Legaltech startup conference: Difference between revisions

We define a [[legaltech start-up conference]] as “opportunities for [[Reg tech entrepreneur|fantasists]] to meet the [[General counsel|credulous]] to flog them [[Legal tech landscape|stuff they don’t need]] with [[When budget allows|budgets they don’t have]]”.  

Here is an interesting list for the [[neural network]] to parse: here are the two hundred and seventy-seven (277) [[vendor]]s listed in the Legal Geek “Startup Map”<ref>I am not making this up: https://www.legalgeek.co/startup-map/. There could be more: the bamboozling way it is set out made it hard to be sure I had go them all.</ref> Now I confess, not all of these are necessarily for profit businesses (by which I mean ''intending'' to make a profit; a large portion of them, however well disposed to the ''idea'' of making a profit, won’t ''actually'' make one) — there are some, even at a quick scan, that don’t even try. And some are unique and different. But they are the great minority. Most fall into the [[legaltech landscape]] as mapped out by {{author|Alex Hamilton}}.

Now there can be no doubt that the amount a multinational is prepared to spend in the pursuit, defence and analysis of its legal rights and obligations is, as far as makes any difference, infinite, but the ''categories of problem'' it encounters when doing that, that [[legaltech]] can profitably solve, are not.  

It might make good on that promise — ''might'' — were there only ''one'' such “startup” with the bright idea, but, per the above, there are literally ''hundreds'' of them.

Even leaving aside the [[JC]]’s usual perorations about scale and [[rent-extraction threshold]]s — plainly these are to be ignored — just the length of this list ought to prompt some questions.

Consider the humble word processor. There are ''billions'' of users of word processing software. There are, to all intents, two viable word-processing applications in the world, and one of them is free. If WordPerfect can't make a fist of it, how on earth with [[Lexrifyly]]?

It strikes us there are two explanations for this bafflingly rich microcosm; neither of them predict a cosy ecosystem for lawtech startups.  

One is that the sector is simply overdue for the consolidation that will push it into the mainstream. These are all good little ideas but, un-knitted, they are too tepid to get anywhere. Once the power of affiliation dawns on them — the founders of 15 basically interchangeable [[contract automation]] tools were to swallow their pride and amalgamate, pooling resources, expertise and clients, then an apex predator might emerge to thin out the gene pool. One or two vendors are starting to do this, but in the main, we are still on the frontier, where footloose imagineers can pursue their crazy dreams. This can’t last. It didn’t in the dotcom boom, either.

This, we think, is the optimistic view: all this excitement; all these inflated expectations will eventually settle down and a stable, smart set of sophisticated legal tools will emerge.

On this view the major players focus on ''enterprise'', not ''niche'', and sophisticated law tools are niche.

The other view is pessimistic: there is a reason for for all the variety. ''These solutions don’t scale''. As we like to say, [[tedium is particular, not generic|''tedium is particular, not generic'']]. 

And, also, consider two very well-funded, sophisticated market participants who are ''perfectly positioned'' clean up in this sector, but who, despite twenty years of opportunity, haven’t: Microsoft and Google. You have to wonder whether they know something these three hundred [[legaltech]] gurus don’t. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

On this view, these little firms owe their continued survival to the single, unique problem they solve for their limited range of clients. Many have one or two clients each. It stands to reason that you orient your product and develop it according to the expectations of your anchor tenant.  This same unique use case may be a barrier to acquiring that second client, whose unique conundrum does not quite match.

But does this not, in itself ask difficult questions about the the real promise of [[legaltech]]? Does this not give the lie to how clever this technology really is? How do you reconcile an ecosystem brimming with solutions so wooden and inflexible that they can’t easily iterate, with the breathless promise of [[artificial intelligence]]?

Either there is a winner, and it will be an order of magnitude better than the rest, or this is a busted flush, only sustained by the wilful suspension of disbelief that accompanies dying days of a bubble. Either way, most [[vendor]]<nowiki/>s should brace for an ice age. Winter is coming.

===On “niche” versus “enterprise” and the meatware vs. hardware wager===

“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 it can do exactly that: adjust, magically, to unexpected adjacencies; to handle things it has never seen before; that, free of our ungainly mortal frames, the machine can pull off manoeuvres that even a grand master could not imagine.