Issue 2: Getting ready for Microsoft Copilot and an upgrade for your trust center
Welcome to the second edition of the Legal Builders newsletter, and thanks for following! If you're finding it useful, please share it with a fellow builder.
This week I'm covering:
Copilot getting closer
Microsoft announced pricing for Copilot , the AI tool soon to be launched across the Microsoft suite. The AI helper will cost $30 per month per user, which nearly matches the price of the apps themselves (or triples it for certain tiers). Apparently Microsoft believes that they are entitled to some portion of the $7 trillion in global GDP to be created by AI.
Hopefully you've spent some quality time thinking about how whatever you're building will fit into a Copilot world, where Microsoft's AI helper will be deeply embedded into the apps your customers use all day long.
Copilot will crush the dreams of many companies, both startups and legacy players, especially in areas like contract management. But for builders it can be an amazing opportunity because Copilot's plug-in architecture looks to be a surprisingly open platform for third-party services. This means:
Of course, Copilot will require you to think completely differently about your application, both as a conversational experience and one that manipulates Office data directly. More than anything, it requires that you focus like a laser on your core value proposition.
Good luck, and in the mean time, here are some useful links for staying on top of Copilot and plugins:
Security-Disclosure-as-a-Service
If you attended our security workshop last year, you heard us talk a lot about the importance of showcasing security credentials on your website, given the heightened sensitivity felt by legal software buyers.
Like everything else, security disclosure has been getting its own SaaS treatment, and I’m intrigued with SafeBase , which gathers and presents your company's security profile in a standardized format. It also allows you to grant permissioned access to deeper information (like audits) that you might not want freely available on your site. Vanta does something similar, and no doubt there are and will be others. Buyers appreciate the standardization of the process and it should save sales teams time in the security stage.
I particularly like the way SafeBase uses customer logos as part of their trust disclosure; a nice idea for any trust center.
领英推荐
Take a look at how OpenAI implemented their trust center on SafeBase , and consider how yours would compare. For most early-stage companies, the comparison may be hard to take, but at least now you have a handy checklist.
Pro tip: Soon enough, these dashboards will also incorporate a set of standards that are developing around AI applications, like the MIT Principles . Because these are still somewhat vague, claiming compliance may be straightforward and not costly. It's worth showcasing those logos now in your trust or security center and other sales collateral.
Random question: These security centers make great sense for software vendors, but shouldn't we also see these kinds of published security credentials for law firms, who handle plenty of sensitive client data and are writing code more and more?
This week's tip: Ditch Calendly
Appointment schedulers like Calendly are incredible time savers, eliminating the back and forth in booking meetings. Putting a scheduler on your website creates a much stronger call to action than a contact form.
But if you're paying $8+ a month for Calendly, you might consider Google's own free version , which is now available in all Google Calendars (personal or business accounts). It's free, and in many respects, works even better than Calendly. (It doesn't have some of the team-driven and other features that hard-core sales teams need.)
To start using it, just open your Google Calendar and pull down the new event button and select "Appointment schedule." You can embed your calendar on any website and add it as a link in your email footer.
Event pick
Since last week we've added more than 20 new listings to the calendar of US Legal Tech event opportunities . Give it a scan and I bet you'll find some places where your customer and partner prospects will be congregating. Last week's edition included some suggestions for making the most of your event motion (including who you want to target, setting up advance meetings, working over your elevator pitch and nailing post-conference follow up). Get in touch for a free consult on your event plan.
Here's this week's event pick:
August 21-23, 2023 | Houston TX
This conference focuses on non-lawyer legal professionals, but there will also be many lawyers and law firm administrators attending. (Check out the confirmed attendee list .) The exhibitor list isn't huge, but sponsors include many of the usual suspects, like Clio, Filevine and LawPay. (Sponsorship details and pricing are here .) There are several ticket options (including a single day pass), all of which are below $500, and early-bird registration ends July 23.
PS Since you read this far (and you might be sort of into events), I'm looking for beta readers to try a much richer version of the calendar (built on Notion). Please message me if you'd be willing to take a look and give me some input.
A CTO and futurist who demystifies the impact of emerging technologies and pursues their opportunity to transform product offerings and create new markets. I love hairy problems!
1 年In the area of patents I'm intrigued by the idea that CoPilot might imply that the content of a patent has already entered the public sphere by being written in Office (if CoPilot is connected). How can we audit the current setting for CoPilot for all users who may do inventive work and prove they did not disclose? In addition the USPTO has ruled an AI is not an inventor, but what if there is even slight evidence that an patent was co-invented by an AI because of CoPilot input, be it specific wording, or earlier concept generation that led to invention? Might AI taint the patent IP process?
Experienced LegalTech Product Manager and Attorney | Passionate about leveraging AI/LLMs
1 年I'm really excited to see this development. I think tools like Copilot reset the baseline of what an LLM product should be. Right now, that baseline is basically "ChatGPT wrappers" that puts summaries and generation and extraction at your fingertips in a few new places. Copilot says that approach is not good enough. Particularly once we see whatever finetuning MS has developed to aid in common content generation use cases. Natural language as a "near-general purpose interoperability layer" is such a powerful capability, and as you said, this really puts the pressure on developers to think big in order to compete. And, that's good for customers.