Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ

01/03/22 • 33 min

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Legal Q (www.legalq.io). As LegalQ describes its offering on its website, “Searching [for an attorney] online feels overwhelming. Referrals from friends and family leading to dead ends. Often the only way to get legal help is by talking to an attorney. Use the LegalQ app to get help today [and] a licensed attorney will help you [to]: Know your options and legal rights, Avoid common legal pitfalls and mistakes, [and] Get personalized guidance for unique legal issues.”

After talking about Zeb’s professional background and LegalQ’s product, Charlie’s discussion with Zeb digs deeply into:

Given the need to reach customers in mass, “retail-like,” markets, LegalQ’s go-to-market and marketing strategies (and, more particularly, how those strategies entail Google searches, Facebook ads and, more generally, search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization strategies)
The iterative process that LegalQ uses refine its app design, improve its customer onboarding and, most interestingly, revise its core revenue model (well after LegalQ’s initial launch) in light of market reactions to its initial business model approach
LegalQ’s use of analytical tools to understand the most cost-effective ways to lower customer acquisition costs
The importance for LegalQ of making a great senior marketing hire
LegalQ’s ambitious (and access-to-justice driven) mission statement (a mission attributable, at least in part, to LegalQ’s participation in the TechStars program).

Episode 38 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast — Interview with Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ

After talking about Zeb’s professional background and LegalQ’s product, Charlie’s discussion with Zeb digs deeply into:

Given the need to reach customers in mass, “retail-like,” markets, LegalQ’s go-to-market and marketing strategies (and, more particularly, how those strategies entail Google searches, Facebook ads and, more generally, search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization strategies)
The iterative process that LegalQ uses refine its app design, improve its customer onboarding and, most interestingly, revise its core revenue model (well after LegalQ’s initial launch) in light of market reactions to its initial business model approach
LegalQ’s use of analytical tools to understand the most cost-effective ways to lower customer acquisition costs
The importance for LegalQ of making a great senior marketing hire
LegalQ’s ambitious (and access-to-justice driven) mission statement (a mission attributable, at least in part, to LegalQ’s participation in the TechStars program).

Previous Episode

Episode 37 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An Interview with Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Mat Rotenberg, founder and CEO of Dashboard Legal. On its website (www.dashboardlegal.com), Dashboard Legal writes of its value proposition: "Tired of switching between email threads, apps and workarounds? Dashboard Legal lets you and your team work right from your inbox - by transforming it into a unified workspace for all the materials related to a case or transaction."

Mat and Charlie talk about the following topics during this episode:

How Mat's experience working as a law firm deal lawyer led him to build a suite of tools that creates an "inbox-first" universal view of a deal or litigation that helps to solve the organizational and collaboration roadblocks that Mat confronted when he practiced law,
What Dashboard Legal does to systematize legal matter workflows and encourage lawyer-to-lawyer collaboration, while at the same time allowing its users to continue using software that they've long used as part of their day-to-day work (e.g., such as word processing and email apps like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook),
The growing importance of collaboration among legal professionals and the benefits that such collaboration offers those professionals (not least of which is the improvement of one's "lifestyle" at work), and
What approaches Dashboard Legal has taken to market its offering (including participation in partner-channels such as Reynen Court and Jameson Legal Tech) and how important a part the building of relationships with customers plays in Dashboard Legal's marketing.

Next Episode

Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast - An Interview with Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of TrialView

In this episode of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), podcast host Charlie Uniman interviews Stephen Dowling, founder and CEO of Dublin, Ireland-based Trialview. As TrialView puts it on its website (www.trialview.com}: "Quickly and easily digitise the trial process and save time, effort and money. . . . [Moreover,] TrialView’s unique synchronising technology enables document led hearings to be conducted remotely."

We learn from Stephen how his founding of TrialView began, as is the case with many other legal tech startup founders, with frustrations he faced while practicing law. Stephen explains that, as a junior trial lawyer working on long-running litigations, he wondered why his and his colleagues' wrangling with many thousands of documents couldn't be handled better with the introduction of digital technologies. As Stephen's developed his thinking about the "digitization of trial work," he came to realize that it it went beyond just the digitizing document review (a step that was already being addressed by e-discovery companies). As Stephen came to see it, digitization tools could also be applied to the task of coordinating, in real time at trial: (i) the presentation of trial documents and (ii) the collaboration among the parties to the litigation in dealing with those documents and their presentation in court.

Stephen goes on to discuss, among other topics:

(A) How TrialView went from its first, very minimum viable, product to the initial funding round for the company and the company's development of a fully-featured trial management tool.

(B) The way in which the COVID pandemic accelerated TrialView's development of video features in support of trials and other dispute resolution mechanisms that were required to be conducted on a fully-remote basis.

(C) Stephen's belief that, even post-pandemic, we will witness a hybrid approach to conducting trials, mediations and arbitrations (where much of what was formerly done in-person will be carried out remotely, but with a core set of dispute elements more frequently than not being handled in-person).

(D) What marketing approaches TrialView has taken successfully, especially in the face of getting both judges and frequently litigating parties (such as insurance companies) "on board" with TrialView's use (with Stephen also pointing out here how TrialView has partnered with companies that handle trial-related tasks outside of TrialView's purview to call attention to TrialView's offering) .

(E) TrialView's penetration of markets outside Ireland and the UK, including especially its targeting of the deposition-taking market in the US

(F) How Stephen and his TrialView colleagues are most proud of the role TrialView played in keeping Irish courts functioning at the outset of the COVID pandemic.