Ep 030 Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala

05/26/21 • 32 min

Episode 30 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Raj Goyle, the co-founder and CEO of Bodhala (www.bodhala.com). Bodhala assists in-house legal departments in managing their outside counsel spend and describes itself on its website as follows: "Bodhala’s mission is to create a transparent market for legal services. Using data to illuminate price discovery, we can drive competition and innovation not just for buyers of legal services, but for the entire industry."

Raj begins the podcast by talking about his professional journey to legal tech. After college and law school, Raj worked in the non-profit sector and on public interest and civil rights law matters, entered politics after winning election to the Kansas State House of Representatives and served as the director of a family investment office. Listeners will hear from Raj about how it was his work in public interest law and the public sector (and not - as one might have expected - any prior work in a commercial law practice) that motivated him to strive for efficiency in the delivery of legal services and, at Bodhala, to help in-house legal departments monitor and control their law firm legal-spend

Raj next describes what differentiates Bodhala from other legal tech companies in the spend management space (hint: offering data cleansing and data organization to its customers, together with up-to-date "what's market" information about legal-spend). In this segment of the podcast, Raj pulls no punches in explaining what it is about much of private law firm practice and the self-regulation of the legal industry that incentivizes behavior that, in turn, makes spend management such a pressing issue for so many law firm clients.

Charlie and Raj close this episode with a discussion of legal tech startups' increasing success in fundraising from institutional investors. Here Raj observes a surge in interest in investing in the legal tech vertical on the part of not only venture capital firms, but also private equity firms.

Episode 30 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- Interview with Raj Goyle, co-founder and CEO of Bodhala

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Ep 029 Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software

Episode 29 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Marc Doucette, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Koho Software. Koho is a value added reseller (VAR) of contract lifecycle management software that describes its mission as ". . . mak[ing] the contracting processes faster, more collaborative, and more secure . . . by providing a solution that’s built around [a customer's] specific processes and [that] scales with [that customer's] organization."

During the podcast, Charlie and Marc discuss the following:

Marc's professional background; including, of course, how he and his team took Koho from providing help desk services to its customers to the legal tech vertical where it operates today

What it means for Koho to act as a VAR in the contract lifecycle management space, and how it offers its principal customers (namely, in-house legal departments worldwide and of various sizes) not only an explanation of what contract lifecycle management's business case is and assistance in assessing the need for such software in the case of a particular in-house department's operations, but also advice in choosing the right contract lifecycle software and, once chosen, implementing that software and providing software support services to get (and keep) the software running

Insights into how Koho markets its services to potential customers around the world.

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Ep 031 Interview with Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean

Episode 31 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - Interview with Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Michael Levy, Solutions Architect at Tonkean (www.tonkean.com). Tonkean describes itself on its website as a set of no-code software tools that enables business people (including, of course, lawyers and allied legal professionals) to “Automate complex business processes, fast.”

Michael begins the podcast by describing how he arrived at Tonkean. Michael’s journey saw him begin his career as a software engineer. From that role Michael moved on to more customer-facing roles, involving product management and software deployment. Michael next spent several years as a member of Google’s legal operations team.

At Google, Michael became a Tonkean customer himself when he became central to the roll-out of Tonkean software to Google’s legal ops team members and others at Google. (At this juncture, Charlie and Michael talk about the increasingly important role that legal operations is coming to play at in-house legal departments worldwide.) Now at Tonkean, Michael helps to bring Tonkean’s process automation software to law firms and in-house legal departments.

Michael next describes just what Tonkean’s software does, with an emphasis (not surprisingly) on how Tonkean’s process automation software applies to work carried out by in-house legal departments and law firms. Essentially, Tonkean’s web-based tools gives non-coders the opportunity to use intuitive drag-and-drop functionality to build workflows. These workflows, in turn, permit data of many different kinds to move among the pieces of software that lawyers and allied legal professionals are already familiar with.

By way of just a couple of examples, legal ops team members, paralegals and lawyers — who, being subject matter experts when it comes to matters like conflict waivers and client intake procedures — can automate (without needing any coding skills) start-to-finish conflict-waiver workflows or client intake workflows. And, as Michael points our later in the podcast, with Tonkean’s not requiring coding and involving only software with which a lawyer and his or her law firm or legal department colleagues are already familiar, there’s little, if any, change management effort necessary to encourage that use.

Charlie asks Michael what it’s like to be marketing and selling to law firms and legal departments out of a company like Tonkean that isn’t devoted exclusively to the legal tech vertical. In answering, Michael notes that Tonkean’s software is aimed at any business person who needs to funnel data through a workflow quickly and efficiently and that the business person in question can certainly be a lawyer. That said, Michael goes on to explain that Tonkean does make a strong effort to be involved with “legal,” including having a membership in CLOC (the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and having a section dedicated to legal operations in its online learning center.