If you’re a solo/freelance lawyer or from a small firm, chances are, you’ve worried about how to win more clients at some point or another. Meet Ivan Tryskyba, the Founder of Caseguru, and the person using AI to solve that problem. Ho joined your host, Rob Hanna, in this episode to share the impact that his innovative AI-driven marketplace is set to have on the legal sector.  

So why should you be listening in?  

You can hear Rob and Ivan discussing:  

• The challenges of creating a legal tech AI model 
• How Caseguru helps lawyers win clients  
• Advice for aspiring legal tech entrepreneurs  
• How Caseguru is different from other AI models  
• The importance of protecting customers’ privacy  

Transcript

Rob Hanna 00:00 

On today’s episode of the legally speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Ivan Tryskyba. Ivan is the founder and CEO of Caseguru, an AI first legal case marketplace where individuals can find the right lawyer. He has experience as a Founder-in-Residence at Microsoft for startups, and the Founder and CEO of Insight Dev and in leverage finance risk at Barclays. Ivan is completing slash completed his Master of Science in Financial Technology at the University of Glasgow. So a very warm welcome, Ivan. 

Ivan Tryskyba 00:31 

Um, yeah, thank you, Rob. Thanks for inviting me. And yeah, that was quite accurate. Just just complete. Just submitted my dissertation like yesterday. 

Rob Hanna 00:41 

There we go. We got it right. Well, before we go through your entrepreneurial experiences, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the legally speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 1010, being very real. What would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law, if you’ve seen it? 

Ivan Tryskyba 01:04 

Yeah, I’ve seen quite, like, two or three seasons, probably, yeah, I would say, I don’t know, because I’m not a lawyer, but I would, I would assume it’s quite so let’s say seven? 

Rob Hanna 01:17 

And you’ve given it a Seven. And with that, we’re going to move swiftly on. So let’s talk about your your journey. Ivan, to begin with, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your your background? Yes. 

Ivan Tryskyba 01:30 

So I was born in Ukraine and raised and then I moved to Italy to study in the university there when so then the war started, and I turned I then moved to Ireland to work in Barclays, as you were saying. And then I ended up in in here in Scotland, and been here for two years. Meanwhile, I was here. I created inside there, which is a which was, well, kind of still is like we’re providing, we’re providing AI development. It’s like an AI agency, basically. And we were developing legal, like, specifically focusing on legal, and we developed a chatbot for a law firm that we really liked, and we thought it works really nice. So yeah, that’s how we ended up with Caseguru. 

Rob Hanna 02:26 

Yeah, and I guess I want to ask a little bit more about Caseguru. And, you know, obviously I proudly sit in as advisor to the company, and think it’s got great potential. But I would like to, before we talk about Caseguru, your kind of reasons why you wanted to set it up, because I know you have a personal story attached to that. 

Ivan Tryskyba 02:43 

Yeah. So when we were in Scotland, my parents, they were in, you know, they never, it was quite tough to for the children, especially to move. We have a lot of them, like six and, yeah, the parents couldn’t deal with it very well, so we started the arguing. And then my mom was kind of looking for a family lawyer to to settle this, which ended up being like a three, let’s say, a month and a half journey to find the right one. And I thought, and then I also found that online market, like marketplaces that help, you, know, help you for example, you know, on Amazon, you can buy goods on Uber, you can find taxi on the rover, you can find, like, a dog walker or something, but you there is no nothing like this. For like, there are some marketplaces that help you find a lawyer. But I, when I was using them, I didn’t help. So, yeah, that’s why we decided to create one.  

Rob Hanna 03:47 

And that’s what I like about you, and your your entrepreneurial spirit, because a lot of people will, um, will find a problem and then they won’t do anything about going to solve it. And clearly, you got fixated on the problem and then wanted to go from a personal experience to turn that into a solution, to add value to other people so they don’t have to go through the pains and troubles you had previously. So Caseguru, then it is an AI first legal case marketplace, where individuals can find the right lawyer. Could you just explain in more detail, and probably simple detail, if you can, you know what Caseguru is all about? 

Ivan Tryskyba 04:20 

Yeah, so at Caseguru, we have, kind of, now, we just implemented it, like three days ago, the simple form where you can describe your case, and then given you know, you just say, like, for example, I want you know, I’m looking for a family lawyer I, or I am looking For, like a lawyer to help me draft some documents or whatever. And it will be then it will be redirected to the app, where the AI will be asking you questions to understand the case. So for example, if it’s a divorce, it will be asking, Do you have children like do to have property together? Do you still live together? This kind of questions that the lawyer would be. Asking, usually, and then it would summarize your case and send to relevant lawyers who are, you know, vetted by us and are happy to help.  

