Quddus Pativada and Dominic Raab, Founder and Founding advisor of Index Law: BREAKING: Dominic Raab joins Index Law

0:00Dominic Raab:Hello and welcome back to The Scouting New York Show. I'm Seb Jolson. Today we have got some amazing guests on the show. Quddus founder and CEO of Index Law, an amazing legal AI startup. And Dominic Raab, who I assume leaves no introduction, but former Foreign Secretary, Justice Secretary and former Deputy Prime Minister, who has just announced that he's joining Index Law as a founding advisor, which is very exciting. But before we get on to the news, his role and why he's joined, Quddus, I was hoping you'd give a quick introduction to the company and what you've built.

0:25Quddus Pativada:Yeah, thank you, Seb, so much for having us on board. And I always love when I'm interviewed for Dominic. It sets me up really well. Maybe a little bit of context on Index and what we're building. So Index is actually our approach at delivering AI-native legal services. I think corporate belief was the first generation of legal AI focused on helping lawyers. We want to actually help clients directly and reshape the legal experience around the client themselves. So, you know, Dominic and I met a few months ago and we've been brainstorming around what the modern law firm looks like or what the AI native law firm looks like.

0:58Quddus Pativada:And, you know, have been working closely on really shaping what that vision is. And we're very excited to tell you more about it.

1:04Dominic Raab:Amazing. Well, look, you know, I guess tell me the news in your own words. You know, you've got Dominic sitting next to you joining as a founding advisor. What does it mean?

1:11Quddus Pativada:Yeah, I mean, so again, it's still a little bit of a shock to myself sometimes, but Dominic and I have been working very closely for the last six months now on really, you know, since founding, before we even wrote a single line of code, really looking at what does new legal services look like? And I'll let Dominic share more on his perspective on that. But the idea is, could we use AI to really accelerate and help clients in a way that's far more accessible, far more effective than ever before? So Dominic's been working with us since the very beginning, not just sort of shaping the product and advising us, but really playing a hands-on role, not just now, but in the future as well.

1:43Quddus Pativada:But maybe Dominic, if you want to talk a little bit about yourself.

1:45Dominic Raab:Yeah, look, it's great fun for me is I've made this transition away from government and politics to get some exposure in the AI sector. I thought when I met Kudus, introduced by a friend, an old contact, what he's trying to do is very inspirational. I'm very drawn towards the mission, not just trying. And I worked in law. I qualified in the city. I worked six years in in-house law and government, even before I went into politics. And I did four tours of duty at various stages as Justice Secretary. So I'd looked at the legal sector for a long period of time and thought it was right for reform. And what Kudus is doing and what the mission of Indexed Law has really been not just to make lawyers 30, 40 percent more productive by using AI.

2:31Dominic Raab:It's really to redraw and reset the paradigm around the consumer. And that's a really exciting, I think, mission. AI is driving it. But really, the concept is to put the consumer, whether it's a business consumer or a private citizen, in the driving seat when it comes to devising their own legal strategy. I think Kudus's story, I'm going to replay some of the compliments, is pretty compelling. How he set the firm up, the personal situations he's navigated, the family law dispute, and how it has really changed his life as well. So there's a bit of heart and a bit of head, but it's a great mission.

3:07Dominic Raab:and Kudus has put together a really exciting team. So great honor to be a part of it. And for me, that AI exposure in a sector that I know pretty well is really intriguing. And can you touch a bit on that Kudus? And it is a really interesting story about how you came to found Index Law. Can you share a bit of that story for those who don't know?

3:26Quddus Pativada:Yeah, yeah, no. And maybe a little bit of personal context as well. So, you know, I'm not a lawyer by trade. I've been fairly tactical my whole life. I've been building products and apps since I was eight years old. You know, my first company I started in my last year of high school before I ended up taking a, you know, I like to call it a prolonged gap year. So I never went back to university after, but I broke an AI education startup. We were quite early as the race of building, you know, with LLMs and chatbot interfaces with LLMs. Had this sort of really great two, three year round period where we were, you know, winning government contracts.

3:54Quddus Pativada:We worked with, you know, users and students and schools around the world. Then sort of, you know, had this incredible sort of one year down period where my parents were going through incredibly rough forest and still are. A lawyer's mistake ended up costing me my child a home that I'd lived in for 15 years or so because he sort of filed the wrong document. I had these sort of issues come up over and over again. And it got to the point where I was probably spending more time with lawyers than I was with my own family. And really started to understand, I'm sure every single sort of lawyer has used AI five times more than they had three years ago or two years ago.

