Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
The Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast covers the startups that develop and sell legal tech products and services. Through interviews with legal tech startup founders, investors, customers and others with an interest in this startup sector, the podcast's host, Charlie Uniman, and his guests will discuss such topics as startup management and startup life, startup investing, marketing and sales, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how customers purchase legal tech. In short, the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast will focus on just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.
Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
Paralegals, Plus Robots: Finch Legal's Recipe for PI Success
What if personal injury attorneys could say "yes" to every promising case that came through their door? That's the problem Finch Legal (https://www.finchlegal.com) is solving with a groundbreaking approach that combines human expertise with AI-powered automation.
In this conversation with founders Viraj Bindra and Ben Weems, we explore how Finch Legal transforms the pre-litigation process for personal injury attorneys. After embedding themselves with law firms to understand operational pain points, these founders built a solution that handles everything from client intake to demand letter preparation, allowing attorneys to focus exclusively on what they do best.
The magic behind Finch Legal's model isn't just clever AI—it's the thoughtful integration of experienced US-based paralegals working alongside AI agents that automate the most repetitive aspects of case management. This human-AI collaboration ensures clients receive empathetic service while mundane tasks like requesting medical records, opening insurance claims, and drafting documents happen efficiently in the background.
What makes this conversation particularly timely is Finch Legal's recent $3.75 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital, validating their approach in an increasingly competitive legal tech landscape.
For attorneys struggling with capacity constraints or legal tech entrepreneurs navigating the fundraising landscape, this episode offers both practical wisdom and inspiring vision about the future of legal practice. The founders paint a compelling picture of how thoughtful technology implementation can expand access to legal services while improving outcomes for both attorneys and clients.
Hello everyone, this is Charlie Uniman, your podcast host at the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast. I'm very, very happy to be able to introduce two legal tech startup leaders, one of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting for coffee a few months ago and who also had a successful raise recently, and those two are Viraj Bindra and Ben Weems of Finch Legal Guys. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having us, charlie, excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Great to have you, as we often do with guests who are startup leaders on the pod. I'm going to ask each of Ben and Viraj to talk a little bit about how they got into our beloved Vertical Legal Tech, and then we'll go on to talk about Finch Legal, their company. So we'll flip a coin, ben, why don't you start? You didn't see the coin flip, but you got heads. Heads came up, so, ben, you can start, and then we'll have Raj talk about the so-called quote-unquote journey to legal tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks, charlie, definitely a big fan of your work. Really have enjoyed our chats and the LTSF community and posts, so thanks for having us on. In terms of my path to legal tech, my background Brad and I we met at Stanford about 13 years ago in a dorm room and I've been really close ever since. I went out and worked at Google and have also worked at a couple of startups not in the legal space, but what really pulled me into legal is actually just through a mutual connection. So, just by chance, I was connected with a law firm in New York where I actually started to do some technical consulting for them. So any matters that came across their desk that were technical in nature I would help out with, that were technical in nature I would help out with.
Speaker 3:And this was kind of a you know, especially with a background in AI. This exposed me, I would say, to the academic interest in wow, the way that work happens here, the way that work happens in this industry, is going to be completely different in less than five years, and so that's what kind of sparked that initial interest. And Baraj and I actually have a mutual friend and we went and were talking with him and he's a personal injury attorney based out of Texas, ryan Hecht and we were hearing about his pain points and hearing about how he could grow his business and he was talking about potentially bringing on a paralegal. And this probably would have been about six figures in the first year between hiring, training, benefits, salary, of course, office space, and this was the moment of opportunity. So at this point there was this academic interest blended with this opportunity.
