Access to the Law through Data – Nicole Clark – S6E8

00:08 Rob Hanna:

Welcome to Legally Speaking Podcast. You are now listening to Season 6 of the show. I’m your host, Rob Hanna. This week I’m delighted to be joined by Nicole Clark. Nicole is the CEO and Co-Founder of Trellis. Trellis is a comprehensive AI powered state court research and analytics platform. Before co-founding Trellis, Nicole was an associate and associate attorney. Nicole has experienced in business litigation, labour, and employment as an attorney. She’s handled litigation in state and federal courts regularly representing multinational corporations. So a very, very warm welcome, Nicole.

00:49 Nicole Clark:

Thanks so much, Rob. Great to be here.

00:51 Rob Hanna:

It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Before we dive into all your amazing projects and experiences within the legal spaces to date, we have a customary icebreaker question here on the Legally Speaking Podcast, which is on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being very real, what would you rate the hit TV series Suits in terms of its reality?

01:10 Nicole Clark:

I would give it a strong 3 in terms of very real, but it’s fun.

01:17 Rob Hanna:

Do you have a favourite character?

01:19 Nicole Clark: 

I simply I think I just love the sort of bravado, you know that what lawyers do anyway, which is we talk like we know what we’re talking about. And that just carries you over.

01:28 Rob Hanna:

Absolutely. Well, I’m glad you’ve given it a 3, I was expecting a sub 5. So glad you hit that. And let’s move swiftly on to talk more about you Nicole. So let’s start at the beginning, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey?

01:43 Nicole Clark:

Sure, absolutely. So I was an attorney for around 10 years, I practiced always in litigation, a lot of labour and employment class action work. So I found myself in state trial court in the US constantly. And really, that started my journey. I simply couldn’t believe how difficult it was to access state court information. So moving on from there, I happened to complain to very talented engineers that I knew that there was just this giant entire court system, entire court system, largest court system in the world that no one had aggregated and structured the data for yet. And from there, we started putting something together. And thus Trellis was born out of my own frustration in trying to access the trial court data.

02:29 Rob Hanna:

Yeah. And that leads nicely on because as I mentioned, and as you touched on there, you are the CEO and Co-Founder of Trellis. So let’s dig in a little bit deeper. Tell us what Trellis is and what it does specifically.

02:41 Nicole Clark:

Sure. So right now, in the US and the state trial court system, we basically we have state courts and federal courts, right. And federal courts are all in 1 unified system in the US called PACER. Not particularly innovative, but it’s a searchable system. On the state trial court side, anyone who’s practiced there knows that it is fragmented county by county across the entire United States. So the data is hosted separately, maintained separately on 1000s of individual county court websites, if you can access it at all. So what Trellis is at its core, think of us as a searchable, a single interface to search the entire US trial court system, whether it’s by judge or by legal issue, or by opposing counsel, and be able to really uncover where information is hiding across the US in a way that’s never been possible before.

03:27 Rob Hanna:

Yeah, and that’s super unique. So we’re going to talk a lot more about this. But I want to go back to your sort of journey. Why did you decide to co-found Trellis?

03:37 Nicole Clark:

Well, I so as I mentioned, I was sort of faced with the frustration of simply not understanding how it wasn’t something that I could do already, how this didn’t exist. So the the true origin story was that I was writing an MSJ 1 night, it was a super complicated issue. I was complaining to 1 of my colleagues that didn’t know anything about the judge, and I wasn’t sure how to structure the motion. And my colleagues said that he thought he had appeared before the same judge a few years earlier. And we went back and checked in the document management system, and there was a PDF in there, there was a ruling that was by my judge on my issue on my motion. And for me, that was absolutely the sort of lightbulb I felt like I got handed the answers, I could see exactly the way the judge thought about the issue and the case law to use. And I wrote that motion in a quarter of the time, I won. And I said, how was it possible that I didn’t have that to start with? Like, how how were we here, and we can search Court of Appeals law, but every court is starting in a trial court. And there’s no way to search across what my judge has ruled previously at the trial court level. So for me it was simply, how could it not exist yet, and then moving from their frustration and, and it turns out, the reason that it didn’t exist is because it’s hard, very difficult to aggregate and structure all of this data.

