From Product to Practice: Why Casetext's Former CTO Has Started An AI Native Law Firm

0:05Welcome to Law Next. For all the talk about how generative AI will transform the legal profession, my guest today poses a pointed question. What has actually changed for clients? The tools keep getting better, he observes, but billing rates keep going up. So where are the efficiency gains going? His answer is that you can't get there by retrofitting AI onto traditional law firms, you have to rebuild the law firm from the ground up. That's what he's doing with General Legal, an AI-native law firm he co-founded and where he serves as CEO. Launched just six months ago out of Y Combinator, General Legal has already signed on some 400 clients, built its technology platform around what he calls a second brain of client context, expanded from commercial contracting into venture financing, and in what may be a first for any law firm, made itself available to clients as an MCP server, meaning AI agents can engage its services on behalf of the humans they work for.

1:10Our guest is Ryan Walker, and if his name is familiar to you, it's because this is not his first act in legal tech. A PhD mathematician by training, Ryan was Chief Technology Officer at CaseText, where he was instrumental in developing co-counsel, one of the first and still one of the most significant generative AI legal assistants, and he stayed on through the company's$650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. Today's conversation, we talk about why he believes AI can now automate 95 % of routine legal work, how the management services organization structure lets an AI company operate alongside a law firm, why an AI-native law firm still depends on hiring experienced lawyers, what he learned from the failures of earlier innovators such as Atrium and ClearSpire, and whether firms like his spell the beginning of the end for the traditional law firm.

2:07I'm Bob Ambrogio. This is Law Next, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law. Before we get to that, please take a moment to hear from the sponsors who so generously support this podcast.

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3:37Now, let's get to my conversation with Ryan Walker. Ryan Walker, welcome to Law Next. Thank you so much, Bob. I'm really excited to be here. I'm looking forward to talking to you. You are the co-founder and CEO of General Legal, a company, an AI native law firm that is looking to disrupt the way legal services are delivered. But this is not your first rodeo, so to speak, not your first time down this path of developing an innovative product for the legal sector. Obviously, you were at Case Text, and you and your co-founders were all instrumental in developing Co-Counsel, which was arguably one of the most important and visible legal AI products to come along then, and it continues to be seen as such.

4:39So before we talk about what you're doing now, let's turn the clock back a little bit and talk about what you were doing then, kind of how you got there. What was your path to getting to case text and working on co-counsel, and how did that lead you to where you are today? Yeah, I think I'm fundamentally a very strange person. I have now been in legal tech for over 10 years, I think. And I came to, I'm not a lawyer, I'm actually a PhD mathematician. I came to Legal Tech because I was looking around, been working in startups, working in Silicon Valley. And I was looking for where is the place where language and search and data processing is most kind of important.

5:21And that's when I met up with Jay Keller, who is the CEO of Case Text. And I started talking to him. And I was really moved by his vision of what you could do at the time, this is around 2015, to make the practice of law more efficient, right? The tools that lawyers had to use to do the fundamental activity of legal research were so behind what was available in consumer tech at the time. And I was hooked. I was hooked from day one. And I was hooked because, you know, one, it's a fascinating problem space, but it's also vitally important and in many ways a very broken system. You look kind of anywhere in legal and you see inefficiency.

6:12You see people not getting access to legal services, being priced out of those services. And so for the right kind of person whose brain is wired this way, it's a never-ending journey to figure out how do we solve this? How do we make this better? And so I was CTO of case tax for all the way through the acquisition by Thomson Reuters. We did a number of innovative things in the legal space, all aimed at making legal practice more efficient, giving lawyers a better way to operate. And obviously, the culmination of all of that was co-counsel, which really was the first first product to fully embrace the generative AI capabilities and bring an AI assistant to lawyers into the market.

7:07And my belief, even in those early days of co-counsel, this is game changing, this really does. I was seeing strong evidence that we're looking at something that automates 80 plus percent of low-level routine practice. And my belief was that with that transformational technology, we'd actually see something change for clients. We'd actually see the service delivery model really change. And co-counsel came at that problem from bringing the technology to lawyers, to law firms, and those were the primary buyers of the co-counsel product. But I'm not satisfied with that approach because what we've seen is these tools have now just gotten better, substantially better.