Speaker 3:But to really start to feel it emotionally and really feel invested to go on this journey, a major turning point for us for both of us is that we actually went and embedded with a law firm in the LA area. So this was really, you know, sitting with the team building prototypes. Viraj has a design and product background, I have an engineering background, and so we were able to really quickly, you know, sit there and start prototyping with them. And this was where we I built a deep emotional connection with the problem and really started to empathize with the firms and the problems that they were facing and saw the opportunity to really make a difference both in these firms' ability to run their practice as well as their actual ability to get better outcomes for their clients and to really like assist these people in need, and so that was when at least for me, that was a big turning point, when I decided it was time to jump in headfirst and start this business.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a good time to be in legal tech, what with all the AI excitement and the boost. What with all the AI excitement and the boost sadly because of the COVID pandemic that LegalTech got when people had to work from home. So you're stepping into the field. The vertical is quite timely and good timing is, I'd say, 50% of the game. Viraj, how about you? Anything you want to add? I guess we covered your having joined Ben as an embed at the firm, but what else got you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll just mirror Great time to start a LegalTech podcast as well. So kudos to you on the timing. But what I? I'll say that I was a little wary about legal tech, to be honest, and I think like when you look back at the history of like big public companies started in the last 40 years, it's really scarce to see great legal tech examples maybe the tops of Reuters, but like very few. And I think I was apprehensive of a world where, in my mind, almost every attorney billed hourly. This was true for me a year ago, and the idea of trying to pitch software to someone that will save them time, when, like time is the way they make money, was challenging, and so I I wouldn't say that I started with a stomach for it, wouldn't say that I started with a stomach for it. I think that, to add on to what? So?
Speaker 2:My background before Fitch was that I spent about eight years at DoorDash, which hopefully maybe many folks who are listening have used, if you haven't. It's a food delivery service. It's kind of what the market share war against Uber, eats and Postmates, but when I started, it was tidy and only in a couple of cities. It was based out of Palo Alto and it was only in a couple of cities at the time. And I think when I, when Tony, who's the founder of DoorDash, had talked about founding it, he talked about walking to a restaurant that was getting their. Their phone was ringing with delivery orders, and maybe two to three a day, so not a huge number but these were customers who were hoping to order their food for delivery and restaurateurs were having to say, unfortunately, no, sorry, we don't have a full time delivery person and so we're not able to take that on. And he built. His ethos was how do I help you say yes to this revenue that you're saying no to today and after eight years of building for not only restaurants but liquor stores, convenience stores, pharmacies, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I have this like deep empathy for an entrepreneur who's amazing at a certain craft and isn't necessarily fully set up to execute on every single part of their business outside of that craft. And that's kind of what a restaurateur is when they're like thinking about delivery and how do they do logistics and operations. Well, that could be a challenge sometimes. So the spark for me when Ben kind of referenced this talk to our friend Ryan Hecht, was when he talked about the cases he wasn't able to keep taking he's very good at. He's an excellent litigator and he is incredibly good at building connection with people, whether that's clients or other attorneys, and so through both connection with clients and through getting referred cases, hit his kind of like 50, 60 cases very quickly in his first 30 days.
Speaker 2:But that to him was his capacity where he then had to kind of slow down his operations in terms of bringing in new cases and I saw the same glimmer, if you squint at least to the delivery problem, which is I wish I had the staffing or the capability or the operations to be able to say yes to more of these cases because he wasn't bottlenecked on litigation.
Speaker 2:He was bottlenecked on his ability to kind of run pre-litigation or this kind of busy procedural work, the admin work that goes into the first six to 12 months of a case in PI and that, coupled with learning about the contingency model and how it worked, which is great in a bunch of ways.
Speaker 2:It's great in a client who is lower income can still get legal help more easily than they can in a field that doesn't have a contingency model, legal help more easily than they can in a field that doesn't have a contingency model but the flip side of it is he wasn't going to have the cash on hand to afford bringing on paralegals or additional support staff until kind of a year or two down the line Felt like there's an opportunity that we could probably build something that adds a lot of value to him and helps him say yes to more of those cases now. So that was my big spark and moment of getting excited was visualizing the opportunity. That felt a lot like someone who was an expert at their craft, who's tried to say yes to more cases and help more people and serve more customers or clients in this case, who's kind of bottlenecked and we could help them.
Speaker 1:Well, at least from my standpoint, it didn't take too much squinting to get the similarity.
Speaker 3:I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:No, I get it and I'm sure our listeners do too. We could spend a whole other podcast talking about the US that have a different business revenue model, call it what you will where it's vitally important to be able to shave time off handling matters and, in doing so, not believe that you're shooting off your foot at the same time by depriving yourself of the wonderful beloved billable hour, of the wonderful beloved billable hour. So yeah, personal injury and and and adjacent, adjacent kinds of most often, litigation practices are great for that, but we're not going to do that billable hour podcast right now. We're going to continue with Finch. So what?
