2236 - Enhancing Efficiency in State Trial Court Litigation with Trellis Law's Alon Shwartz

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1:05With us right now, it's Alon Schwartz. Alon, you are the co-founder and COO of Trellis Law. You're found on the web at trellis.law. Alon, it's great to have you. Great to be here with you, Josh. Very nice to meet you. Yes, yes. Well, listen, before we talk about the work that you do and the work that Trellis does in the world, yourself personally, I don't know if there's any hobbies that you're really into, movies, TV shows, games, anything that you're doing in your personal life that you are currently geeking out on? Oh, for sure. So I like workouts. I'm one of those, you know, part of the cult called CrossFit, right?

1:48I'm joking, right? So the last weekend, every Memorial Day, which just happened yesterday, we had a really crazy workout that was a lot of fun, called Murph. I'm sure some of the... You're a CrossFitter. Yeah, well, 15 years now, yes. Oh my gosh. Why do you stick with CrossFit? It goes across a lot of things I do and a lot of things I read or listen to. There's optimism there, right? There's optimism there. You can do things that you didn't imagine you can do. You used to have back problems. Now you can lift really heavy lifts. You can do things you can't imagine you can do. I also think that sports for me is really important because it's not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, it really helps all around, right?

2:34It's, it's way more than just staying fit. It's really staying happy. Goes across a lot of things I do, you know, movies I watch, things I read, you know, just about optimism, right? Cause it can be really challenging sometimes. Well, and that's the thing that, you know, I've, I've had friends that have been really into CrossFit and they're like, yeah, Josh, it's so much more than just exercise. Like it is, it's, it's about mindset and that sort of thing. It sounds like that's what you're saying as well. Yes. Again, it's, it's important if you run a marathon, if you're doing Ironman, whatever you do, you know, put whatever you can into it because that goes into being an entrepreneur, right?

3:14It's hard. And, you know, sometimes many times you get stuck on your, you know, things are challenging and it's not as what you imagined and you need to power through. This is kind of a daily reminder of, you know, if you would just power through many times, most times it's in our mind, not necessarily in our muscles, right? So if we set ourselves to a success, we can do it. I love it. I love it. Okay. So let's talk about Trellis, the website trellis.law to our friend that's following along that if you want to kind of open up the website so you can see exactly what we're talking about. But if you were to sum up what Trellis is and who you serve within just like a minute or so, Do you mind giving it a shot?

3:56Please do. Yeah, of course. Trellis, if you need to pitch up my business, of course I'll do. Trellis is geared, it's around state trial court. So it's basically geared toward litigators as an attorney's, the litigating in the state trial court system, not the federal side of the legal system, on the state trial court. but it's also super helpful for insurance companies, corporations like Uber and others, academia. So it's multiple verticals for anyone who needs information around state trial court litigation. That's the foundation. On top of that, we have analytics like judicial, like judge analytics.

4:37And of course, on top of that, AI, which of course you may have heard it's something that's going to be huge one day, right? a generative AI that helps attorneys to draft motions, understand the litigation, who's against them on the other side of the V, right? So I can talk about it for a long time, but I'm sure that's not what we're here for. But trellis law is really about anyone who's dealing with state trial court litigation, that's the place to be. Yeah. Well, do you mind maybe just sharing for someone that's completely not in this world. Maybe it's kind of a time for an explain like I'm five.

5:16Do you mind giving us a little bit more perspective? Now you're speaking to a group of sixth graders. Do you mind kind of breaking it down for us dummies that don't understand this world very well? Absolutely. So the first thing is if you have a case against you, whether you're an attorney or a party in a case, you can find it on a trellis. The way the state trial court system is built is that it's potentially available, but extremely hard to find. So that's the first level. You can find any case for the last 20 plus years, regardless of the 3 ,000 courts in the country. There are 3 ,000 courts.

5:52We have them all, pretty much 47 states, 46 states. Then you have a judge. Judge Smith is presiding on your case. What is the likelihood of that judge to rule in your favor, whether you're plaintiff or defense? We can tell you that based on the last five, 10 years of that judge litigating, we can tell you what is the likelihood of them to rule in your favor. That'd be nice, right? Before you even, how long will this, if we go all the way to trial, how long will it take? What is your chances of winning? A lot of that falls into what we call the judicial analytics. Beyond that, if you're an attorney and let's say you're my opposing counsel, Josh, and I'm on the other side.

6:38What do I know about you? I've never, I never went to any, I didn't have any case with you. Well, you press a button and it will tell you everything about you based on your history. I want to know if I'm a client and I've just been sued. Give me all the strategy about my case so I can be prepared. Not just know that someone is suing me. Well, that's super helpful, but tell me all the strategy based on a thousand other cases that share the exact same criteria as my case. So we are truly elevating the practice of law to a whole new level based on, we have tremendous amount of cases, hundreds of cases in our database.

7:18So it's, we have data that no one else has, basically. It's all about data. um are how often are your users in-house counsel um law firms or clients uh kind of doing their own research all the time but if you were to break it down like who's is it all of the above oh for sure there's law okay uh law firms uh in-house counsel i can't give you specific names right now, but it's okay. No, no, no. I'm not asking for that, but you've got, you've got, I'll happy to, I'm not sure they will allow me to, um, small law firms, large law firms, a lot of, uh, individuals, you may have Googled your name. You can find the case that you're currently on.

8:03If you're a pro se, like a representing yourself, we have all the information. We have all of these cases indexing Google, which is how we get all of our traffic. So we have tremendous amount of inbound traffic from Google. This is really good. Wow. Okay. So I'm just thinking of cost savings. Do you mind addressing that? Because I'm thinking if I historically have had to pay my law firm to do a ton of manual research so that we can have our best chance of success, and now they can do in days, which historically may have taken and then months to do, I'm thinking about my legal bill and I'm smiling because that's gonna save me a lot of money.