8:03And I don't see any evidence yet in the market that clients are experiencing a difference in legal service. Actually, I think you have counter evidence. If you look around, the billable hour rate is going up. I don't think you're seeing a change in what you're getting. And so - New tech to do the same old thing. Exactly. So where are these efficiency gains accumulating? And my co-founders and I, all three of us came from CaseTech's job at NJP are both fantastic lawyers in their own right. They are also technologists and they share this point of view that we can do this so much better. We can change what it looks like to bring legal services to the world.

8:51And we came to the conclusion that the way to do that was not to just continue pushing tools to law firms that I think are going to struggle to fully incorporate. It's kind of like trying to retrofit an air conditioner into an old house, right? Like, yeah, eventually the house is going to cool down, but you're going to do a lot of work to do that. And it'll never be as good as like building from the ground up, you know, like an eco-friendly house that can, you know, cool. It's probably a terrible analogy. But I look at it that way. It's like the retrofitting of technology into very, very old organizations, I think, is not the fastest path to transformation.

9:37And the fast path is, in fact, rebuilding from the ground up, taking a lot of the things that work about the legal profession and building that on top of a truly AI forward foundation. And that's really what general legal is doing. We have built out a technology platform that does automate the parts of practice that are very kind of routine, low level. We think that accounts for, in many cases, something like 95 % of what you're getting billed for by your law firm is now something that an AI system can do for you. And so we have built this foundation. And then we hire experienced, really good lawyers and put them on top of this.

10:25And as they practice on top of our technology, our technology learns and improves and gets better and gets more customized for the clients we serve and the markets that we're working with. So they say you live in interesting times. And we just saw another AI-enabled firm, Norm AI, raise$120 million this week as we're talking. But we're also seeing traditional law firms working with Harvey, with co-counsel, with Legora, kind of layering those on top of the way they practice. So when you're talking about an AI-enabled firm, how is that different than what they're doing? They're using AI as well.

11:09What's the difference? I think there's lots of answers to that. But probably the simplest one is what's changed for clients? What's changed for clients because of all of this? What's happened? Are your bills going down? Is routine work no longer billable, you know, billable sent to you on your bill at the end of the month or whatever? And I think the answer is no, we haven't seen that realized yet. And so I think what's happening in this market is a race by these AI native providers like Norm to capture that well ahead of what what happens with the traditional firms. I think it's a great question about, you know, it is a huge, huge market.

11:54And so there probably will be different approaches that are taken. The prize is so immense. But I think our model is really focused on how do we take the benefits of this technology that's transformational and get them into the hands of clients as fast as possible while maintaining the same level of service quality that you get from a traditional law firm. Law firms do that very well. They provide, you know, they can say a lot of things about law firms, but their quality of service is generally very high and very consistent. It's expensive. It's slow. It doesn't integrate into the way that clients actually work on the ground day to day.

12:41And all of those things are now possible to refactor while maintaining that level of service quality. And you do that by, in our opinion, hiring really good attorneys who have practice experience, learning from their practicing and improving that system over time, taking full advantage of being integrated into the client so that you see all the context of what they're doing. You think about like an MSA, I think an interesting way to think about an MSA, MSAs are part or one of, you know, MSA review is a kind of common thing we as a law firm do. Think about like, where does an MSA really start is a good question.

13:22I think the answer to that is actually it probably starts months ago on the phone, on a Zoom call with the two parties talking to each other. And imagine that context being carried all the way up through the negotiation. It's a small part of what matters there. But now you have this law firm that can look across that context record and use that context very, very efficiently to help the client get the outcome that they want to see. Yeah. Just kind of pulling that string a little bit further. Could an Amlaw 100 firm become an AI native firm or does it require really kind of starting from scratch?