04:59 Rob Hanna:

I love that though because you identified something that’s not there and rather than saying it and sticking with it’s hard, you went and found a solution and did something great about it. So let’s think with Trellis them, because you’ve touched on some great points already, but trellis aims to, you know, basically improve the access to the law. You know, it’s making state trial courts records and legal data more accessible, which I’m sure we’re all for. But you know, what is the real significance of this?

05:25 Nicole Clark:

Yeah. So if you think about the way that most attorneys would utilise, let’s say, Lexus or Westlaw the, you know, giant legal research platforms, it’s to do strategic research, right? It’s to understand what the law should be and sort of apply your facts to it. And is it like, or is it not like, and what we’re really doing is sort of asking attorneys to just simply reframe the way they think about research. So it particularly when, of course, you’re in trouble. So instead of thinking what what sort of what should the Court of Appeals case law be? You look at it in the practicality. What are judges applying right now? What’s the case all the judges are applying right now? What is my opposing counsel done in other cases, similar to this? All the way across let me let me use other attorneys motions to get an understanding of how I can write this faster, better, more persuasively, what’s been successful in the past. So really a super practical way to think about moving forward with practice and access to data that historically wasn’t wasn’t possible.

06:32 Rob Hanna:

Yeah. And I love that because you know, people say data is the new gold. And I would tend to agree with that. So I love what Trellis is doing. And prior to co-founding Trellis, you were representing multinational corporations, what experiences did you gain as a business litigation, labour and employment attorney? And how did this contribute towards Trellis?

06:54 Nicole Clark:

So there’s probably 2 sides of it, right? There’s there’s the domain side, meaning how do I help to build a product that I know is actually going to be useful for lawyers, because of my own experience, and sort of, you know, building version 1 is always solving it for yourself. So that’s going to be your the grind of the research and the drafting and all of those pieces that I was doing day in and day out, and how, what would have made my life easier at that point. And then there’s the flip side, which is sort of the business, how does being being a litigator previously, how did it how did it prepare me for being an entrepreneur. And I’d say on the 1 hand, not at all. They’re wildly wildly different skill sets, sometimes entirely counterintuitive to each other. But what did prepare me I’d say was 1, the, just, you know, willingness to work hard, I think that is something that’s gonna go carry across the board, no doubt. I didn’t suddenly realise I had to, to, you know, grind and work a lot of hours, I was doing that. So it was just doing it towards something that that I loved. The other side would be, I’d actually say law school in general prepared me for this, which is, I learned that I can learn anything. So we get, you know, giant books, securities regulation, and all of these topics that we’ve never considered before. And you dig in, and you learn it. And I think that’s the best takeaway that I actually had from law school and from practicing, which was you, you’re not expected to be an expert, you’re expected to figure out how to become an expert. And that simply takes digging in and studying. And really, anything can be learned. And I’m now sort of reapplying that on every spectrum, from marketing to sales to leadership, on sort of a flip side of the business perspective.

08:49 Rob Hanna:

Yeah, and I love what you say that because even my own experience of working with lawyers, when I’m looking at transactions or instructing lawyers, I always like the ones that say, let me get back to you. Because it just it just tells me that you know what, they’re not flying by the seat of their pants. They’re not just trying to say something, they’re actually going to hopefully take that step because like you say, they don’t necessarily have to be the expert in absolutely everything. But if they can find the end solution and go to counsel or find other people makes perfect sense. So you’ve done a lot. You’ve sat the bar exam in 3 different states and licensed to practice in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut, why stop at 3, I mean, what, you could have gone for the whole lot, but has this assisted you and co-founding Trellis?

09:32 Nicole Clark:

So 1 I’m clearly just a glutton for punishment. I mean, that’s obvious by the number of bars. It’s prepared me in that if you think about what we do, right, we go in state by state and aggregate their trial court data county by county and the amount of nuance state by state is just ridiculous. So great example is New York calls their lower trial courts, the Supreme Courts right, so it’s every sort of classification that you can imagine but having a little bit of knowledge in a few states to start with, to sort of understand simply the court system and the ways that they can be called different things, but what are they actually talking about, and what are the types of pieces that are going moving forward in each of those states. So I think that has been really helpful. And then obviously, just building a little bit of a knowledge base, but am I am I actively applying my state, you know, bar bar data from from my various states right now, no, but I can still understand and speak to our customers who are lawyers. And so that’s.

