Legaltech startup conference: Difference between revisions

“Niche vs. enterprise” is an interesting prism to view the market. If [[legaltech]] really is niche, it ''doesn’t'' scale. It is too fiddly, too context dependent, too hard to adapt to adjacent opportunities. But the whole premise of lawtech, remember, is that it ''does'' scale. That is can do exactly that: adjust, magically, to unexpected adjacencies; to handle things it has never seen before; that, free of our mortal frames it can pull off manoeuvres of which even a grand master could not dream. This is brave talk, of course.  

[[Legaltech]] is the wager that that will happen. [[Meatware]] — an investment in our learned friends, the legal eagles — is the bet that it ''won’t'': that [[legaltech]] does not, ultimately, scale: that, when all said and done, it will turn out to be more like a conjuring trick.

Legaltech does not (yet) scale. There are lots of underwhelming, poorly conceptualised offerings, all obliged to extract outrageous rent — see below — ''because'' they don’t scale. So ''can'' legaltech scale? The best answers currently go the other way: [[OneNDA]], for example, looks to genericise a legal process so it doesn’t need sophisticated [[legaltech]]: enterprise tech will work on it. But, simplifying is hard: it takes deep expertise, risk-awareness, a sense for psychology and market experience. The [[legal eagle]] [[paradox]]: the more expertise and experience you have the less inclined you are to simplify. ''Mastery of the ineffable is your unique selling point''.

But there is, too, the legaltech paradox: just as the [[meatware]] is disinclined to simplify, ''so is legaltech''. Of the 277 offerings below, how many dedicate their machine learning, NLP, neural networks and artificial intelligence to ''making law simple''?