Speaker 2:what now? Bring us back in a year and we'll we'll debate that. That'll be a fun one. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And then we'll debate the entire reengineering of even big laws business model. That will happen within 10 years and I'm being conservative there, but let's go on to Finch. So, okay, you embedded. That's interesting. I found that fascinating that here you were two people who were not lawyers, embedded with lawyers with the intent of seeing what you could make out of it from a startup making founding standpoint, one with an engineering background, one with a product background as well. You know that that that which which, yeah, I'll just.
Speaker 2:I'll just say on this it it takes a healthy mix of both hubris and humility to do that, and I think we had a little bit of both, which is the you know there's there's an advantage to a beginner mindset in any industry in space, but there's also a humility that came from we don't know this space well enough to go just invent a product that'll be successful. So we need to like deeply, deeply understand, as Ben kind of alluded to. So, yeah, I would call it a healthy balance.
Speaker 1:Well, and I'll riff on that and then promise to get to Finch. And that is, if you had I don't know whether you had a big law law firm or not, but I've spent my years of practice in big law all too often and I hated this. If you weren't a lawyer you really didn't count, and then that was so damn foolish. You could be exceptionally bright at whatever non-lawyering activity you engaged in, but you really didn't count. I hope you didn't run into any or much of that at all. But let's talk about Finch. What does Finch do? I'll steal your thunder a little bit. I guess it is focused on the personal injury side of practice, at least for now. But what does it do? What kind of features and functionality does it offer?
Speaker 2:So maybe I'll take the first step better than you fill in some of the tech gaps. Does that sound good? Excellent, yeah, so Finch for firms like Ryan's is an end-to-end pre-litigation platform. That sounds meaty. It basically means we do three things. We help him with intake, so that he's not the one who's on the phone qualifying every single lead that calls in the door. Is that he's not the one who's on the phone qualifying every single lead that calls in the door. We help him with case management, which is going to be working with insurance providers. It's going to be working with medical providers. It's going to be working with police stations and other kind of investigation sources across the country to get records in and out, and it is checking in with clients during treatment and then ending on the third piece, a demand letter, and so intake through demand is kind of the suite of products we offer.
Speaker 2:What this should look like is someone like Ryan, who is excellent at litigation, excellent at bringing cases to the door, should, with very minimal supervision, be able to scale his practice and say yes to infinite cases, and so we'll peek below the hood. But the way we make this work affordably for someone like Ryan at scale is. It's a combination of great case staff that's really experienced and US-based, along with AI agents that help augment in the areas of this case cycle that are the most automatable without sacrificing quality. So to shed a little light on that and then hand off to Ben, this is human paralegals helping with intake and client communication throughout, and all of the case manager functions to third parties is where we get leverage from the tech to help us request and receive medical records and bills without human intervention, to help us open claims without human intervention, to help us be able to request police reports without that as well, and to eventually take a first step of a demand such that end-to-end we're able to.
Speaker 2:I think today for a lot of firms, your options are either I have to hire a full-time person, and that's a lot of the work of hiring, training, management, or I think about offshoring, and there's this trust gap with that where I still end up needing to do a lot of work, to monitor, to give feedback, to give the right instructions, to get the output I want. We envisioned this version of experts in their field of case management plus AI. That leads to a very cost-effective and accessible version of your pre-litigation just kind of runs by itself.
Speaker 1:Gotcha and pre-litigation, as I heard you describe it. I was not a litigator, I was a corporate lawyer, but again, I think what you're saying is tell me if I'm right or wrong. Is what you're involved in and with is everything before you're, even as a lawyer, writing what I'll call litigation documents for delivery to the other side A complaint or a brief. Yeah, a brief, okay, all right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe this is a helpful level set is 95% of cases in personal injury will settle at some point. The majority of those settle in pre-litigation. Most often you're working with insurance providers to send them like. The final artifact will be a demand letter which outlines incident details, damages, liability, has these real-world proxies for it, which are the medical records and police report, for example, and so that process is done, even in the cases that eventually get filed and go to litigation. But we are kind of helping with that. First call it six to 12 months of that journey before that handoff point.