10:36 Rob Hanna:

Yeah, no, absolutely, and is it true that the California bar is the hardest of the all?

10:41 Nicole Clark:

Oh, by far, it is a monster. And you know, that may have changed, which is funny. I think for all of us that sat for the California Bar pre, you know, the last year or 2, when they switched over to 2 days are like, that’s not fair. We had to go through that terrible gauntlet. So no idea what it has, what is changing too, and I think it’s getting a little bit better. But I can tell you, California was harder than both of both Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. So really, really intense test for sure.

11:10 Rob Hanna:

Yeah. And I’ve I’ve heard that and it’s interesting that you, you’ve flagged that. So thanks for for sharing your experiences. And now it’s time for a short break from the show. Are you looking for a way to get your firm working more efficiently and profitably, while ensuring a better work life balance for your team? Well, if you haven’t considered our sponsor Clio, I’m here to strongly recommend that you do. I absolutely love working with Clio, not only is it the world’s leading legal practice management, and legal client relationship management software, it also has a really solid core mission, to transform the legal experience for all. Something I personally support. What sets Clio apart for me, it’s their dedication to customer success and support. There are lots of legal software’s out there. But I know from talking to Clio users that their support offering is miles ahead of the rest with their 24-5 availability by email, in app chat and over the phone. Yes, you can actually call in and speak to someone. Clio is also the G2 Crowd leader in legal practice management in comparison to 130 legal practice management softwares and has been for the last 14 consecutive quarters. G2 Crowd is the world’s leading business solutions review website. You could check Clio’s full list of features and pricing at www dot Clio dot com forward slash legally dash speaking. That’s www dot c l io dot com forward slash legally dash speaking. Now back to the show. What type of problems did you identify regarding sort of legal data and the judicial system? You know, and how did you seek to address them?

13:08 Nicole Clark:

So there’s a variety of ways to think about sort of utilising state trial court data. On the 1 hand, we can talk about the granular, right, the I want to look at my opposing counsel and motions they’ve written in the past and get an idea on how they’re likely to position issues. I want to look up my judge and see how they’ve ruled on this issue on this type of motion before. I simply want to pull a document on a case that’s in a variety of court systems, right. That’s the more granular aspect of the data. On the other side of that is the zoomed-out view. It is the trend analytics information that you can pull by what was previously fragmented data. Obviously, AI is going to have to do this, this isn’t a human that’s able to look at this volume of data. But when you look at this volume of data, you can see trends surface and insights surface and so that goes from everything to which cases end up costing the most to which types of defendants in which venues right. There’s so many different ways to slice and dice and think about how to utilise this data and actually not only in a legal context, but in a business context as well. We have a variety of business clients that litigation spent is huge for them is is a massive part of the budget and having a little bit more predictability in that particular area of the business is really useful as well. So I think it goes across there from you know, I’m a paralegal and I need to pull a document in a case to you I am general counsel of a giant corporation and I need to make decisions about which cases to settle, what products to, you know, start to phase out all of those things. So really almost too many things.

14:50 Rob Hanna:

A lot in short, basically. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So would you mind explaining the process of building Trellis and how you brought it to the market, because its inspiring story so far?

15:02 Nicole Clark:

