Thread by @gavinsblog

*Sharp intake of breath*.

Dear Twitter folk, invariably you will find me giving out about something on here (🙈), but this time I'm asking for your help with something 1/n

*sips tea*. So some time ago (in product dev terms that always 3x longer than some time ago) I started working on a startup in the legal industry.. as anyone will tell you, building software is... difficult

One thing you often start with is a hypothesis: for example you might think that existing software is too burdensome or expensive to use, or you might pull things back to first principles and say things could be done in a new, different way

Anyways, during a lengthy High Court / Supreme Court case involving me and the National Asset Management Agency I experienced first hand how certain things work, and I got to speak to solicitors and barristers about their experiences..

This led me to speaking to many, many more solicitors and barristers. I think I've now had 100s of chats with both. Conversations like that often go in different directions, but a common theme emerged - people were frustrated with access to legal information.

Building product is difficult. You listen carefully and try to discern where the frustration lies - and what problems you could potentially fix to make that person happier in the tasks they have to perform - one framework is called Jobs to be Done (JBTD)

You can read more about JTBD here whencoffeeandkalecompete.com

Anyways, eventually after much tea and coffee and chats with lawyers you reach an early hypothesis and decide to start working on it. The rule of thumb is that this will take 3x longer than you expect to build

Then you have to find a developer (or team of developers) who can also empathise with the problems confronted by the people you've spoken to. Then you have to find finances to pay them, and you have to keep stubbornly iterating until a potential customer says; oh that's cool!

And when they do, it's like Christmas. "My hypothesis, maybe it was correct?!". And then you keep going, and chatting and iterating. You find someone who really likes the idea (the excellent @jasuarez in my case) and they join you to realise the thing - just over the horizon

And it's a rollercoaster, you have good weeks, bad weeks, good months, bad months. But always with the end goal in mind - how do we fix these problems we've identified and build something lawyers will LOVE.

We broke down the problems, but they boiled down to some core issues:

1) Judgments and decisions are sometimes hard or slow to find
2) Tracking judgments for words and phrases could be easier. Lawyers need to keep on top of things
3) Saving your knowledge can be hard

*sips tea*

The further you dig into those problems you find more. The more chats you have (thanks @ronanlupton! ) the more you realise there's even more opportunity to improve things.

Court rules for example came up frequently among both solicitors and barristers. Is this one consolidated, or not? How come they are so hard to find? When was this rule last changed?

So we set about fixing that.

Another one, particularly among solicitors engaged in litigation, was knowing the status of their case in the High Court. Traditionally you'd have to check each case manually to see if anything changed. So we automated this process instead. We tell you when a case changes.

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to track your own cases. So we copied Twitter: "follow" your case. Then we added in a time machine (as early customer @rossamcmahon called it), so that you could see when a new filing, listing or order occurred in your case.

And solicitors might need to follow dozens of cases. So we let you do that too, and get alerted only when a case is updated - so you know when your case is up for hearing or mention, or if the other side files. This leads to time saved, and frustration eased (feedback was good!)

By now we believed gosh we're onto something - we think this addressing real problems lawyers are having, *and* they're enjoying using it.

But we heard yet more problems too. Lawyers were telling us that they had to use a particular website to access decisions (invariably the official website). One small example is the Irish Tax Appeals Commission...

They publish important decisions in PDF, which means you can't easily search all those decisions together easily, or get alerted easily when new determinations are issued. So we pulled all the text out of all the PDFs, added to out system and made them easily searchable

*our. This problem persists across many many official websites. So we started adding more from these sources - including UK First Tier and Upper Tribunal Tax decisions. Always focussed on making life easier for the person who needs the information

Now we've ended up with nearly 1,000,000 documents in our system, growing daily - with the potential to add far, far more. Some solicitors and barristers don't always need all of it since they often specialise, but we know that at a minimum, many of them need at least some of it

And then we asked people if accessing all this information on your phone might be useful. Our hypothesis was that it might be, but no one had really tried it before.

Yes they said, sure if you're in a court down the country you might need to look up something, like a court rule

So we made it *all* mobile and tablet friendly. We allow a lawyer to look up any consolidated rule, or any of our million documents in our system, on their phone. Some of our early trial users said: oh wow.

And we put lots of care and thought into things like moving back and forth between things, making the text well aligned and easy to read on a screen, and linking to primary legislation where needed. Our early users appreciated it, which is always music to the ears

Fitting lots of functionality in a small screen is *hard* but we think it's been worth it. Our early users login every day to check their cases, see any new judgments, check a rule or practice direction. And it is deeply satisfying to see it in action.

And they come to us with suggestions and ideas. And we try our best to keep improving things for everyone.

We've also wanted to make it easier for some users to go deeper, so we've built some experimental tools to help. Our first was judge profiles

My background is in data journalism, and I remember the moment I did a pivot table. I love data. Some legal tech companies focus on "prediction" or "AI", but those are often overblown. Users told us they'd like to search the judgments of a judge for a keyword or phrase

So we built it. Sometimes it might be that you have to look something up because you're in front of a judge soon and you'd like to see the last time they dealt with a particular issue or law - and you might need that fast on your phone.

Other incidental data is case volume over time - but not predicting, just data. The best people to interpret the data is our users.

And since we had data on law firms we developed a prototype to show a solicitor some data about their own, or another firm. Again a prototype so we can show it practitioners and get their guidance on what data is important.

*sips cold tea*

So Twitter this is where I need an assist.

We're launching this product today and our hypothesis is that 1000s of solicitors and barristers in Ireland would save time using @vizlegal. We also think they might get the same joy our early beta users say they have.

We'd like as many lawyers in Ireland as possible to know *we exist* first of all, and second we'd like them to try us out. So if you could retweet this or mention someone on this thread who you think would benefit, please do! ☺️

We're launching the product at €99/month or €990/year.

And we're offering our first 50 early adopters a 25% discount if they sign up for a year. We are particularly keen to work with small and medium sized firms - and sole practitioners. We think they deserve better tools!

And if a team wants to sign up - we can chat and, er, do a deal, as a certain US President is known to say!

Sorry for filling your timelines. Product dev is hard, building a business is hard and pleasing customers is hard. But it's worth it for that "oh that's cool" moment.

Also: we appreciate all the support our friends and families have given us while we've slogged away building this - it's been tough, but hopefully we can delight our customers and make their work easier and save some time too.

you can sign up here right now to try us out for a 10 day trial (this is also a good way to test our signup process works ok!) 👇

app.vizlegal.com/register

If you're a solicitor or barrister in Ireland, we'd love to hear from you. If you're not from Ireland, try us anyway!

Thanks Twitter! I'm in your debt if you can spread the word.

Hopefully our hypothesis is correct 🙈

Also: if you find me reminding people of this thread or of @vizlegal over the coming days/weeks I apologise in advance.

Also: releasing a product is nerve wrecking. 😱

And our first 50 customers will have a) my eternal gratitude and b) boozy lunches are a distinct possibility, for the purposes of product feedback of course.

Addendum: also each and every one of the #first50 will get one of these very attractive mugs. It's a no brainer. *Sips tea*

Thanks Twitter! Day one: Two people have signed up for a year. We're looking for the next 48! Two teams are also keen to talk more. We're very grateful for all the support 🙌