27 things to know about legal tech (and counting)

I've been deeply involved with dozens of legal tech companies and projects, and I've been keeping a list of things I've learned. Here are some to start, with more to come.

Please share your own learnings, and connect to talk about what you're building .

Product

1. If your app touches client data you need to attend to attorney-client privilege in your design. One result is that permissions may be more complicated that you think.
2. Access to a critical data asset for the legal industry -- the written law itself -- is fragmented and expensive. This is a serious barrier to innovation.
3. While the Microsoft stack dominates among legal professionals, many in-house lawyers are on Google (and are underserved).
4. Law-firm client data lives in Outlook and monolithic document management systems (iManage and NetDocs). They are not super friendly development environments and are hard to penetrate (except on behalf of common clients).
5. Every legal practice area is a world of its own, with distinct software and workflow requirements.
6. Lawyers have a distinct ethical obligation as a data steward for their clients. As a technical matter, they often don't know what that really means.
7. I've never seen a company start SOC-2 certification too soon, but many who waited too long.

Growth

1. Lawyers go to more than their share of events and conferences (see the complete list) , in part to meet continuing education requirements. Attending and exhibiting (when done right) can be highly effective investments for a startup.
2. Product-led growth through trials and freemium is a challenge in legal tech given the sensitivity of client data. If you're providing demo access, pre-populate the data.
3. More than anything else, lawyers really want to win for their clients. If you can, make victory a part of your message.
4. 98% of lawyers are on LinkedIn, in part because they thrive on referrals from other lawyers. Developing personas in Sales Navigator lets you put a face to your buyer and size your opportunity.
5. State bar associations are actively involved in promoting vendor content, exhibitions and discount offers. To get started, study what you can do in California , New York and Texas .
6. Efficiency is highly quantifiable in an industry with high hourly billing rates. Offer an ROI calculator and be careful not to underprice.
7. It's great to be in integration marketplaces with larger legal tech companies, but they won't give you much promotion until you have lots of common customers.
8. Lawyers are easy to reach directly through emails on their website. Although they'll ignore you, they'll probably read your subject line.
9. Lawyers are readers. Give them something good to read. Anticipate and answer their questions. Go further than you otherwise would on documentation.
10. Lawyers are more distracted than most people by typos in your copy and errors in your grammar. Always give it one more read.
11. Social proof really matters because lawyers are naturally skeptical and lawyers are competitive.
12. In addition to sites like Capterra , G2 and Azure Marketplace , your legal tech software should be listed and reviewed in Theorem , Legal Tech Hub , Lawyerist , Law Next and LinkedIn Product Pages .

Law Firms

1. There's a significant generational divide within law firms as to the use of technology. Consider partners and associates to be different user and marketing personas.
2. Ethical walls are a significant data challenge within a law firm, which is compounded by new data uses like GenAI, which may train models across clients.
3. Even though it is channel and source of truth for legal work product, email remains relatively unexplored as a data set. Microsoft Copilot may change this.
4. Firms spend a ton of money on marketing, and even more if you count the lawyer time that goes into publishing law firm memos and updates. These efforts are underserved by software.
5. Law firm logos on a vendor's site gives you no idea of how many people are actually using the product.
6. Depth of true technical innovation efforts varies widely across law firms. Sometimes these efforts are performative for clients.
7. Law firms often require client consent for the sharing of data with certain software applications.
8. The smaller the firm, the less exacting they probably will be about vendor security.

What have you learned so far on your legal tech journey? Let's connect.

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