Speaker 1:Gotcha Wonderful. Well, I'm certain sharp listening listeners are saying wait a minute. I thought I heard them talk about paralegals and case managers. Where do they fit in? Who's paralegals, who's case managers? That's a loaded question. I know the answer, but I'm going to let these two fellas take it from there.
Speaker 2:Dad, do you want to take this one?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, it's something that differentiates us from a bunch of other folks on the market, which is that we actually employ our own case managers and paralegals, and that's rooted in, honestly, a belief that this is the human first business, right? Somebody's just been through potentially a life-altering event and they want to get on the phone and talk with a person who can understand them, who can build that trust, build that empathy, and so we actually, as part of, you know, owning the N10 client journey for these attorneys, we have a person that'll get on the phone, that will connect with them on a personal level, and that's something that attorneys really, really value. They value the customer service. A lot of their business comes through referrals, and when we're hiring these people, we really focus on their ability to connect with clients.
Speaker 3:What a client probably cares less about is that that person, after they hang up the phone, goes and sits on hold for 45 minutes with the insurance provider or gets, you know, bounced around different departments, and that's where we're actually able to add a lot of efficiency with things like voice agents.
Speaker 3:They don't care that that person goes into the CMS and spends 45 minutes entering the data.
Speaker 3:That's another solution that we're able to provide by extracting the details from that call and making sure that everything stays up to date, because today, honestly, it just doesn't is really the outcome, and so you end up with a lot of blind spots where you're losing information along the way, and so that's basically the philosophy of what we're doing here For everything that's in the front office, for everything that's client-facing, everything that's attorney-facing reports getting treatment records, medical records, drafting medical chronologies and then finally drafting this demand. Which is where you're seeing a lot of energy in this space today with a lot of other companies, is on that final demand draft. And because we actually own that process end to end, because we were the first people to say say hello, how are you to the client? We actually have the richest set of information when it's time to actually go craft that demand and help that claims adjuster, kind of build a personal connection with the client, because we, as Finch, really deeply understand that client and are able to put together a differentiated demand based on that.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, you've been able to persuade the lawyer in the picture that the people that you're offering to do these services, the real human people, are vetted and capable and experienced. That's great, I mean, if you can eliminate that worry and you would have to in order for the model that you've just described to work. Once you get over that hump, the lawyer can breathe more easily and devote his or herself to the stuff that you know the license to practice law really demands of skilled lawyers, and that's, you know, negotiating the settlement or, if it comes to it, litigating the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and to be clear on this, it's not a like blindly trust us that we'll find the right person. There's a little bit of a matching process here and I would say that the folks were able to hire, really like stand out on their own. So when you're, when you are hiring someone, you are meeting them and you are vetting them and you are making sure that you feel really good about them and you are. So it's not a block Like.
Speaker 2:This is maybe where the squinting of like compare this space to Doorordash falls apart is, uh, when largely the act of delivering a food for a to b is something that's commoditized enough that we at doordash would pull the closest available driver.
Speaker 2:The best driver was the one who was nearest to the restaurant because it would deliver the food the fastest, sure, uh, that is different here, where the the best person for the job when it comes to like working with your clients is the one who builds kind of a playbook and trust with you and represents your firm really well.
Speaker 2:And that only happens when you have some immediate bar of trust in them as a person, that is, a professional, but also when they get to kind of deeply embed and spend time with your firm, and so we will make those introductions. Generally, we're very successful because we're pulling folks in case management staff who have done this for a bunch of years and are highly, highly qualified. But they will also spend their first 60 days really writing the playbook of how your firm runs with you. And so for a lot of these firms, we have to earn the trust of working with them, and so we don't take it for granted that they're definitely going to love the person out of box that we happen to pick. We take it as an exercise in building that trust over that 60 days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great trust building exercise having them help. Author that playbook. So you've got customers, you're in the market, Am I correct? You're not in beta. You're out there. Good yeah that happened this month.