Rob Hanna 05:13 

Yeah, and that’s what I like about this. And you know, that’s the other point, isn’t it? Because this isn’t necessarily just a B to C, but also can be, you know, a tool to help lawyers actually win, win business. So could you explain, particularly, maybe, law for lawyers who might be struggling to win business in the competitive marketplace, how Caseguru helps them attract basically new clients?  

Ivan Tryskyba 05:36 

Yes. So as a lawyer, you just register, and you’re filling your profile. And these, you know, you see all the cases that are available, which is kind of no one does like this. And you can filter. You can choose the ones that you specialize in. And then you can read the summaries that are produced by AI during the onboarding. And also, you know, understand if you’re interested in much more detail than normally you would get from online leads, like normally an online lead, it would be like, I want to get divorced that seat. And then when you call, you find out it’s actually completely different to what you’ve thought, and you kind of spend time on something you’re not interested in. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve for lawyers, and especially as of now, who we see is very interested is the self employed lawyers are very interested because, well, it’s very difficult to attract new clients, to compete with firms who spend millions on marketing. And the same goes for the like High Street firms, smaller firms, who are also struggling to compete with larger firms and marketing and yeah, it’s also a great tool to if you you know, actually deliver the service that you’re promising to deliver on your website, then the clients you know would have you would have like, what’s very interesting is that if you’re a local High Street firm, you usually get local clients from local affirms, something like this. But this case, Guru, you could reach a person who is in another part of the country, and then this person would start spreading word about your firm in that part of the country as well, and you would get new clients from different parts of UK, that’s what’s interesting, 

Rob Hanna 07:23 

Yeah, and it’s smart, isn’t it? Because then, you know, lawyers can grow their practices, you know, and they get access to new markets and new opportunities, maybe higher fees, better quality cases. Um, through actually adopting this, this, this technology, which I think is genius. Um, I’d like to talk more about your personal entrepreneurial journey. So you obviously taught the reason, you know, why you found this problem from a personal circumstance, but talk us through that journey to how Caseguru is actually founded, you know, as as a legal technology entrepreneur, because lots of people have an idea and might want to be a legal technology entrepreneur themselves, but don’t know how to start. And you know, how did you then start building the platform to where it is today.  

Ivan Tryskyba 08:01 

Yeah, I’d say, like, the very restart. It was not perfect, because we didn’t spend enough time on validating the idea. But if I could start over what I’d say, it’s very it would be very smart to just create, like, a wait list and then market it actually do pay dots, for example, on the waitlist. And see validate this waitlist before you start developing, before you write a single line of code. For example, it would be super nice to talk to actual potential clients, any any way you want, even spending your nuts to promote like a landing page that has a wait list on it, and understanding that, okay, yeah, if I have, if you see there is, like, organic traffic that sends up to waitlist without you spending like, three hours with each person talking about your product and, like, basically, then, yeah, it’s a good idea. And it’s worse, that’s what I would start with. 

Rob Hanna 08:59 

It’s a great tip. And I always say that, you know, wait lists are a great way to gage demand, even I go back to my my nightclub days as promotion manager at university, when we would hold the queue. You know, of nightclubs to make the nightclub seem busy. You know, you create that demand. You create that buzz. You sense whether there’s an interest and if people are really going to be up for it. So that’s a really neat tip. Thank you for for sharing that. But you know what? 

Ivan Tryskyba 09:21 

I yeah, I also wanted to say it’s kind of important to just to like, it’s important to let people know that it will be a paid product, to understand they will be able to pay they want to pay for it, not just like some random but at least some newsletter that says, oh, yeah, this is a new product that’s coming. But if you actually say the pricing will be this, and if you then see people signed up to this pricing, that’s a very it’s a great validation. 

Rob Hanna 09:50 

Yeah, and it’s good expectations management. And also, you know, that’s data for you to look at whether the pricing is right, could be improved whether that’s going to be a reservation, whatever it is. So there’s so much data you can take from that as well. You know, you very honestly said before that you didn’t do it necessarily the right way. And you know, you’ve had to go through some some challenges. So you know, what other unique challenges have you faced in building the platform, and you know, basically ensuring that you know you can help connect clients with the right legal representation, talk us through some of your entrepreneurial challenges. 