14:03I think they can. I think it's a question of timescale, right? I think the prize is so big, as I said, that there isn't a choice here. Everybody's going to have to become AI native. But I think the real question is, what will it take to do that? And how long will it take? And in the meantime, what happens when you have players like a general legal who are moving way, way faster at this transformation than others? And I think you'll see our clients see a stark contrast between the service that we offer and the service that they get from traditional legal service providers. And that is, I think, a very, very compelling motivation for change, right?

14:52People look at like, wow, now I can get AMLA 25 level service for a third of the cost. And it happens really fast. And it's integrated into my workflow, not just email back and forth. that's what the competition for those big firms will look like. And so I think some of them are going to work really hard to get there. I think where we're going to see a lot of struggle is actually, you know, I think that the top, you know, 25 of the market, they're going to be all right. I think it's the kind of, you know, lower half of the AMLOS, say, that's going to face the real pressure. And it's not going to just be from us.

15:35It's going to be from private equity that's engaged and rolling up law firms very, very actively. There's going to be all kinds of forces that are pushing firms to this outcome. And so what we're going to need to see to have that change be realized in the AMLAW is, one, real technical talent getting embedded into these organizations. Two, willingness to change and challenge the business model, which is really difficult, up against a partnership that has deeply vested interests in the way the model runs. I think all of those draw out the timeline for change. Obviously, a big part of what you're delivering here is predictable pricing in that you're delivering services on set fees.

16:22But from what I'm hearing from you is that your understanding of what clients are looking for from a law firm is not just about lower prices, but about a whole different kind of experience. Can you talk more about what it is that you think is important to be delivering to clients? Yeah, so I think there's a big picture answer to that, which is like, if we look at what legal services, what good legal services today, it's a very scarce resource. And everybody has a scarcity mentality when it comes to legal work. And so literally every choice you make about where to engage legal, you're pushing it off to the last minute, you are foregoing as much of it as you possibly can.

17:05And often that's actually a terrible strategy, right? Because really legal is way cheaper if you start at the very beginning, right? If you build your product with the kind of knowledge of privacy regulations or privacy agreements from the very beginning, it's much better than building it 95%, sending it to legal review. and then legal comes in and makes you change all of the way you're storing and handling data. We see the real opportunity as saying, okay, now legal is no longer scarce. Guess what? You can get this cheap, you can get it fast, and you can get it integrated into those workflows.

17:46What can you do? And how does it change how you think about where legal should be brought into your organization. We see a world where legal is now embedded directly into that early stages of product development, for example. It's embedded early on in the conversations with clients in that first call negotiating the MSA. We're already starting to think about what the deal should actually look like on the other end. When you think about, you know, financings for startups, it's where You're starting from the very beginning, organizing your documents in a way that allows you to sail through a diligence process.

18:26All of these things, as scarcity kind of relaxes, become available. And that's really how we think about what clients really want to see from legal. They want to see a change. They want to see a way that they can now not have to think about this as a rationed, highly rationed thing. So our clients in particular, you know, really, really value speed. They value the integrations into their systems, into their ways of working. And, you know, most clients are, you know, less sensitive on pricing. pricing. Pricing is certainly like a macro factor, right? That it does matter when you look at your legal budget.

19:10But getting good quality and getting it fast is for most of the clients we serve as the core kind of anchor proposition. Yeah. And who are those clients? Talk more about who it is you're serving at this point. Yeah. So we have a big mix. I mean, obviously we started with early stage startups. And our focus has been on the needs of startups to a large extent. We're now at a place - Is that because you came out of that world? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we started the company six months ago in Y Combinator and very, very quickly acquired a number of startups at different stages in the life cycle. But for the most part like kind of seed stage, a couple of series A and greater companies from there.

20:03So it's roughly like set, we have about 400 or so clients at this point, six months in. 70-ish percent of those are early stage companies. Then we have a range of later stage companies that we serve as well. legal needs across the life cycle. There's variation, but fundamentally, everybody needs legal services. That's why it's a massive market. And many of those legal services are held in common. And the value props across those different kinds of clients remains the same. What we're trying to do with our early stage clients is get them to a place where we have a complete portfolio of service offerings that allows them to use us as their full service law firm.

