Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

In this Best of 2024 episode, we revisit our conversation with Scott and Digby Leigh, founders of AltFee—a legal tech startup tackling one of the industry’s biggest challenges: the billable hour.

Despite decades of debate, the billable hour still dominates legal billing. Enter AltFee. The app helps legal professionals scope, price, and manage projects using alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), offering clients more transparency and value.

Scott and Digby highlight why AFAs matter now more than ever: as AI reduces time spent on tasks, value-based pricing will become essential. AltFee provides a foundation for law firms to shift away from time-based billing, encouraging lawyers to focus on the actual value of their services—not just the clock. From scoping projects to auditing fees, this conversation explores the future of legal pricing and how AFAs can reshape client relationships for the better.

If you’re curious about innovation in legal tech, or if you’re tired of the constraints of hourly billing, this episode is a must-listen.

Episode Credits

Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock

Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI

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Brandon Wiebe, General Counsel and Head of Privacy at Transcend, offers tips about implementing data governance frameworks and how to utilize software in the process. Brandon’s company is a privacy platform that helps legal and compliance teams automate data compliance tasks.

Brandon explains that most data privacy laws, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and U.S. state laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), generally require similar things of companies:

• notice at the time of customer data collection
• implementation of data security obligations
• that companies have a lawful basis for collecting information and that use of the information is consistent with the companies stated purpose for collecting it
• individuals have the right to opt out of data sale or sharing.

Despite the many data privacy laws already enacted and new ones on the horizon, Brandon is quick to emphasize that data privacy teams should not let perfect be the enemy of good. They must get started somewhere in their data privacy policy journey.

He says the best place to start is an organizational data map detailing all the places in a company’s tech stack holding data subject to privacy regulations. Once a company has its data mapped, it can more easily comply with customer requests for information as permitted under data privacy laws and can also ensure it is not keeping more data than needed.

Brandon also touches on why AI can complicate data privacy efforts, but also notes that artificial intelligence can also assist with data privacy efforts.

Vivek Rao, talks about his path from workers compensation attorney to co-founder and CEO of Foundation AI, an app that automates the manual process of collecting, categorizing and filing documents and unstructured data. The software is used by law firms and insurance companies and utilizes a combination of artificial intelligence, optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision to process incoming documents and email by type, time-sensitivity, and matter or claim.

Vivek, a native of Los Angeles, figured he would get into entertainment law, but ended up as a lawyer working in real estate and finance.

Later on, he started helping a workers compensation firm handle case files. In that role, he saw an opportunity to use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to automate the manual work of processing and filing the thousands of documents his firm received every week.

After the acquisition of a medical AI company he represented as corporate counsel, Vivek started wondering if a similar technology could be employed in the legal and insurance industries and after some ideation, Foundation AI was born.

Chad Sakonchick is a serial entrepreneur.

After a stint selling computers for Dell, he launched his first technology company: an early SaaS platform that allowed users to easily create websites.

From there, he launched an app that took online orders for food truck owners and then he launched Spacesift, which he describes as Airbnb for event spaces.

Spacesift did fine, but he didn’t find startup traction until a few years ago when he convinced a lawyer buddy to let him automate the creation of LLC documents.

Using automation apps like Zapier, project management software like Asana and online form apps like Webmerge, Chad built the automation and his friend loved it.

It worked so well, the two decided to launch BetterLegal and while they have graduated to a more sophisticated backend, as we will hear, they are still building the company on a low/no-code philosophy using platforms like Bubble.

After hearing Chad’s backstory, you would think he most certainly would end up pursuing a career in law. While in college at the University of Texas he worked as a paralegal at his dad’s law firm. After that, he landed a job with an early legal tech company that digitized deposition transcripts. But alas, his heart was not in pursuing a career as a lawyer. His passion is entrepreneurship.

Erik Bermudez, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for legal practice management software Filevine, visits the podcast to discuss the importance of having an internal champion to drive software adoption within an organization, as well as ongoing training and metrics tracking to ensure the software is being used effectively.

Erik also emphasizes that successful implementation of new technology requires top management’s understanding of the problem and pain points that the software is solving. Without buy in from the top, the odds are stacked against successful adoption.