Ivan Tryskyba 10:23 

Yeah. So the primary challenge was that we were building software all the time, and then we were never doing like marketing and business development appropriately before. So we what we did this Caseguru, we just built everything quickly, and then using the design that we created, without speaking too much on the of the actual customers. And then when we started speaking to customers, when the product was kind of done, we realized that it’s, you know, it’s very far from what the industry needs, what people want. So we had to redesign the whole thing completely, and which meant basically rewriting the whole front end from scratch. So we waste, like, basically wasted three months on it, three months of, like, the work, you know, work for everyone. And, yeah, it was quite painful. And I would say the most important thing before you write any code is to validate that this code will be useful. 

Rob Hanna 11:29 

Yeah. But I also think, you know, you know, I always use the acronym of, you never lose. It’s just life offering some experience. You’ve that as an acronym. And actually that experience you got given meant you had to go away and tweak, you know, you’re still you’re not looking backwards all the time. It’s like, okay, this wasn’t right. We’re going to get it right, so at least you’ve kind of momentum forwards. And that’s what, again, I like about your vision as a founder, is, you know, you accept you’re going to have challenges along the way, you’re going to have setbacks, you’re going to have issues. It could be anything related, but being focused to the core goal is the key. I’d like to ask about some of your previous experiences, because you were at Microsoft, startup you’ve mentioned, obviously insight there, you know, Barclays, you were you were there. And how have these experiences, if at all, helped you build Caseguru? 

Ivan Tryskyba 12:12 

Yeah. So the only interesting thing about my past experience is that they were very diverse. So like completely different industries, different, you know, mentalities of people who work there, and different cultures as well. So, yeah, I would say it did help, kind of broaden the world view in general, which helps to any business, and especially if you try to, if you try to create a business from scratch, it’s very helpful to know it under like it helps, it helps understand the target audience and also the like, how to position the messaging and how to Position the brand. Some more people would be engaged, yeah, despite we are still struggling with it, but I think it’s, it’s on the way. 

Rob Hanna 13:07 

It’s all a journey, isn’t it? And that’s what excites me about Caseguru, because I think there’s a legitimate need for this to help people get access. I think this really helps also the access to justice gap and so many other things with the technology and the utilization of AI as well. I want to use a quote that you’ve been quoted saying as the founder and CEO of Caseguru you previously shared someday is not a day of the week. So what’s your meaning behind that quote? 

Ivan Tryskyba 13:38 

So the meaning is that it’s cool to plan stuff, but it’s more important to do stuff. That’s the meaning, for example, like, if, like, for example, if you’re trying to do like, doing the day to day job is more important than planning day to day like, every what’s like, there should be a balance between planning and doing. For example, what I do usually is, in the morning, I decide like this the whole day, and then I do it. Do it like I make sure that I do what I planned, uh, before starting to plan again. 

Rob Hanna 14:16 

Action is everything, isn’t it? You know, ideas are great, but actually acting on those ideas and trying to create things. You know, someone said to me, I’d rather have, you know, imperfect action over perfect inaction. Ie like you’re saying, you know, take steps to make things better, and don’t just sort of procrastinate or just have an idea and then not move forward and talking of moving forward. You know, Caseguru is picking up market recognition regularly at the moment, and you were recently accepted on the law tech UK, recognizing your efforts to improve access to justice and make it easy for people to find and work with solicitors, which is great. What does it mean for Caseguru and you as the founder for being part of law tech UK, and what are the advantage of that as well? Yeah. Yeah, 

Ivan Tryskyba 15:00 

I think like UK, like deeply wants to see B to C startups in legal space, because they have the tone of B to B, and very few B to C who actually try to make, you know, the life of of the people, of the clients, easier. And yeah, for Caseguru, what it gives us is the access to community that they have, the events they are, that, you know, basically making lawyers aware that we exist, that what this is the mission. This is what we try to achieve. We want to be the place that you know, when the it’s like, when the person would think, I need a lawyer, they will think, Caseguru. This is the mission. And so, you know, eventually it would be working like AI would help all things that you don’t really need the lawyer for, and then when you need a lawyer to just recommend you all the available lawyers in your area. And it would be super seamless for everyone.  

Rob Hanna 16:00 

And that’s important, isn’t it? Is the experience? You know, the user experience needs to be simple. It needs to be easy for people to kind of take mass adoption. Where does the name Caseguru come from? How did you come come about the name Caseguru? 