20:53We just this week announced the establishment of our early stage venture practice. So we're now supporting companies with Series A, B, financings. And that really rounds out the portfolio of what we offer, which is commercial contracting, employment, and general corporate. Now we add financings on top and you have something that's a pretty complete package of legal services that you need at the early stages. For our later stage clients, commercial contracting is such an immense kind of pain point, especially where that contracting is tightly coupled to regulation. There's so much regulatory overlay in spaces like crypto, in fintech, in health tech, that there's a lot of pain to solve there.

21:50And that's primarily our focus with those later stage and public companies. Yeah. Not with specific reference to general legal per se, but are AI-enabled firms most suited for certain types of law practices and completely unsuitable for other types of law practices? If you'd asked me six months ago, my answer would have been different. There's been some changes that have changed how we think about that question in the past, you know, really around sort of February, March of this year. Our answer changed on that pretty profoundly. I actually think now it's much more level playing field in terms of what practice areas are amenable to kind of rapid development of automation.

22:32What made the difference was step-level change in what the agentic techniques were capable of doing. We start to see this emergence of the second brain concepts. Second brain is the idea that you kind of put all of your knowledge, all of your company's knowledge, all of your client knowledge into context that's readily accessible by these agents. And the step change is now that agents are quite capable of managing that context very, very effectively. And what that meant to us is that you can start to see automations of less routine legal work. So when we started originally, the answer was more like, well, we think a lot of routine things, things that are very repeatable.

23:20That is kind of what AI native firms are suitable for. We think that's not true anymore. We think that's changed. And we think it's changed in response to this technological shift that's underfoot.

23:39Ryan is not a lawyer. He's a mathematician. So, given ethical rules against non-lawyers owning law firms, how exactly does he run general legal? In a moment, we'll dig into the two-entity structure that makes general legal possible, why earlier attempts at this model failed, and whether it's all just a workaround for the ethics rules. That and more when Law Next continues. Stay with us.

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25:22Welcome back to Law Next. I'm Bob Ambroji, and my guest today is Ryan Walker, co-founder and CEO of the AI native law firm General Legal, and formerly the CTO at KSTACS, the company that developed co-counsel. Before the break, Ryan made the case that AI can now automate the vast majority of routine legal work and that the range of practice areas open to a firm like his keeps expanding. But all that raises the ethical question. How does a company backed by investors and run by a non-lawyer deliver legal services at all? That's where we pick up in the conversation.

26:01something we haven't really talked about yet is is the sort of the business structure around the way that you were you've organized this ai enabled law firm and i think the term of art that everybody's talking about these days are is an mso or a managed services organization where you have a dual entity structure you're not a lawyer you're the ceo how does this work can you explain what the structure is that enables you to work in this way? Yeah. So the management service organization structure has been very well established in other areas for quite a while, particularly in health practice, where there are similar kind of professional challenges to ownership.

26:45It's more recently adopted in legal, but widely adopted. Now, I would guess there are now thousands of these entities out there. Fundamentally, what an MSO allows you to do is compartmentalize the delivery of legal advice from the operations and technology and capabilities, technical capabilities of the organization. And so you think about anywhere where someone is providing legal guidance, providing client service representing a client, that needs to be packaged into a law firm entity that, you know, truly can operate in the best interest of their client at all times. And the way these organizations work is then there's a, you know, sort of standard corporation that's contractually bound to the law firm entity.

27:41And, you know, that contractual relationship is all around the fact that for For this law firm to operate successfully, they need to engage the services of this C corporation that can deliver immense operational effectiveness into the entity. And that's broadly how I think of the MSO structure. And to me, it makes a lot of sense as an operating model that protects clients from making sure that their interests are contained in an entity that has the ethical obligations that you'd expect from a law firm. So do you handle basically all the C-suite side operations in marketing and not just tech, but marketing and business operations and whatever else might be there and the lawyers do lawyering and that's it?