Speaker 2:So you know it's a fun time to be us, where we're finally going to take the thing we built with 20 firms and kind of a closed beta and go talk to firms across the country about it. So I'm in Atlanta right now. Ben was in San Diego last week, but we're out there.
Speaker 1:Good, good. So one aspect of this that I'm going to comment on and ask for your reaction to, and then we'll be a neat segue, I think, into the next topic, and that's your recent raise. You know, I've never been an investor, I've been a startup founder, but we never raised. But it's always been said to me. You know, the services side of business is low margin. The software, saas side is high margin. Some investors want to play in one sandbox, recognizing what its finances are all about, and the other set of investors want to play in the other sandbox. So you've managed to combine the two. And now the big reveal you have recently closed a $3.75 million round led by drumroll Sequoia, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and some other good investors. Did you have a lot of difficulty selling them on this combined model of services and SaaS, or did they get it right away?
Speaker 2:And so they did get it right away. But I'll give you this framework that maybe takes it out of. You know, we definitely had the right idea and we nailed the best investors in all the land to believe in. It is when you're investing early and I'm going to put on my if I was an investor hat right now I think you are betting on is this a team that I trust and think is really thoughtful about the space? Is the space something I want to be involved in, and do they have a unique take on the space? Not necessarily, it's the take that I'm 100% sure will pan out in five years. So this will be the dose of humility. I think that the framework for Sequoia, or any of the other great firms we happen to talk to that in making a decision, was seeing founder market fit for this space. So I think there's a belief of. I'll give you two answers to this question. One is what is the world where we are right? This is the right way to tackle this, especially with some of the trade-offs to an operational business that you mentioned. And then the second is why would this be the right team for it? And so putting myself in that, in those shoes, the.
Speaker 2:I think Ben and I were both expecting, as we were talking to our first set of attorneys in the space, that the way that Ryan reacted would be the way everyone might to the idea of, oh, there's a that could help me, and Ryan is young and very tech forward, and that's not always true. I think that we've met a swath of people who view this space very differently and, as much as there might be AI excitement in plaintiff law, there's also a healthy amount of AI skepticism or even some fatigue. There's a sentiment of I might have tried two or three or four of these tools because they seem promising and because the incentives align is the way we talked about earlier. But they all have these limitations. They might have some security issues, they might hallucinate a certain amount, they might take more effort to edit the outputs of than the first version that I would have written myself, and at that point, what was the value of it? Something else we've seen at some bigger firms is the demo is amazing. I see a world where this tool could be great, but usage is really tough internally, like adoption of maybe 10%, 15, 20% of my case. Staff uses it, so I'm not really getting the output that I wanted.
Speaker 2:So it was those observations that really drove us to what would a different positioning be that we know would add value to a firm day one and uh, and so that that was kind of our unique take on the world was the hey, the proxy that most people understand already is I hire staff, like the way that I saw my capacity problem is I'll either bring on a full-time staff or maybe I will outsource it to another you know, uh, to someone who's remote or external, especially in post-COVID. So we saw value in walking folks to this AI-driven future, where a lot of their tasks could be automated or go much more efficiently by using really trustworthy people as a call it step one to that. So my interface remains the same, which is I can get help from a person. I can go ask them for something in particular. They'll give me an answer, they like work for me.
Speaker 2:But I'm getting the leverage of this tech in a way that I wasn't able to before, by leveraging people. So that was kind of our take on the world and I think it is a slightly different one than how most are approaching the space. And I think when you are investing, you want to invest in something that feels not just better but different, something where, like, if that team is right, then that is like a very different take on the world and if they pan out, they could be very successful. The market's a good size too.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, and you know, I would think that if you might very well have the largest success with this not the largest of the large PI firms and there are a few but with the smaller ones, where some of the impediments that you described, that you ran into when you were talking to law firms, might not be as big, and that is still a very big market and market size is an important point to sell to your potential investors. You know, they're looking for something big, if it does turn into a grand slam.