4:24Quddus Pativada:But none of my legal bills had changed and none of the experience itself had fundamentally gotten better. And I thought, you know, instead of just selling the service to the service provider, there seemed to be this one to two year opportunity to actually displace the service provider or the incumbent legacy traditional service providers. That became a really exciting mission. And we started to get obsessed with the legal industry as a whole. And one of the things that, you know, Dominic and I kept coming back to this was a lot of the flaws or issues of the client experience weren't a result of domain expertise.

4:52Quddus Pativada:You know, lawyers themselves are great. And we're not trying to get rid of lawyers by any way. It was the system around them. It was the structure of the law firm. It's the way the service is delivered to clients. It's the priority of a client based on what they bill, what they pay. It's the model itself, which makes it a system design problem and not a legal problem. And when we started to combine AI researchers and systems thinkers with legal experts like Dominic and others, we started to come across this really powerful combination where we think every business will have access to really high quality legal support for a fraction of the cost.

5:22Quddus Pativada:You know, our end vision is that, you know, any legal trouble gets sort of abstracted away and nobody has to go through the same thing that I had to go through when I was 22. And, you know, balancing my first business with the family situation itself. So I think it's a mission of, you know, you can think of it as a vengeance in a way, but at the same time, it's like highly motivating, you know, mission of abundance. You know, I think once you start your abstract legal away, you know, if you can get contracts turned around in an hour and then you can, you know, resolve disputes in an hour, you sort of you know lead to this world that's far more trusting a world where you know people aren't thinking or aren't under the pressure of people but they're actually able to do more and be more so i think you know that's a vision that dominic i shared from the very beginning

5:59Dominic Raab:and why do you think it's uh what if the big legal tech companies that we've seen with this harvey or lagora have focused so much on building a product for lawyers themselves as opposed to your mission which is all about kind of consumers or end users whether that's businesses or

6:12Quddus Pativada:individuals no i mean we think harvey and lagora are great companies i mean the way we think about it is that was the, you know, that's the first generation. You're selling to law firms, you're essentially a margin expansion exercise, you're making service providers far more effective. What we sort of see ourselves being is the second generation of legal AI and legal tech, which is actually delivering the service itself to the client. There's companies that are doing this now that, you know, we look up to and we were inspired by. But I think, you know, being able to deliver the service directly to the client, bypassing and, you know, I wouldn't say bypassing is the right word, but working together with that middle layer of, you know, licensed lawyers, licensed professionals, I think will lead to a far better experience.

6:47Quddus Pativada:And, you know, the way we see it is the lawyers are still very much part of the process. And I can let Dominic touch on this as well. And he's helped, you know, shape our strategy around this. Our, you know, lawyers are both providing the final pass. They're still providing final judgment for any of our outputs. But the AI just has the first pass to allow it to be a far more cost effective and just effective solution for the client. But Dominic, if you want to talk something about that.

7:09Dominic Raab:Yeah, look, and I had not the same story as could have. But when I set up my own consultancy, when I moved out of politics, there's a whole suite of legal issues from professional liability to contract review to tax. And I wish that there'd been something like index law there at the time, I would have managed to work out those issues in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost. But it's worth perhaps just walking through what this experience will be like for the consumer. We see this as about AI emancipating, liberating, empowering the consumer. whether that's an individual like me or Kudus or anyone else or a business consumer.

7:46Dominic Raab:And if you like, you go there and you plug into index law the details of your challenge, the wider circumstances. And what the regime, the model will do is give you a legal strategy. So already the index law USP is not again just making lawyers more efficient. It's giving the consumer the ability to devise and execute their own legal strategy. So you would get a checklist of problems, a roadmap how you go through with them. And then index law would, through the algorithms and the knowledge, start to answer those questions. At the same time, where and when you get to that stage where it's at a level more serious or more intricate that you just need that human touch, the care, the attention, responsibility that can only come with a trusted lawyer.

8:43Dominic Raab:We also then connect the client, the customer with that trusted lawyer. And that's where I think the niche is that Index, Law and Goodas have found. And if you think about it, it's not just about cutting through the inefficiencies of the current system. It's about empowering the consumer to get to the answers quicker, more efficiently, but not losing sight of that, again, that human care touch and responsibility. And I think it's that that makes index law unique. That's really interesting. Dubu, you've been in the legal sector for such a long time, both kind of before your political career and then in politics and justice department.