28:34That's the idea. Yes. And that's the common, it's kind of like you think of it as the back office for the law firm. Back office operations are now held in this separate investable standard corporate entity while the services are held in the LLP. Yeah. You and I have chatted before, and I asked you last time we talked about the ghosts of Atrium and ClearSpire, which were kind of two early attempts. ClearSpire was first, and then Atrium came along, attempts to kind of innovate through this dual entity model. Neither of those exist today. But as you say, now there are thousands possibly of entities out there that are replicating in one shape or another this model.

29:25Why do you think those didn't work and that now we're seeing more of this? Is it a matter of simply the time is ripe or the technology is better or what's the difference? I think fundamentally it is the technology, right? I think in the atrium days, there were certainly efficiencies to be gained by applying this structure, by introducing technology into the operations of firms and building those back office functions on a modernized tech platform. But I think those efficiencies might have looked something like 40 % more efficient, 20 % more efficient, something like that. And I think what has changed fundamentally with what's possible with the Gen AI capabilities today is I think you're looking at something like 95 % of that is now, there's like a 95 % savings possible and that that will actually ultimately converge to something that's closer to like 99%.

30:27and you'll have these massive, you know, kind of, it is a massive differential between the technology then and what's possible now. And I think that's the difference. And it's pretty sad. I think Atrium wound down about, it wasn't so, you know, time feels so distorted since the launch of ChatGPT, but the timing between like kind of the end, the real like wind down of Atrium and the launch of ChatGPT was not that, not that. Not that long. It might have been a year or so. And, you know, I think they just missed the timing on on on that happening. Yeah, I forget if we talked about this before, but I remember going to case tech's headquarters in San Francisco and also going to atrium's headquarters the same day because you were like right across the street from each other in the same neighborhood.

31:21And I think they were already starting to wind down at that point that I that I was there. I'm trying to get when that was. But yeah. What about I mean, I'm just kind of curious your thoughts on on the regulatory environment. I mean, I think some people will look at this sort of MSO structure and think, well, this is just a workaround for Rule 5.4. And since there's no private investment allowed in a law firm, this is just a way to get around that. So, you know, should the regulatory structure change? I mean, what's your opinion on this? Should the regulatory structure change to foster more tech-enabled law firms?

32:01I mean, should 5.4 go away, I would assume your structure would go away. You would just merge the law and the C-Corp all into one entity, right? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think what we saw with like the ABSs, for example, these alternative bar structures, the Arizona one, Utah, I think DC had one for a while. Like, I think that was a real attempt at innovation on that kind of regulatory structure. You know, is that good or bad? I think we need to measure it against what's good or bad for the clients of these entities. I guess I fundamentally like the MSO structure because it does draw bright lines between what's the part or what's the investable thing?

32:51What's the thing that, you know, venture capital or private equity can be involved in? And what's the thing that they can't be? Right. And what they can't be involved in is the provision of legal services. They shouldn't influence or they can't influence or guide the kinds of advice that clients receive. I see that's vitally important, right? Something fundamental is breaking if what ends up happening is a private equity entity can shape how clients get legal advice. And I think that's what the rules are intended to prevent. And I think that fundamentally is a good thing that is totally a workable problem with the structures.

33:30I'm sure there will be people who grumble about this. I think there's a lot of interests at stake. But the fact that there really are thousands of these entities now, this isn't a thing that's going away. I think this is now becoming a very normalized thing. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I'm trying to remember. I was just reading something about it. I think it was Colorado or something that just enacted an ethics rule that basically said, not an ethics rule, but adopted a policy that ethics enforcement agencies won't go after sort of alternative structures such as this and trying to develop a model for other states to follow in terms of pursuing that.

34:12I want to go back to, you know, you talked earlier about the fact that one of your, one of the core tenets of your business model is to hire very good lawyers. And I wonder why is it that you can't hire, I don't know, why is it that an AI native model can't sort of take, I don't know, mediocre lawyers and supercharge them? Why do you want to work with, yeah, why is that part of your thinking about how to approach this? This is a great question. I think it comes back to really two things. So one thing is the gaps that exist between what AI is capable of and what a lawyer, what you need from your lawyer, they tend to align entirely around expertise.

