Finding your comparative advantage

Originally published in Deakin Law Students' Society's 'Et Cetera' Magazine.

As I entered the final years of my law degree, I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a lawyer. I’d only studied law because it was what you did if you did well in high school, and sort of liked arguing.?

But I had no idea what being a lawyer was really like. I’d never worked at a law firm, had never been inside a court room and was more of a tech-nerd at heart. At university, I’d worked at a tech company, and founded a small web development business - and loved it. Often, I wished I’d studied computer science instead of Arts/Law.

So I had a decision to make: should I try to be a lawyer, or should I try to go work in tech?

I asked a lot of people for advice on what to do. The message I got from most was: it’s easier to move out of law than back into it, so trying it out at the beginning of your career is a great time to give it a shot. Even if you don’t like it, the skills will be valuable, and you’ll never be left wondering!

My dad also provided some useful words of guidance: it’s helpful in your career to develop some sort of “comparative advantage”. Rather than trying to be the greatest technical lawyer or the most advanced software coder, if you’re one of the rare lawyers that knows tech (or vice versa) you might see things in a way nobody else does and find something that sets you apart.

With this in mind, I decided to start my career in law, and managed to score a spot in the summer clerkship program at a top tier law firm.

Working at the firm over the next few years, I learned a number of important life lessons. Firstly, I discovered work is as much about what you do as where you work. While I didn’t mind the practice of law, my personality didn’t really suit corporate culture. My generally scruffy appearance and frequent ideas for new workplace improvements were out of place in the clean-cut office where I was at the bottom of a long corporate ladder.?

Secondly, I learned that work is as much about what you do as who you work with. The advantage of working at a top tier firm was being surrounded by many exceptionally bright, high performing people. Watching and learning from them was invaluable – from the way they structured emails and organised information, to how they easily deconstructed and solved problems that seemed overwhelmingly complex.

Thirdly, I realised that there was a massive opportunity for technology to transform the legal industry. I saw that the ‘billable hour’ model of most law firms (where lawyers charge for their time) didn’t incentivise firms to invest in efficiency. As such, firms tended not to invest in technology and I saw many missed opportunities to utilise automation or software tools which were commonplace in the tech industry.

As a summer intern, I met my future Sprintlaw co-founder Tomo, a fellow graduate who shared a background in tech. Tomo had similar ideas and visions for how legal work could be done more efficiently and we spent most of our office lunchtimes discussing and exploring these ideas. Tomo also introduced me to the book ‘Tomorrow’s Lawyers’ by Professor Richard Susskind. The book helped clarify many of the ideas we’d had and set out an inspiring vision for what the future of law might look like – where legal work was increasingly systematised, commoditised and automated by technology.

Susskind’s conception of commoditising legal work strongly resonated with us. We had seen at our firm that although legal work was often truly bespoke and complex, there were also many instances of clearly ‘repeatable patterns,’ where lawyers were required to manually do the same tasks again and again. We knew this first hand because, as junior lawyers, it was us doing them.?

We thought: what would happen if these repetitive services were treated as products? What if they had fixed prices and were delivered by lawyers who, rather than working manually, used an efficient production process that was highly automated and streamlined?? This process, we thought, would be able to output legal work that was faster, cheaper, and better quality than the status quo.

We knew we were on to something, but initially weren’t sure who might be interested in providing or using these types of ‘legal products’. It wasn’t the right fit for our large firm; its main value proposition was providing tailored solutions to high end clients with novel legal problems, and the concept of fast, affordable legal products didn’t sit well with that.

After a bit of research, we discovered the perfect target market: small business. We learned that these businesses were hugely underserviced in Australia - surveys showed the majority of SMEs reported dissatisfaction using legal services, because traditional lawyers were seen as way too expensive, and too complicated and confusing to use. Yet we saw lots of patterns in the legal needs of these small businesses, with many of them needing the same kinds of services and contracts. This was an area ripe for our ‘productised’ services, which could make accessing legal help more affordable and much simpler for these clients.

We started to develop our big vision: could we build a massive online legal provider to service small businesses everywhere, offering ‘legal products’ to cover all their legal requirements?

Tomo and I decided to take the plunge and launch Sprintlaw in early 2017. By the end of the year, we had our platform up and running and we started to receive a high volume of enquiries from small businesses across Australia, and our concept of productised legal services quickly began to catch on.?

Since then, we’ve been fortunate to experience lots of success. We’ve now grown to a team of 40+ staff, helped over 30,000 small businesses and recently launched Sprintlaw in the UK.? What’s been crucial to that success is the lessons we learned from our big firm days: it’s not just about what you do, it’s about where you do it and who you do it with. For us, this means creating a team of high performers who can learn from each other in an agile, flexible working environment.

We are just at the beginning of our journey to achieve our big vision and there are plenty more lessons to be learned along the way. But so far, I’m glad I seem to have found that ‘comparative advantage’ and no longer have any regrets that I decided to be a lawyer!