9:23Dominic Raab:What do you think about it, the legal sector, that makes it so ripe for disruption in the age of AI in a way that actually some professional services aren't seeing this? Accountancy probably is not quite there yet, but we are seeing a lot of amazing news cases where people are using AI to help with legal matters. Why do you think the legal sector is so ripe for disruption? I think there's two fundamental reasons. And it's changing and evolving all the time. And some of the AI models will definitely make law firms more efficient. Again, we're looking at a slightly different paradigm shift. But why is it right for reform?

9:57Dominic Raab:Partly because as a sector, it is very producer interest oriented. If you look at the structure, the lockstep partnership structure, I know that it's evolved and the US firms coming in in the 90s made a big change. But still, it's quite a sector that's governed around the producer interest. I think still, I think you look at the billable hours. When I first joined and did my articles in a law firm, you would bill the client on five minute chunks of time. And lots of things follow from that. Sentence structures follow from that. We've switched this round. Everything is about empowering the consumer to devise and execute their strategy.

10:38Dominic Raab:yes there's a bridge to the trusted lawyer at the right moment but it's about the results and the impact the the system and the model the index law will use for them and i think it's that combination you can also see i mean when i was a trainee solicitor in the late 90s 98 to 2000 you could see also that the combination of legal executives first second year qualified solicitors trainee solicitors and paralegals, that whole chunks of due diligence work was done by them. I think there's going to be less of that in the future. And that's because AI can do a lot of those things. And what you're left with is still that desire and that need for that premium level support.

11:25Dominic Raab:So what we've got is we think the fusion of the efficiencies of AI with the human touch and the expertise that in truth that the end only a lawyer can provide. And I think that's why law is particularly susceptible to this paradigm shift. By the way, I also think accountancy will end up there. But it's an interesting time in all of these professional services and that space. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about perhaps the UK or England and Wales itself? It feels that there's a particularly interesting regulatory framework in the UK. I think I saw that there's been approval for like an AI native law firm.

12:02Dominic Raab:It feels like the UK's regulatory framework for the legal sector makes what you're building particularly well suited. Can you touch on that a bit? Well, I, you know, I've obviously been involved both as a practitioner back in the day and also as a chancellor. The one thing I would say is that the regulatory regime will respond quite slowly. and again it will reflect the producer interests so i think it is amenable to reform i think reform will happen and the regulatory system will adapt but we come back to this quintessential point we are focused on the consumer of legal services and probably the regulatory system previously and here too has still been relentlessly focused on the producer interests now i'm not saying they don't matter um i still feel very deeply uh uh proud to have come up through the profession uh have a lot of contacts within it but this paradigm shift is is is important we are we are putting the consumer in the driving seat and we would expect i i'm very confident the regulatory system will adapt will be malleable to that particularly if you can keep the liability and responsibility of a trusted lawyer at the higher end of the process.

13:23Dominic Raab:And ultimately, what consumers want, and I think the public trust issue is important, and the integrity of what we do is very important, what people want to know that it's a trusted system. So having best-in-class error rates. So everyone makes mistakes. Computers, AI will make mistakes. Individuals obviously make mistakes. But narrowing down that to the very lowest level possible, I think that's something we embrace. And also then having the lawyer at the end of that to make sure you've got the integrity of the system. Again, you get to that place where we think index will be at the vanguard of a consumer experience that is more responsible, regulator friendly, but just delivers a change in the mindset and the outlook of the way you approach legal services.

14:10Dominic Raab:and I think it'll be very difficult to hold that back. We hope to be leading the charge. And can we talk specifically about the role? So you've been named founding advisor. What are the kind of things that you're going to be advising on, working on and what are the things that you're not going to be looking at? Well, look, we're feeling our way a little bit. It's an exciting time. We see month by month the concept and the index all going from strength to strength. There are institutional, legal, policy and commercial issues. I think being a handrail, a sounding board on those issues. I think what I've certainly enjoyed and could give his own perspective is thinking also about the medium term strategy in answer to a lot of the questions that you've put to us.

