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Having a close family member working in BigLaw in the United States, I can confirm that lawyers absolutely HATE time tracking — so your market is definitely valid. If you can make this work and get adopted, I know at least one person who would be very happy. As to getting product-market fit, you will have a huge issue getting traction in big law firms unless you can run the app on-premises or on the local machine, or provide some serious (read: insane) security guarantees. There are simply too many information security issues that can be existential to firms and their clients to trust any startup with cloud solutions, whatever dept it is in, M&A, IP, Litigation, or even T&E. (I've tried to suggest solutions many times for many of their information mgt issues, and it is a hard NOT EVEN CONSIDER). Perhaps if you get bought by one of the major cloud firms, they might consider it; e.g., I know they are using MS products, but IDK if they are self-hosted or not). Small firms without those kinds of issues are your best bet right now, but even some of them have litigation issues with serious InfoSec issues. Perhaps (this is just speculation) dedicated and isolated server racks for each client firm and VPNs could work. In any case, put that up-front in your sales pitches. The other thing you'll need is connections to the phone system and the lawyers' mobile phones to at least capture call logs and link them to clients. This should be easier as the firms install partitions with their own software on the phones. The other thing that takes almost the most time, is composing the description for each time block for the client to read. These entries must essentially "sell" the time block to the client, informing them of the work that was done in a way that they agree that it delivered value. If this part isn't done well, the clients tend to challenge line items on the bill, consuming valuable time and getting write-offs. Presumably, you could train the LLM on all past bills to pre-generate good descriptions for each time slot, which would help as it's easier to edit than to write from scratch. Also, doing anti-training on past entries that were written off may be very helpful (at this point, they just have forbidden word lists). You are definitely on to a hot market, and I hope you can get to market fit really soon — may the wind be at your backs! |
We completely agree about supporting large firms, either with on-prem or deployment within their cloud environment.