34:57Right. Well, what's fundamentally, you know, not possible in these models is kind of deep understanding of markets, deep subject matter experience and understanding of the law, of the legal system, of processes. And so we think that you actually get way more leverage out of hiring somebody who's practiced for five, six, seven years at a great firm than taking the junior associate, shoving them into this system where their knowledge might not be so much different than what an LLM can provide on its own these days. And so we think the hiring of expertise is really covering the places where we really shouldn't rely on LLMs to guide our choices.

35:49And we think that is actually the much more efficient process. We also think the second piece of this is that think fundamentally about what is valuable in your lawyers that you engage with. And I've engaged with many lawyers over the years and I have lots of memories, most of them not great memories, but the few times where I was like, wow, this lawyer delivered immense value to me. That value is anchored in expertise and guidance and advice. I didn't I didn't it wasn't I don't have a great, you know, them marking up a document for me isn't the the part that I value. It's that they tell me, like, I marked this document up this way and I did it because this is how we get you what you need.

36:40This is why this is what you should need. This is why this is why we're doing it this way. And here's what to do when the other side pushes back. Here's how to negotiate this. And that's where we think it really does matter to have experienced lawyers that are overseeing this work. And the real value comes from that. And our clients absolutely echo that. It matters that they're engaging with a lawyer who they can recognize, that they can reference back to a good firm that they know has practiced for many years in this area. Yeah. So is there in an AI enabled law firm, is there a clear line or a fuzzy line or kind of no line between sort of where AI stops and where humans pick up in terms of legal work?

37:27It's a good question. I mean, for us, there has to be a clear line, right? All of the work that we do must be overseen by a licensed attorney. attorney. And so that's one very clear line. Maybe the deeper answer to that is like, so our AI kind of, you think of it as sort of doing the first pass, although it's in fact more iterative. AI does a first pass on this and then the lawyer is in a reviewing position. Where the deficiencies are in kind of what AI spits out and where our lawyers spend the most time kind of redirecting or guiding AI is really on questions of what's market here? What's the right strategy that aligns to what the client actually wants?

38:15And how do we negotiate this? What should we ask for? And how do we ask for it? That's the sort of more, I think, more fundamental line is that we want to be able to amplify that kind of service because that's where the value really is for clients. Yeah. Do you do, is there any kind of, I don't know, internal sort of documentation? What's sort of your supervision review process within the law firm to kind of say, you know, we as the managing attorneys within this firm are monitoring the work being done by, you know, associates or others in our firm? How do you kind of evaluate output? How do you know what's AI, what's human?

38:59I guess from an evaluation question, how do you evaluate all of that? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few ways to do that. And I think the most important way, part of what we need to succeed at as a law firm, and I think in many ways, big law firms have become pretty good at this. We need to succeed at delivering a consistent experience across any attorney that you work with at the firm. And doing that, I think there's a few pieces to that. So there is certainly a supervision component to that. All work that we produce is evaluated by, is reviewed by an experienced attorney. And so that part always happens.

39:43We're also using AI as checking, rechecking and checking work. And the evaluation and the review process is actually collaborative with the AI. So our attorneys say, no, this isn't right. Let's review it again. AI reviews, attorney checks, no, still not right. And we work in that kind of workflow pattern. I think the other piece of this is obviously building tools that accelerate work review. And so, you know, our system is ergonomically set up to make it so that our lawyers can have oversight and, you know, carefully check the work that they're returning back to clients. And then, you know, there's also a just kind of overall hiring process that we think is pretty important to how we bring attorneys in.

40:42I think it's a bit different than how, you know, hiring's been done traditionally in the industry. I was sort of shocked when I learned this, you know, coming from like a software engineering background. It's sort of obvious that when you hire a software engineer, like you look like, well, what school did they go to? What companies do they work for? Are they good? Do I know them? you check all that and then you test them right like you actually make them like do a hacker rank project or you know co pair program with you or something i was sort of shocked and they're not easy tests there's no tests um so we actually have you know we think it's really important for the lawyers we hire to like not only for us to evaluate them but for them to also see like hey this is actually how this firm works this is what you're going to do day to day here you better like enjoy this or it's not a good fit.