14:54Dominic Raab:We've been gaming out how does that work? So a sounding board on issues as they arise, contributing to the strategy. And ultimately, to make this effective in the way that the vision that could have set out, we need good partnerships. we need good partnerships with investors with clients um with larger businesses and with the legal sector and so hopefully can contribute and add value to the partnerships that index law builds yeah because you touch on perhaps like how this relationship came about you know like it's uh you know you're fairly early on in your career you've been heads down building you've had this stuff going on with your family how did kind of dominant come into the picture and then how did the role, the real role sort of materialize?

15:39Quddus Pativada:Yeah, no, no. I mean, I think to both echo what Dominic said and to answer some of the questions that you had, I think my biggest concern when I first started thinking about Index and the idea of AI-native legal services was the credibility and trust aspect. I can sort of envision what a really great client experience looks like, but would I have the first clue on how to get regulated or would I have the first clue on, am I allowed to call myself a law firm versus not? How do I think of lawyers? I think that's a missing domain expertise. I sort of saw it almost as a barrier to building the company itself, where I had sort of understanding the tech and the AI aspect itself and building the agents around the sort of space.

16:14Quddus Pativada:But actually understanding the space deeply and having someone to guide us through that. That was what we initially were looking for. And then when we came across Dominic through a mutual, I thought it was just going to be like a really great press announcement. I can announce that Dominic joined the team, probably got some inbound off of it. So it's been months now since we started working together and we hadn't announced it so far because the thing that surprised me the most was most of the value was actually internal. So we meet on a periodic basis. I'd share thoughts and product updates whenever we had them, get Dominic's sort of ideas on our go-to-market.

16:44Quddus Pativada:And then the last few months have been sort of a rollercoaster. I mean, we're going to be announcing a lot more, but we work with a government entity. We have live paying clients that we do, real services all the way from basic contract review to a company set up and new countries are expanding to. So we are working across the spectrum. I think Dominic's played a really helpful role on balancing that move fast and break things, startup ideology with how do you actually build the next big law firm or the next Latham or the next day. And I think that's sort of one of the things that he's been incredibly helpful with, helping us think through that, but then also charting out the path itself.

17:15Quddus Pativada:We have an idea of where we want to be and what the space will look like 15, 20 years from now. I think what Dominic's really been helpful is actually charting out what that looks like on a year by year basis. Does that look like I was today providing contract review for startups? A few months from now, maybe handling other practice areas, whether that's negotiations or government, and then really being that, again, that go-to legal layer for every star of every individual in the world. But it's been the pleasure of my life working with Dominic. I, again, pinch myself every time I sit down and dispel communism.

17:43Quddus Pativada:It feels like I've got the most specialized version of ChadGBT. I'm getting the former Deputy Prime Minister, but it's been awesome.

17:53Dominic Raab:That's amazing. I want to ask one final question for Alit, you guys go. What have you got to achieve in the next 6, 12, 18 months to get Index to the next stage of its journey? Yep.

18:05Quddus Pativada:I'll let Dominic give his thoughts as well. But the way we see it is we've sort of validated and proven this model of being able to deliver legal services, whether that's contract review, empty review for startups, all the way, again, to country expansion, negotiations with customers themselves. Our idea now is to validate this at scale. So we have a handful of paying clients. We're now sort of onboarding, you know, founding clients, we call them, where these are enterprise startups that we can co-develop and co-design solutions for and then sort of scale past that. We are working very methodically and in a phased approach where we're not irresponsibly sort of expanding your practice areas too quickly.

18:37Quddus Pativada:And our goal is really just to work with as many startups as possible. You know, our vision over the next six months, but even over the next five years is, you know, can we reduce the number of startups and individuals thinking about legal problems? And two, can we increase the amount of work that AI can do in that sort of end-to-end workflow? Maybe, Dominic, if you want to touch on that as well.

18:53Dominic Raab:Yeah, I think that's right. It's about scaling it up, the clients and diversifying the clients. I think that's important for a startup stroke scale up. The investor attractiveness of the company or the attraction of index law to those investors and also the relationship with lawyers. I mean, it's a revolutionary terrain. But actually, what I hope we've articulated is the fusion, the hybrid nature of it and where and how lawyers will fit into it. So that will require some partnership building as well. We're off to a really good start. I think scaling all those three areas up is going to be the key.

19:31Dominic Raab:Amazing. Well, look, best of luck with it. I'm very excited to watch you on your journey. I think it's an incredible time to build and what you're building. And yeah, thank you for taking the time.

19:39Quddus Pativada:Thank you. Thank you so much.

19:50Thank you.