Sure, the start was with an assumption. I had an assumption that based on that single ruling that I had had, that this data would be valuable to me in my own practice. And I really started there to say, I think, I think that this could dramatically change my sort of motion success rate, if I couldn’t, if I could see this information. And so we actually started aggregating data from the courts that I appeared in most often at that point, I was working in Southern California, so Los Angeles and San Diego and San Francisco. And basically think about it as pulling what is otherwise public data, it just hasn’t been accessible up till now. So dockets, rulings, documents, and kind of just slapping a search engine on top of that, so that I, in my own practice, could look up a particular legal issue and sort of get an idea on how I thought judges were ruling on it, and then tweak and tailor and, you know, my position accordingly. And what happened was, we started aggregating this data for a number of years while I was still practicing. And I started to be really successful in my motion practice. And, you know, I wasn’t bad before, but there was a clear, dramatic change in in my win rate, I just started winning. And so for me, that was actually what gave me the courage to jump all in and to say, okay, we’ve we’ve aggregated this data on sort of a regional California subset and proven that it is useful, if it’s useful to me, it’s going to be useful to other litigators. And so from there, we started out early with actually my very first firm, the firm that I was at, at the time that I was building Trellis. And they knew that I had been winning a lot. So when I, when I gave notice, to tell them, I was going to launch this product, they were like, well, let’s talk about it. And they actually became our first customer. From there, we iterated sort of on site with the attorneys in a in a feedback loop that is so necessary when you’re building early software, and started really building out from there and growing our base, we joined an accelerator called Techstars, got more exposure into the sort of start-up ecosystem, raise some early funding, and really started acquiring customers from there.

17:20 Rob Hanna:

And it’s not straightforward, running a business, getting it off the ground. You know, what have been some of the challenges along the way that you’ve faced?

17:31 Nicole Clark:

I think, you know, every part of this has been a massive challenge. It’s a funny thing they say about entrepreneurs, that sort of if we knew how hard this was, before we went into it, we’d never do it. And I think there’s true, there’s something about the naïveté that makes you think you can accomplish this thing that otherwise is practically impossible. So at the early days, it’s getting someone to believe an idea that doesn’t exist yet. So, so that in itself is huge. And then once you have that, then you have a product that’s not great yet, because you’ve had a small amount of money put into it, and it’s very much an MVP, and then getting people to understand, hey, we can make this better, and to actually give you feedback and to engage. And then from there, acquiring those customers, acquiring enough customers to go out to what you know, we’re a venture backed company, so to go out to investors and demonstrate, hey, this is valuable, this is huge, it’s something that you should invest in. So I’d say I’ve every part of the journey has been its own sort of, you know, mini mini gauntlet, of, of sorts. And every part of it is something that I’m learning. So obviously, I was not I didn’t know any of this stuff. And even even a start of universe I knew when we started this company, I knew a single engineer, that was my, you know, my sum total of what I knew in sort of the the ecosystem. So really surrounding yourself by people just much smarter than I am that I’ve had a lot more experience in growing and scaling companies and trying to utilise their expertise and and sort of rely on them for the questions that I’ve never encountered before, as much as possible. And I’d say I still do that today.

19:09 Rob Hanna:

Yeah, and you raise such an important point, not just for for entrepreneurs, but anybody you know, and perhaps a lot of lawyers listening won’t like what I say here, but it’s not always what you know, it’s about the quality of your network. And you’ve described there, but actually by leveraging that network that can relieve a lot of those pain points, because by asking simple questions or going to them, or having those mentors or that community that you’re part of can just save so much time because that’s the only commodity that we we really have but the only thing we can’t buy and so, you know, I think you raised a really good point around that. So folks listening in, you know, as you go through your legal journey or connected to any sort of journey, make sure you have smarter people around you because it’s 1 of the best kept secrets and as you can always have in your pocket. Okay, so.

19:52 Nicole Clark:

I think that’s true. Just to hit that for 1 second. Also, I think any attorney that’s bringing in business knows that, right. It is that network that is what enables them to ultimately go and write their own check and be able to move on to other firms, etc. So yes, we can love it, and we can hate it, but network is vastly important.

20:10 Rob Hanna:

Absolutely, even more so how you can connect that with the current digital world that we’re in as well in terms of the access and all the platforms that you can be, and the communities you can be in, even in the Web3 world, but that’s a whole different discussion. So does Trellis have a specific target market, i.e is the platform only for attorneys, associates and judges, or can anyone in the legal sphere utilise it?