41:31And so that's been a big part of how we want to establish a consistent quality across the service. I think fundamentally, though, it's a little bit different than you look at a Harvey or a Legora. These are tools that necessarily need benchmarks. And we have benchmarks on our AI. But what's different here is that ultimately, we have real attorneys, serious practitioners who are signing off on the work product that they're turning to clients. Our goal is to deliver signature ready work product to clients every single time. And so our processes are really driven by that as the kind of the standard.

42:17You're six months or so, maybe a little bit more into this. And you mentioned earlier the fact that you have kind of maybe expanded your idea of what practice areas could be suitable for a firm such as yours. What else have you learned during these first six months? What surprised you perhaps about how clients work with your firm? Yeah. So, you know, arrogance, I guess. I thought I knew a lot about legal and I knew nothing, right? Well, I knew something, but I learned a lot. And I think I learned a lot more fundamental things. And the things I've been really learning is, you know, where is the real value for clients?

43:03That's been the interesting thing to me. Like I came into it somewhat naively, like the value is that we're turning this work product around for you and we're doing it really fast and it's cost effective for you to get it. And that is incredibly valuable, but there's a big other thing that clients care a lot about. What they care about is that you, as their attorney, us as their law firm, that we understand their interests and their strategies. They feel like when they get work product from us, it somehow reflects them. And there's this like kind of magic difference between work product that looks like that and work product that's just like an attorney redlined everything in the document and turned it around.

43:49And so that is sort of our standard. And I think that's our kind of stickiness is that we understand these clients very, very well and we care about their strategy and making the work reflect what they value, what they want. And then they see themselves in that work and it's easy for them to say, this is good work product because it speaks to them. It looks like them. It reflects their interests. And that was a sort of, you know, should have been obvious, but it was a sort of surprising insight is how much is tied to that delivery, right? And that, you know, good news for AI native law firms, so much of that is amenable to, you know, certainly like attorney in the loop evaluation, right?

44:37We can take the full context of clients. We get better every time we work with a client because we learn more about their sort of revealed preferences, revealed strategy. And you can incorporate that and you can continue to get better and better at reflecting what they like, what they want, what they want to have happen in these deals in the things that we turn back to them. It's interesting because it sounds almost counterintuitive. I mean, you're interfacing with clients through Slack. You're interfacing with clients through an MCP server. I think you said you're the first law firm to have an MCP server, which it seems like you would have less familiarity with the client by dealing with them in those ways.

45:18I mean, how do you get that sort of familiarity through those? So it does come back to being able to use context more effectively, right? When we take a client in, we ask them to give us anything that they'll give us. We'll take a huge bucket of whatever they want to give to us as context. We'll go get their website. We'll go fetch all of this. And we kind of push this into our second brain of the client. And everything we do is run through that context. And, you know, depending on this situation, we'll also sometimes interview the client and we have an intake. We have an automated and semi-automated intake processes that help to like really flesh out the strategy early on with clients.

46:04And so while these things sort of feel human, and they are human, it's actually exactly this like 95.5 thing where you can do a lot of that kind of fundamental research, have a good lawyer take a quick look at it and say, okay, here's how we shape what this client cares about. And we can do that accurately. And you can do it accurately because you're combining sort of mass processing that's unlocked by AI with expertise, with experience from a good lawyer. And you can get those kinds of efficiencies in that. It's surprising. it is true there's a whole other emerging world we haven't really talked about we did also release the law firm as an MCP experience, you can engage through MCP, we did that for a couple of reasons, but the big one is we see more and more agents procuring legal services on behalf of their clients, early days for that sort of pattern, but that is a thing that we think is coming that increasingly agents will be part of that process.