Speaker 2:It is, and you know, personal injury is somewhere around the vein of, depending on the report you read, 60 to 70 billion in outcomes each year, out of the like 120 billion plus in consumer law outcomes, and so it is a massive space. We're excited to play in it. I would say that the um, the observation of why we might be an interesting team to tackle this is uh, there's, there's some amazing technical teams building in this space. Uh, we know a lot of them. We have great admiration for them. Uh, we haven't seen a ton of operational grit or dna in the, and I think, when I look back on one of the things I was privileged to gain from DoorDash, it was a marrying of great tech and great operations in the same breath, and there was a couple pieces of that.
Speaker 2:One was at DoorDash. We were only as good as our last delivery, doordash, we were only as good as our last delivery. If, at some point in the journey, the pizza spilled over or like a drink spilled or whatever happened, doordash was blamed. It wasn't. Oh, we supplied the tech for this, but we're not responsible for the outcome. It was like we are on the hook for the job, for the work done. And in the same vein, we are that here, which is, if the demand letter is below par, there's a mistake made where we're missing a document, we get blamed for it, and rightfully so. We are incurring the we are taking on.
Speaker 2:It requires a great deal of trust to outsource work to us or to ask us to take on the job, but then we are also very much responsible for the end outcome in a way that we wouldn't be if we were just tech that your staff is using where, like, the tech might fail, but then you're still going to hold the case staff responsible, and so that's, that's a a pain tolerance that I would say ben and I both have me from my time at doordash of, of uh being willing to take both the, the trust and responsibility, but also the feedback that comes with owning the work.
Speaker 2:Uh, personally, the reason I love that is when we have an office filled with both paralegals and case staff but also engineers. It just helps our cycle of building in a way. That's kind of, I think, very difficult to emulate without being side by side the ability to see the work being done. And I think about it back to at DoorDash, we were required to do deliveries once a month. Most people our team ended up doing it about once a week where we would be doing deliveries where we're a dasher and we're also seeing we're picking up from a restaurant and we're delivering to a customer. So we kind of see the whole end-to-end experience and it led to better product being built and I think the belief and hope here is that the same will be true.
Speaker 1:I know that you asked an initial question about investor perspective and then I went a little off the rails on what I was excited to share, so I'll pause there and turn it back to you. No, that's wonderful, and I would add that there's a big swath to use the word that you had used earlier of legal practice. That's not and I'm not denigrating back office real back office. You know billing and accounting and the like. It's very important, but there's a process-driven side of legal operations at law firms that's close to the practice of law. It's almost like project management. That is often not thought of as a separate discipline, a separate area of specialty by lawyers. But boy, from big law on down to smaller law, they could really use help in managing those processes. And you know you've tackled in this pre-litigation space that you speak of something that smacks of that. That smacks of that and there are other examples of it that are just begging for the right AI or the right whether it's generative AI or some other flavor of machine learning and the right application of talented people who specialize in process management, starting a legal tech startup or pivoting or thinking about how to modify aspects of what they're already building. That process side is too neglected and it's where I practice a bad problem in big law and they just don't see it as such. The lawyers practicing there, I think they're becoming more sensitive to it as they get an idea of what AI can do on the generative side. That isn't going to interfere with their practice, but make the practice run more smoothly.
Speaker 1:So here you are. You explained to the potential investors what your business model is all about. But I can't ignore. I have to come back to you. You're dealing with Sequoiaia and you dealt with them successfully, and it's good that LegalTech has gotten to the point where it has today, where they don't look at your bug guide if, as they would 10, 15 years ago. Legaltech come on, what is it? I don't even know what it is and it's probably not important enough for me to pay attention to that, I think is now close to a settled issue. But what else did you do in dealing with these folks both lead investor and other investors to make them want to write the check? Any particular pointers you could pass on?
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I'll acknowledge where we had a significant advantage and then I'll let Ben cover any pointers no-transcript, as operators in some capacity, before that overcame some of the trepidation, otherwise of, am I going to trust this new team in a space I'm not quite familiar with?
Speaker 3:but let me head into Ben any any tips and tricks, especially like um when, when we're sharing with an audience that might be raising from, or hoping to raise from, sequoia in the future yeah, I mean, I think, with regards to to Sequoia specifically, it's your, your comment pretty much hit the nail on the head and, and it really comes down to, each of us have had 10 years in various industries before this and you just never know who you meet on that journey. That's going to be the connection folks, of course, that we were talking to as we're getting started and a lot of those are second degree connections or third degree connections and being able to have people in your network that are very close to you, that know your work and are going to go to bat for you and are going to make that intro and put their reputation on the line. It's really just something that you build up over thousands and thousands of days and tens of thousands of hours of putting in the work and showing people what you can do.