20:35 Nicole Clark:

So really, anyone in the legal sphere can utilise it, and we see that across the board, we actually have a freemium aspect of our product. So you folks, folks may encounter us because they Google a judge or a case or a motion, and we might pop up and and then what you have is basically the ability to start a 2 week free trial. What we found is that we create champions by letting folks dig into the data and discover the value themselves. So that we see all the way from, you know, paralegals or people supporting attorneys all the way to GCs, utilising the platform. Now, they all use it a little bit differently, what they’re actually their specific use case is vastly different. But what we can say is anyone who touches the state trial court system, whether it be making decisions, actively working in it, has a case moving forward, we have also, you know, individuals and consumers that want to get analytics on their judges, as well. So goes across the board, I would say, let’s call our our core hefty portion of our market is going to be litigators themselves. But now, we also have this interesting piece, which is what we’re continuing to grow out with the business right now, which is the our end user platform, you’re sort of you know, Google, because you’d be better encountered our site, it’s there’s a, there’s a large search bar, and then you’re digging into data. So very similar to models that we’re used to. What we’re seeing is that other industries can utilise this data, as well for making decisions, and so we’re now growing in the sort of insurance market in financial services, and a lot of areas that you wouldn’t think of are that have use for this data that simply didn’t know it was accessible up until now.

22:21 Rob Hanna:

Yeah, and it’s great that, you know, it is so accessible. And you know, everyone in and around the legal industry can get serious, serious value from this. And we talked about the challenges previously with Trellis, Trellis, I just wanted to talk more about the journey. So you know, since being on the market, how has Trellis evolved, if you like, and can you explain the stages of that development?

22:43 Nicole Clark:

You know, I’d say we’re at and this probably goes for any software company, your product is always getting better. It’s just and and I will, I will never be able to look at Trellis and say, perfect, done, we’ve, we’ve done it, because you can always make something better. So let’s say super early on, we started out and it was 1 specific thing. It was simply judges tentative rulings in California, that’s basically in California, and judges do a thing where they rule, basically 24 hours before hearing, they’ll let you know how they’re going to rule on your motion, and the why. So we started out just collecting those. And so it was searchable, tentative rulings in California. Then we go throughout California to add dockets, and pieces and documents, then we started growing across the nation. And we’re still getting better. If you think about, we’re bringing in hundreds of millions of cases across the country. Now, sometimes clerks enter information in wrong, they’re still human, sometimes for the data that we’re aggregating. So every now and then you’re still going to encounter a piece that isn’t that isn’t on our site. It simply it happens. And the way that we try to make sure that we’re getting everything is is multifaceted, but 1 thing I would say is, it takes a user’s sort of giving feedback and helping us, so we have a spot on our site, don’t find a case, entering the case number, we go back and grab it in real time, now it’s on our site. Now you’ve helped the entire community to continue to build out this data. So I’d say we’re right now in 15 states 500 and something counties it grows regularly, so it’s hard for me to to stay on top of it. It’s actually a it’s a funny thing with our marketing materials, too. It feels like every time we finish sort of new marketing materials, the product has changed dramatically and it’s stale already. So I’d say the product is is changing leaps and bounds on you know, we, our engineers work on what’s called a weekly sprint. It means every week we come up with the goals that we’re going to accomplish and then the you know, we finished those and the product hopefully on a weekly basis is getting better and better. And the end result is simply to really own the state trial courts face, if you think of state trial court data, whether it be analytics records, information, data as a service, you think of us. And it’s a lofty goal, we are talking about 3000 different counties across the entire nation. But we’re working hard on it. So I’d say the product has evolved dramatically, continuing to evolve on a regular basis, we, we recently released verdict analytics. So now we have analytics across verdicts that are enhancing the data. So there’s always new pieces of data that are coming in and enhancing our existing dataset, both from a sort of depth perspective, meaning more value in particular areas, and then from a threat perspective in terms of adding additional counties and additional states.

25:41 Rob Hanna:

Love it. And you talk about the goal, you know, I remember when people say, you know, if your goals don’t scare you, they’re not big enough. And I think you’ve given a great example there of that, and you also touched on some points where I have other friends and entrepreneurs, I know that I have software businesses that are always saying they’re getting better, and I always say, does that mean, they’re always in beta is what I say to that, because a lot of a lot of responses of business owners say we’re always we’re out of beta, but we’re in beta, because we’re always testing, we’re always working on it, always improving it, so I’m sure you can relate to that. So let’s get on to it, then with the sort of trends and way the way it’s going, you know, as legal intelligence and AI becomes more prevalent, would you say this area is a competitive landscape, and where would you say Trellis fits in within the space specifically?

