if you like. If you had to complete this sentence, how would you finish it?

The legal profession of the future will not be defined by organizations using the most AI, but by those that By those who used AI to give their people more judgment, and definitely not less. that’s a very powerful way to end that sentence. I like that. Ruben, this has been a an an absolute masterclass. Thoroughly enjoyed learning about your own

Individual journey, what you’re building with LEGALFLY, the story behind it, how you’re thinking about growth, you know, your ideas, strategies, all very, very exciting. I’m sure you’ve inspired a lot of our listeners and watchers around the world. So if they would like to learn more about yourself or indeed LEGALFLY, are there any particular websites or social media handles or indeed resources you would like to share? We’ll also make sure we share them with this episode for you too. I think definitely our website, LEGALFLY.com is one of the most interesting channels to follow. We’re very active on our LinkedIn.

as well. we’re also publishing every quarter a report. the report is not commercial at all. What we basically do is we we really deep dive into the space and we often perform research as well where we’re interviewing a couple of hundreds of GCs on certain topics to get their thoughts and and also to keep tracking how the industry is evolving, how the maturity of of LeagueLai is evolving as well. So yeah, I I would recommend follow us on on LinkedIn.

keep an eye on the website and every quarter feel free to have a look at that report and hopefully there is some interesting information in it that we can assist you and if at any point you would like to get a demo, I’m pretty sure anyone of our team would love to show you the platform. Absolutely. Well it just leads me to say thanks so much, Reuben. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. And I think this conversation proves that, you know, an important reminder around the future of legal technology is not about just replacing manual tasks with artificial intelligence. It’s about rethinking, you know, how legal work is going to be completed and what it looks like in the future. So from all of us here on the Legally Speaking podcast, wishing you and the entire team at LEGALFLY lots of continued success as you transform the future of Legal Eye. But for now, from all of us, 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 pub, the Legally Speaking Club, over on Discord.

Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There’s a link to join our community there. Over and out.