Speaker 1: So if you've seen the show Shark Tank, it's a reality show sort of based around venture capital where people bring in ideas for companies or even companies that are already up and running and try to pitch them to the judges, to the sharks. And so we have three sharks here today. Ralph Baxter, who we all know, is the chair of the Legal Executive Institute. Dr. Ron Dolan, who's a senior research fellow at Harvard Law School. And Bill Henderson, who's at Sanjay, was caught in the hurricane. So replacing Sanjay today is Bill Henderson, who will be playing Sanjay today due to the hurricane. And we wish him well. So I'm going to introduce each of the representatives of each of the companies. And they're going to present here in the middle using the hand mics. Each company's going to have 10 minutes. That's going to be divided between an elevator pitch of about four minutes and then six minutes with engagement with the judges. Okay. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Ajay Shankar, who's the co-founder and chief executive officer of Everlaw. Take it away, Ajay.

Speaker 2: Thanks. Yeah. My name is Ajay. I'm like Scott. I don't have a legal background. My background is actually technical. I'd agree. You don't need to apologize for that. That's fine. I'll make an argument why that's actually a good thing. Good. Please. Go ahead. I think we're all in the same way where we think of ourselves more as a tech company that happens to do legal rather than the other way around. Right? So we make a litigation platform. There you go. So if you look at litigation tools today, there are many of them. It's a very vibrant system, and yet it's still very complex. It's a very big market. Something I think worth addressing. Anyone here who does litigation, I think, would agree with that. But what are the problems you face today? I mean, this is something that, to me, was interesting coming into this space, that there's a lot of people trying to do this, and yet there's some dissatisfaction. So in a couple arenas, one is that there's a lot of data and a lot of moving parts, and the amount of data is only increasing. Software you use, if you get to use it, is typically aging enterprise software. It's updated once a year. Very buggy and slow. Or it's using pen and paper and boxes and binders. It's hard to coordinate, review and analysis. It's hard to take information that's extracted in one part of the process and integrate it into the next part of the process. And finally, one of the most interesting ones is that there's typically poor collaboration between in-house and outside counsel. These two teams are nominally working together, but it's still very hard to communicate. And so, to me, it's an interesting question. Why do these problems still exist? A lot of people are trying to solve this. Well, the first thing is that these are hard problems. This isn't a photo-sharing app or messaging app. This is something that's really hard to do. But the second observation, I think, is that when you actually look at the problems, they're not legal problems. They seem like legal problems. It's in the legal space. And so, what I'm actually talking about is big data at scale, artificial intelligence, real-time collaboration. These are technical problems, not legal problems. And that's why we're solving them. And that's to get to that point about approaching these from a really technical angle. And so these are the things that we're trying to solve. So our solution here is a platform that focuses on solving all those challenging technical problems so that legal professionals can focus on the practice of law. So there's three main components here. One is state-of-the-art engineering and artificial intelligence. So state-of-the-art, not in terms of just legal, but state-of-the-art in the computer software industry itself. Two, really deep collaboration. Law is a collaborative endeavor. We should have the tools to match. And three, a consumer-level experience. So moving this kind of software away from a necessary evil or something that I have to use, but I don't like it, to something that you really love to use. Something like the phones that lawyers have, a great piece of technology that they like to use, makes them do their job better, helps them win their cases. So that ends up being really important here. So I like to show, rather than tell, I'm an engineer, so I can't actually do a demo here, but I will show you kind of screenshots of our actual product, and this is how it works. So it does everything from discovery all the way through presentation and litigation. So for instance, in search. So if you want to build a complicated search, you don't have to learn a complex query language. You don't have to wait eight or 10 seconds to find a result. Search runs in three-tenths of a second on a million-plus documents. It's a drag-and-drop visual search that lets you find exactly the documents that you need. Every step of the way, even if you're presenting a search term report or something abstract like that, we're able to build a software that makes us very accessible to people who need to get at this data but don't have to learn a complex technical interface. Artificial intelligence is geared around really two things. One, producing great results for our users in a way that's clear and understandable. We kind of make it very accessible. We point out the documents that are super important to you without you having to go through an abstract workflow. And two, really building trust between the system that we have and the lawyers and the teams that use it. Okay? So AI is great, but when it looks like a black box, something opaque, it's hard to really embrace it. If your job's on the line and you have to trust the system, it's hard to do. So we really work to make sure, for instance, in this screenshot here, we'll show you the areas of your corpus of data where the system is doing a very good job, but we'll also point out the areas where it's not doing a great job, where it doesn't understand the documents well. We'll point you in that direction and you can focus on those documents like that square at the bottom of this graph here and really hone into that so you don't miss anything and you're also going to improve the performance of the system by analyzing those documents. We'll give you concrete steps about what to do next to make sure that you're building that trust. So ultimately, you're going to use this tool to augment your practice, right? So it's almost as if this is an elf in your back pocket to bring to bear. And finally, we have real-time collaborative tools for chronology building, outline building, workflow analysis, all that other stuff. Really collaborative. You can work on these things at the same time, whether you're in New York and I'm in L.A. or vice versa, all built together to make sure your evidence seamlessly moves from discovery to the courtroom.

Speaker 1: Okay, great. Sharks. Any questions? Do you rate your doctor viewers?