Speaker 1:You know that makes me think and the thought can't be original to me.
Speaker 1:But if you're a startup and now you're at a rather early stage, but if you're a startup even at a later stage and you know you're going to be asking for money and you really haven't done it at this level before it seems to me, and you two were founders so that's got to your connection with Lynn and now being founders of the company has to count for a lot.
Speaker 1:But even if the person you're out to hire is not someone who was with you from the beginning of the journey but can in some role be hired because of the connections that that person he or she has developed over the years with senior players at big time VCs, that might be a hire worth making. Well, to have someone who, once they know the business and can be comfortable saying it's in their DNA, in their blood, they can go out and help you get over the obstacles that must have would have confronted anyone who didn't have the the Alfred Lynn connection that you have but perhaps can can get it on the team by looking for someone with a similar connection. But others who are actually raising probably have thought of that a thousand times before I did.
Speaker 2:I think you're right.
Speaker 2:I'll say that the reason I have a little bit of skepticism there is I think there will be a lot of folks who claim that their network is their value and I think, especially early on. I think most of the hiring you want to do is on potential, so not necessarily like if you're a startup founder, that most of the folks we've been on and I'll say we got here by a little bit of trial and error. There was to me a belief of let me go try to take the best people that I've worked with who are already crazy accomplished from DoorDash and bring them in. But I think what we found more success is hiring the folks who looked a lot like before they started at DoorDash, like the same kind of resumes of like folks who haven't yet had a way to improve themselves and who folks were very excited to if they one day found a company haven't yet achieved the kind of track record Ben or I have had. That like enabled the fundraise to be as easy.
Speaker 2:So I'll show that just as a separate take. And you're probably right, there's probably folks who are have a much better time raising by bringing on someone with a lot of networking connections. But my personal advice would be to mostly think about kind of slope rather than Y intercept. So think a lot about where you see someone growing with you and the like kind of pace and tenacity they would bring to that in early startup days, as opposed to try to hire someone off of off of what they've already done before no, I I think that pushback is warranted.
Speaker 1:I I was, as you were describing the situation just now. I was thinking of you know the caution, uh, startup leaders face and hiring a very seasoned senior sales exec who who comes in and really, you know, doesn't have the hunger that he or she would have had had she been at a lower rung on the ladder, and I can think of all sorts of horror stories I've heard about what doesn't work with that highly networked senior sales exec brought into a pretty early to mid. So good point, quite a good point. We're going to be jealous of our listeners' time and bring this to a close. I can't thank you enough for being such great guests and bringing such insight and a great story to the podcast. If people want to reach you guys, how do they do it? What's the best way to reach each of you personally or just get to Finch Legal?
Speaker 2:Email us personally. So it'll be Ben at FinchLegalcom and Viraj at FinchLegalcom. If you're potentially a customer or potentially a founder raising and just want more detailed advice or follow-up question, feel free to reach out there. We'd be excited to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Wonderful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll add on to that just in the interest of expanding there. If you know, if, if you are a personal injury attorney, if you know any personal injury attorneys, uh, that might even just want to chat about, about what we're building, uh, you know, we're, we're still, we're just coming up on on a year end, so we love connecting with with loads of people. Uh, would love to just spend time chatting with you. If you're in New York, we'd love to grab coffee. Uh, so that network expansion phase and would love to connect with anyone that you think might be interested in what we're doing here. Excellent.
Speaker 1:Well, Viraj, you and I have to get together face-to-face sometime.
Speaker 2:I'm excited We'll do it.
Speaker 1:And we'll drag in Ben, what the hell Sure. So thanks again, so much. Be well and continued success.
Speaker 3:Thank you, charlie, appreciate it. Thank you, charlie, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in legal tech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free LegalTech Startup Focus community by going to wwwlegaltechstartupfocuscom and signing up. Again, thanks.