Chutzpah

 

Never in my life would I have thought that the word "chutzpah" existed in English. The editor of Legaltech News, Zach Warren, uses it to describe one of the character traits it takes to launch a legaltech startup. In addition, he says, it takes vision and the ability to think as precisely as possible into the situation of the desired user. There's a lot of truth to that.

Many founders fail at even describing their customers. You often hear "all lawyers" or "all attorneys". Maybe you should also generally move away from this customer group-based mindset and instead ask the question, "what pain are you trying to solve with your new product?" Then it's time to show your colors.

One example: from the current study by Wolters Kluwer - I already mentioned it last week - you can read that standardization of contracting is a very important topic for law firms and for corporate legal. But why is that, really? Is it about the speed at which new contracts can be created, or is it about ensuring quality? In the former case, systems like Bryter or top.legal can actually help by analyzing the most important contracts and putting them into a question-answer grid with all the options provided. In the second case, it is more about the internal workflow and ensuring that all valid templates and text modules are actually stored in a defined location and that all employees are obliged to access only these quality-checked modules.

Certainly, the answers will be mostly ambiguous. But the message is: you have to understand your customer very well and know his pains as well as possible before you start developing a new software product. And exactly the same applies to customers facing the introduction of new tools. First define your pains and then deal with possible solutions!

PS: Even if founders have defined the parins and found a solution, it will still be a very long journey that requires a lot of chutzpah.