Ivan Tryskyba 16:13 

Yeah, I think we spent three days on choosing the logger and the name. Yeah. We were called legal insight. We were called justly. And then we saw Caseguru is like, I wanted to add it’s the actual idea was that in the so the AI, like the AI assistant on the platform would be like a can guru coming up, coming from the screen and saying, like, I’m AI and like, this is, he is with the case. It’s still on the, you know, it’s still on the way, but eventually the AI system in the platform will become guru, and then the Caseguru is obviously the reference to this.  

Rob Hanna 16:56 

Yeah, no, I like that. And again, I can see that and visualize that. And I like the branding, and I like the, you know, the website and the look and feel of what you’re you’re doing a very important point, particularly not just for your business, but lots of legal tech businesses, and any business actually is around data and ensuring you know you adhere to the latest accordance in GDPR, GDPR rather standards. So what steps do you take at Caseguru to protect user data and ensure privacy?  

Ivan Tryskyba 17:27 

Yes, so we, first of all, we have, like, a dedicated security advisor. He worked in very large tech businesses as a head of security, and he is ensuring that what we the back end that we built is, you know, is not leaking any data, and everything that we do is deployed in places which are secure and GDPR compliant. Um, yeah, I guess we also, when we use AI, we also try to choose providers that are publicly reliable, and they publish regularly about how they tune the models, how they align the models, how they are compliant, as opposed to the providers who are less known and less compliant.  

Rob Hanna 18:12 

Yeah, and maybe a simple question, but again, for people to fully understand, how is Caseguru different? So let’s say, for example, someone can go on to chat GPT and say, recommend Top 10 law firms in Bristol for family law. And it will probably bring up those 10. How is Caseguru different to a chat GPT or any other sort of AI out there that would recommend lawyers to them? 

Ivan Tryskyba 18:40 

When you when you list when you are looking for a lawyer in Caseguru, you list your case instead of so what happens is you are not recommended any lawyers, because when you recommend when is a person, you don’t know anything about law. And you you know you don’t you can, you don’t even have the reference to compare. And then you recommend with the lawyers, you then need to kind of, you know, you like, you don’t have even the ability to choose properly. There is a high chance you would make a mistake with choosing the wrong one on case. Guru, what we’ve done is you list your case and then only the relevant lawyers who are basically there’s like an AI matching algorithm in between that matches you only with the relevant lawyers, and then they read your summary and your case and contact you. So this makes them interested, by definition. So what’s important when the person looks for a lawyer anywhere else, they would usually get some lawyer that they deem to be appropriate, which in many cases, is not, is not the case. While on Caseguru, we will do everything to ensure that this particular one is has experiences in very similar cases and is actually relevant. 

Rob Hanna 19:58 

I know, I agree. I think in the article that from Caseguru as well, I think it was what is wrong with personal legal advice for the market, you state that only 7% of legal tech companies are trying to make client lives easier, and again, you’ve just talked to that brilliantly. Let’s talk a little bit more about the referral program. Because you know, you are an aspiring legal tech provider. You do have one designed which I think rewards individuals with 20% of revenue when they refer a friend. So can you tell us more about how the program actually works?  

Ivan Tryskyba 20:30 

Yeah. So let’s say a friend asks you to recommend the lawyer, for example, you can in your in your account, on his guru, you can copy the referral link, send it to them, and we will ensure they find the right lawyer using all this super technology that we’ve just described. And meanwhile, you will get 20, you know, you will get around 2% of the case value as a cashback. So effectively, you can even register an account, two accounts, and refer yourself and get the percent back as a like. You know, the nice bonus for using his guru, for recommending his guru to your friends?  

Rob Hanna 21:10 

Yeah, no, again, it’s just a nice stem way to kind of grow and also reward people and people who see your mission and vision as well. And I guess, what are you most proud of to date? You know, you’ve had a few accomplishments, and I’m sure many more to come. But what are you most proud of that Caseguru has achieved to date? 

Ivan Tryskyba 21:30 

We So, for example, all the people that we’ve helped so far, we didn’t take any profit, so we just helped them find a lawyer for free, because we think that we want to define the product and make it super useful. While these people actually some of them, like yesterday, for example, the person called me and like was so grateful that we helped them, you know, find the slur that they were looking for for a very long time. This is the achievement that I really enjoy, plus all the good comments that we hear from the lawyers saying that Rai is cool, the way, this way of doing business development is the future, and all the other very last things that we hear from the lawyers who signed up to us, yeah. 

Rob Hanna 22:17 

And then let’s talk about sort of continuously improving as well. And the future of Caseguru, because I know you have big plans for this, but what future developments can we look forward from seeing from Caseguru, yeah.  