8:51And I don't know if my day - So you are right. What's that? You're right. And we'll see, right? So yes, law firms now can do research way more efficiently, cut time by a factor of 10, right? When it comes to research, when it comes to drafting, when it comes to preparation, all of that can be done faster. whether law firms will lower their costs. That's a whole other question. And I'm sure they'll find ways how to obviously keep making money. So there are clients, I'm not going to say anything other than that. But yes, it is efficiency and likelihood of winning a case goes tremendously high when you use Trellis because you already have a leg up.

9:39You have the biggest, the largest repository of cases in the country, you have AI that's working and helping you as another brain to prepare for any step of the case. Time to any task goes down significantly, and the likelihood of success goes up significantly. Yeah. Because in the past, again, you'd have some, either you have an attorney who's worked with every single judge and just, oh, trust me, I know how this judge works, right? There's that, that's one way, right? But they're still gonna need to do their research for all the case law and stuff. So, you know, again, they're just gonna, again, very cumbersome process now that AI can synthesize and make available.

10:28And the cost seems to be pretty accessible. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about pricing? It's very reasonable. I mean, we definitely charge it by size of law firm and number of attorneys and such things. But it is not insanity. I like to think about it as what is the return on investment? So if you're a law firm, a midsize or large law firm, even a small law firm, you need to really use our product and probably get one client and you already paid for it. You already paid for the product. the likelihood of you getting more client, what we call the business of law, as well as winning cases, which is the practice of law, increases dramatically.

11:14And both of these factors are greatly helpful by Trellis. So from an ROI, I don't think, you know, from historically, from what we know from our customers, it is measured in months, not in years, ROI. Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess, you know, I'm curious about the, when someone, well, when someone starts this, it's again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm on your website right now. And I'm just like, I mean, it's, it's super easy to get started too. It's not like, I mean, you got to, obviously you got a demo, but like, I'm looking at the pricing. I clicked on the pricing tab and I can get started with a free trial.

11:56And, you know, currently it's, you know, under$200 a month. Yes,$129. You can start easily. Play with that. Try it out. If you're a small law firm, if you're an individual attorney, absolutely. Just put your car card, try it out. Two weeks. You can always contact us, contact me directly, right? Or any of our amazing team. And yeah, if you need to get additional features, if you need to scale up, all of that's possible. but we make it super easy to get started. Do you want to try it? Free trial. Don't owe us anything. You don't have to pay anything. Get it for two weeks. Do whatever you need to do.

12:34Do you provide, and it looks like, let's say someone needs backup. Do you provide backup? I see a line here that says, expert research support when you need it. And your customer success team is made up of former attorneys. Do they get hands-on? So we are not a law firm. So we're not going to help you with the strategy of the case. will help you on how to use our product to find and create what you need to create. So if you need to find something, sometimes when you have hundreds of millions of cases, it's really hard sometimes to find what you're looking for. We can definitely help you with that as well as navigate the product.

13:11We're not a law firm, so we can't help you with strategy. And then, Elon, as far as the company itself, tell me about Trellis and your growth. and your plan for continued growth? What does that look like for you? Right. Our goal is to master and really be the number one source for any state trial court litigation. Two seconds about how the system works and the legal system works in the United States. You have the federal side, which you have multiple products like LexisNexis and Westlaw, that are known and then been around for ages And you pretty much have to have that if you're practicing law.

13:57State trial court on the other side, which means any kind of trial court, like I'm in LA. So LA Superior Court, for example, has 30 courts. And then in California alone, we have 60 something counties with about 100 plus courts. Each one of them is a different place, a different website, it's a different system. Everything is different. times the country, you have 3 ,000 courts. So no one ever thought that getting all this information from all these courts is possible. It was considered crazy until my co-founder, Nicole, Nicole Clark and I, okay, this is not that crazy. Let's do it. And of course, people smiled kind of like, yeah, that would be cute if you guys can do even a small part of that.

14:46And now we have 46 states and over 3 ,000 courts. the picture is different right so that's why it's complicated that's why it's so valuable because in one place you have access to everything and every court in every case throughout history and then everything could be built on top of that from analytics like if you're a law firm you want to understand your uh not just your opposing cuts you understand the other competitive law firms who are their clients what are the cases how do they win their kids what's their playbook how that it works so you can really win against them, we give you all of that ammunition by clicking the button.

15:24Very powerful. Elon, in terms of like, how do your clients typically find you at this point? Multiple one. We have millions and millions of index pages on Google. So if you Google any case, any judge, you'll find us there. So that's one way. We work really hard on our SEO and how to be discovered. And of course, we have an outbound sales team that are reaching out. We're using marketing, which is one reason I'm here with you, Josh. Yeah, sure. So marketing, outbound sales, inbound sales. Love it. Trellis.law, when somebody, Alon, goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? Try it out.

16:07Try it out. I mean, it's, we really, our goal and my goal, because I'm also leading product, is to make it easy, make it usable, make it discoverable. Put your, if you're looking for a case for a judge, navigate, try it out a little bit. It's not complicated. You will find what you're looking for. Beyond that point, try, yeah, put your credit card, try it on our free trial. It doesn't cost you anything. You can always cancel at any time. You don't even have to contact support. You can go to the website and cancel it. Try it out. Trust me, you'll find it super useful. I love it. All right. Alon Schwartz, co-founder and COO of Trellis Law, the website trellis.law.

16:50Alon, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, it was a pleasure. Looking forward to meeting with you again.

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