26:31 Nicole Clark:

So absolutely, I think we’re in an interesting place right now, because we’re supplemental to the core of legal research platforms that folks have grown up on in law school, your Lexus, and your Westlaw, etc. So we’re not asking you to rip and replace and not utilise those we understand those are core to the way lawyers have been practicing for many years. Now, we’re simply saying, here’s a supplemental data set that will if you touch state, that state trial court system, if you’re a practitioner, and state trial court, that will allow you to have greater insights, make decisions on your judge, some states actually allow you to bring your judge meaning you can request assignment to a new judge if you do it in a in a couple of days. So having some of that hard data and information available to supplement the types of research that attorneys already do, gives you a massive competitive advantage. And so I put us that right, right there in the we are there’s heavy adoption right now and it’s continuing to grow. And what I would say was sort of early on Trellis fit in as a competitive advantage for early adopters, right, folks that were willing to try new products and AI powered, and really sort of embrace technology. They were the folks that were getting a massive competitive advantage for Trellis. I think we’re moving closer to a sort of levelling of the playing field now, where it’s becoming where it really is, it should be industry standard. You know, historically, if you’re on the state trial court level, the data wasn’t available, so of course, you use Court of Appeals data to do your research. But now that the data is available, it’s affordable, it’s accessible, and really your opposing counsel can look at it and probably is, on a very basic level, you should be utilising that to from the start of a case to make decisions. And I think clients are beginning to expect that attorneys are utilising data in a way that if they’re not there, they should start, because client expectations are definitely moving there.

28:26 Rob Hanna:

Yeah know, really, really well said, and so to wrap up, then, you know, what are the future plans? What’s in store for Trellis? You know, do you have plans for further expansion? I know, you talked about the big goal, but yeah, just tell us more about the future.

28:41 Nicole Clark:

Sure. So I mean, little little goal of taking over the world. But when I when I say that what I mean is sort of the the entire nation, so all 3000 counties across the nation, and we’re moving rapidly towards that goal. So certainly expansion and the idea that you can feel confident that whatever you’re looking for at the state trial court level we have accessible on our platform. And so there’s always the sort of the data aspect of the company and then there’s the features and ways to utilise the product and make it better, so always improving our analytics, we now have judge analytics and verdict analytics, we’re going to be moving towards attorney and law firm analytics as well, so simply a way to be able to dig into all of this data and see insights that you haven’t seen before. We’re also working on some company analytics, which are think of it as your sort of Fortune 50 Companies, and where are they getting sued by who in what venues, who’s representing them, all of this data that’s there that we just need to sort of surface because it’s fascinating, and it’s really important information to for us to understand our judicial system and how different players are moving through it. So it’s going to be on the side of data expansion, and then also, always making the product better, always making it better, and continuing to provide data to other industries as well.

30:01 Rob Hanna:

Love it. And I love how you touched on a collaborative point at the end. And I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed learning about your journey Nicole from sort of lawyer to entrepreneur to sort of taking over the world. So you would have inspired many of our listeners today I’m sure, so if people want to follow or get in touch with anything we’ve discussed today, what’s the best way for them to contact you, feel free to also shout out any social media or website links, we’ll also share them with this episode for you too.

30:24 Nicole Clark:

Absolutely so you can visit our site at simply Trellis dot law slash search and start searching. And that’s some of the fun stuff. But you can also reach out to us info at Trellis dot law. Me in particular, I’m Nicole at Trellis dot law, happy to chat with anyone who’s interested. And then also you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter at Nicole underscore a underscore Clark.

30:46 Rob Hanna:

Awesome, well, thank you so so much, Nicole, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today. So wishing you lots of continued success with Trellis and your future career. But from all of us for now from the Legally Speaking Podcast team over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you liked the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub, the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord goes to our website www dot legally speaking podcast dot com for the link to join our community there. Over and out.