Ivan Tryskyba 22:30 

So what we want to do is like, bet heavy on AI, obviously. And we want to make this useful both ways. So for example, we plan to do when the person posts the case, we would give them an estimate of how much it costs, automatically it would cost, like a range. And then when the case is listed, we would show a win probability for the lawyer, or just the probability of success for the case. We would also, maybe also want to integrate some sort of like AI research tool that were given the case summary would allow lawyers to see relevant case law, relevant legislation to the case with just one click of the button. And other very useful tools that would help you know just just would accelerate this process of initial engagement with the client and then further research on the case, just delivery of legal services, basically. And on the client side, the process of, you know when, when we provide so much useful feature to the lawyers, they are more happy using our platform, and it would directly be reflected on how they perform the work for the client on our platform. So they would also benefit?  

Rob Hanna 23:41 

Yeah, no, I love that. And it’s very focused around, like you say, helping people, helping lawyers with really kind of important information, but just making it easy to use, easy to understand. And like you say, really kind of make it the marketplace where people want to go. And I guess that leads nicely onto my next question is, you know, in the years to come. What legacy do you envision for Caseguru? 

Ivan Tryskyba 24:03 

Yeah, I think the most the coolest thing would be have 1000s of people who say, Yeah, we the my life would be would be different without Caseguru, my family would be different. Because, you know, if we didn’t find a lawyer, this lawyer, specific lawyer, who helped us resolve, settle or something my employer would not pay me for unfairly dismissing me, or something my company would not be protected, as well as it is now in terms of like compliance contracts, like my suppliers would, you know, scam me or something, if not, I found, if I, you know, If not the lawyer that I found on Caseguru, this is the kind of and then obviously making it, you know, known all around the UK that, yeah, this is the trusted place where you can find great legal help. And for the lawyers, that this is a place where you can these people who are actually looking for for lawyers. And. Are, you know, they have a clear intent of hiring one. Are there? 

Rob Hanna 25:04 

Yeah, I love that, because it’s all about coming from a place of, you know, really wanting to improve people’s lives. And, you know, be known for that, that you were technology for good, and that’s something that we’re very proud of, kind of, you know, giving people a light and a platform here on the show to to discuss Ivan, it’s been great, kind of learning more about your journey and Caseguru. And it’s a pleasure to be part of this initiative and to help it grow and no doubt become that marketplace. I have no doubt. Just one final question, what advice do you have for those who are interested in legal, tech and AI or potentially thinking about starting their own ventures? 

Ivan Tryskyba 25:40 

So I’d say it’s very it’s, it is not as hard as it seems, to learn to actually build a software. So if there are people who are coming from, for example, I meet sometimes lawyers who see the potential to automate some things in their work, trying to then, you know, quit the job and create a business, like a legal tech business, for example, they are usually, like, scared of like, they don’t, don’t understand where to start in terms of tech, yeah, what I would say is it’s, it’s very easy to find great tutorials on YouTube, online, to learn basics, And then to be it doesn’t take, it’s very difficult in the beginning to kind of grasp all these concepts, but it becomes a lot easier after just a couple of weeks of actually learning. That’s what I would say to the to the people who are because I meet a lot of people who want to create legal texts, but they are not texts savvy, let’s say, and they are just not starting because they feel like they are not able to, like, you know, build, like a tech, a useful tech product. Meanwhile, it’s not actually the case. It’s much easier than it seems.  

Rob Hanna 26:54 

Yeah, and again, that’s a really practical tip, isn’t it? And I think you know, you can see things and get overwhelmed, but like you say, take that action, go and watch some YouTube videos. Maybe get a mentor, maybe reach out to somebody like you, and you know, take steps to then actually implement something. That’s what we’re looking for here. Ivan, as I said, it’s been great having you on. If our listeners would like to learn more about your career, or indeed, Caseguru, where can they go to find out more? Feel free to shout out any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also make sure we share them with this episode for you too.  

Ivan Tryskyba 27:26 

Yeah. So there are very nice demo videos on Caseguru dot app, so Caseguru.app, where they can so that people can see how the platform works, how to navigate it in just like a one minute video, and the lawyers can do the same. And obviously my personal LinkedIn, I’m super open and super actually interested to talking to anyone who is looking for a lawyer, or who is lawyer, who is a lawyer looking for to develop, to grow their practice, just to hear what problems they face and what kind of solutions they will want.  

Rob Hanna 27:59 

Well, there we have it, folks. Ivan, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, wishing you and all the team at Caseguru, lots of continued success, but from now, from all of us on the legally speaking podcast, over and out.