47:12You're going to start, I mean, you see this already, you have agents who are working deals for clients. And of course, if that agent's trying to get another entity to sign a contract, there's going to be some legal review process to that. And it's probably even more important now to have that where there's less connection between the client and their agent who's out in the world trying to do stuff on their behalf. And so a law firm that can integrate and connect into that is, we think, part of what is coming. It's also value - On that point, can an agent initiate a lawyer-client relationship? An agent can, yes.

47:53An agent can. I mean, the agent has to be operated by a human. The interest of the agent can't, a computer can't independently engage a law firm, but an agent can engage a law firm on their human's behalf. I think it's a very, I think it's a very interesting question. And I think you're going to, we're going to see agents out there that are maybe trying to do their own things that like you have to vet and understand like, is this person really acting on their human's behalf and best interests? Yeah. Well, as AI takes over the world, it's going to need lawyers. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I cut you off.

48:35I'm not sure what you were. Do you remember what you were going to have to say? I was just going to say there's another reason to think about this sort of delivery model, too, which is we think ultimately, you know, tools are going to get we think legal should get driven further and further back into processes within within organizations. And so the ability to expose agentic legal capabilities is part of how you do that, right? Tools inside of companies will increasingly be agents doing all sorts of things. If you have a legal law firm entity agent that can engage in that process, that's part of the transition to how you bring legal service, how you take this scarcity model and change it to something where this is now readily available.

49:21It's integrated into the fabric of your company, and it's not this blocking, expensive thing that you put off until the very end of something. Is general legal and others like you the beginning of the end for the traditional law firm, or will there always be a place for both models? So I think general legal is certainly not the beginning of the end for the attorney. I think attorneys will have a role in the practice for indefinitely. Until there's AGI that controls all of us, there will be attorneys in the loop of all kind of legal processes. There should be. Otherwise, you're doing something bad if that's not part of the process.

50:10Is it the beginning of the end for traditional law firms? I don't know. I think it is an immense source of pressure for these organizations. I think what is happening undisputably is that these organizations that, you know, no offense to them, but have a challenged relationship with making change, right, are being pushed really hard to change how they operate. And, you know, that's coming from all kinds of directions. Like I said, I think PE drives some of that. I think entities like General Legal drive some of that. I think clients themselves increasingly will say, just like Meta did a few months ago, I'm not going to pay for stuff that an AI can do.

50:56You have to change how you're billing me for this. They're just going to redline it out. And increasingly, traditional law firms, that's probably their biggest fundamental challenge is what happens when a client, a big client like a Meta says, no, I won't pay for this kind of service anymore. or you have to take it out. That, I think, is the big potentially unraveling question for them. And I think some of them will navigate that well. And I think folks in the middle or folks who've been slower to kind of embrace the technology will be the ones who struggle the most with that transition. I know I've kept you longer than I promised, but just to wrap things up, I wonder for you and your co-founders, and I should say for your investors as well, we haven't even talked about the fact that you have taken on some investors.

51:49What's your vision for General Legal? Where do you want to see this going over the next five years or so? I want to see us become the biggest provider of legal services. And we want to do that because fundamentally the problem that has you know, like completely captured me over the past decade is that legal is too scarce. It's not available to the people who need it, the companies that need it. You can't get enough of this service. And that has all kinds of negative consequences for everyone. And so by the big thing we're trying to accomplish with general legal is break that scarcity. And I think that is the thing that will unlock a kind of massive law firm.

52:39Anything else you want to say that I haven't asked you about? Well, we covered the agents taking over the world. So I think we probably hit almost everything. It was a great, great conversation, Bob, and really, really enjoyed it. And I always admire the folks you have on. And I'm really honored to chat with you. Yeah, well, it's been a great conversation. I'm really, really glad we were able to do it. And following your development, I'm eager to see how this plays out. Thank you so much. Yeah. Ryan, thanks a lot.

53:14Thanks for joining us for today's show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to share your own thoughts or comments, please do so by messaging us on LinkedIn or other social media or by emailing me directly, ambroji at gmail.com. If you're a fan of Lonex, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Lawnext is a production of Lawnext Media. I'm your host, Bob Ambroji. Hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of Lawnext.