Speaker 2: We actually provide statistical measures of accuracy for doctor viewers, yeah. You can actually, within a couple weeks or even less, you can identify who's doing a great job and who's not. What did Andreessen like about you? We're funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley company. Why do they like us? I think they liked that we have a technical event to this. I think they appreciated the difficulty of the problem from a technical angle. That was appealing to them. I think second, the approach we have of really bringing what we think is a consumer-level experience to the space. You know, lawyers are people, too. So non-lawyers are as well as we've already established.

Speaker 3: Do you measure user happiness?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Of course. We take NPS.

Speaker 4: You name it. Okay. How did you get pulled into this industry as a technologist? You could have gone to any industry, but here you are working in law.

Speaker 2: That's a great question. When I was in grad school, I was a technical expert for a law firm for a couple cases. I was just consulting for them, just meant to be a little gig, and it ended up being really interesting to me to see firsthand the importance of technology in this space, the cry for confidence. When was that? That was before the previous startup I did. That was in 2008, 2007, 2008. And I founded this company, got up and running in 2011.

Speaker 3: Do you have an API to integrate with Allegory?

Speaker 2: We do not.

Speaker 3: We don't have any APIs at the moment. Should the market size be about a tenth of what it is? In other words, eDiscovery overall, a multi-10 billion market, but the inefficiencies in there are outrageous. You're working on margins that are a fraction of, I think, what some of your competitors are working on.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it turns out that one interesting thing is that the complexity and size of the cases keeps going up. We've raised our prices every year, successfully. Believe it or not, as we increase the robustness of the product.

Speaker 3: That's a good model.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's the law firm model. Once you buy into the product, we lock you in for life. So we grandfather in everybody who joins early, so it's a nice incentive. The second thing is the problems we're attacking here are not just limited to discovery. It's what happens after discovery for the next 24 months, and that's a very inefficient process where there's a lot of room for doing a better job.

Speaker 4: Who's on the management team? What's the other? Can you describe the other key principles that are making strategic decisions at Everlaw?

Speaker 2: We have 30 people, and five of them are actually our lawyers. That helps. But we have someone in charge of business development, someone in charge of sales, newly hired, someone in charge of marketing, accounts, customer service, engineering, all the standard things you expect in a tech company.

Speaker 1: Do you think UI or the back end is really the selling point of this particular? A lot of the platforms look like 747 cockpits, and I noticed that this is better.

Speaker 2: I think it's the UI, and for the following reason, that no one should care what's on your back end. I've always found it funny when some vendors will go out and tout that they're using a NoSQL back end or whatever. That doesn't matter at all, and I can assure you your choice of database is not why your platform is slow. If you go to Google, under the search bar, say we're using Bigtable or whatever, it doesn't matter. Is it an awesome service? Is it fine what you want? We want to take all that off the table for them and say, is this a great experience or not? To answer your question, it should just be the experience that they have, and the back end shouldn't matter at all. Okay.

Speaker 3: Do you get viral marketing when you're in litigation and the other side of things?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. That's actually been ... We actually just, after this round of funding, just hired a sales leader a couple months ago. Before that, all our growth was viral. People just talking about us, co-litigants working together, and actually, in certain cases, people across the aisle from each other.

Speaker 4: They say they can't do without Everlaw because why? Why can't they do without it?

Speaker 2: When you have these problems, okay, so you have a litigation, you have fixed deadlines and you have a fixed volume of documents, it's not even about billable hours anymore. You're already going to saturate your hours before the deadline. It's what can you find in your corpus that's going to push your case forward. We can help you do a better job of that, find more important documents more quickly. You're going to win more often.

Speaker 4: The gold standard in litigation is winning. Is the winner going to go to the best technology or the best user experience?

Speaker 2: Those are absolutely entwined. I don't think they're any different. If you look at why you like your iPhone or Android, it's because of great technology. It masquerades, in some sense, as user experience. Those things are absolutely hand-in-hand. You can't do one without the other.

Speaker 5: Your target market is law firms?

Speaker 2: We started with law firms. Our sweet spot was law firms from 30 or 50 attorneys up, but now we're moving as we broaden the spectrum to law firms that are even smaller, but primarily focus on the big ones. We now also have corporate clients. We also have a lot of government entities that use us. Thirty-four of the 50 state attorneys general use EverLaw, so there's quite a lot of adoption. The more complex the case, the more this makes sense today, and that'll be bigger and bigger.

Speaker 5: The corporate clients use you when they're doing it themselves, or they require their outside counsel to use you or both?

Speaker 2: A little bit of both. Oftentimes, they get the data in the system early, and when they're ready to engage outside counsel, they just hand it off. That's one of the things where having these really collaborative tools where you and I can work together makes a lot of sense. One last question, please.

Speaker 4: Your early adopters were 30 to 50 lawyer firms? They weren't the huge firms? Your early adopters?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. The huge firms take ... There's a sales cycle that's six to eight months long. We're actually ...

Speaker 1: That's all six to eight months? Yeah.

Speaker 2: It might be a little longer. That's just to have that first conversation. Yeah, but the midsize ones are the ones that are nimble where the partners can make more decisions themselves. Now we're moving, working with big firms and running POCs and all the normal stuff.

Speaker 4: That was an awesome, good decision on your part.

Speaker 2: Thank you. All right, EverLaw. Thank you, AJ. EverLaw. Thank you. Thank you.