Intro Music

‍

Tyler Finn

Is it possible to carve out a meaningful career in the law by following your passions? What's harder, building a nonprofit or a business?

And I like this one. What do lawyers have to learn from animators? Today, we are joined on the abstract by my friend Adam Stavsky, founder of Briefly. Briefly helps organizations like Zoom, Orick, and Guild distill complicated legal concepts for their business and other non-nerdy lawyer stakeholders.

Before starting briefly, Adam was the founder and executive director of the New Media Advocacy Project, which uses video and narrative content to drive change around human and civil rights issues. He started his career in a slightly more traditional way as a clerk at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as a Skadden Fellow at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and doing litigation at Debevoise.

A note to be fully transparent on this one. I've been working with Adam a little bit for a few months, advising briefly on my own time because I like the mission. ah I think he's a cool and interesting guy, as you will learn. And I like working with cool and interesting people. So just wanted to tell you all about that. Adam, thanks for joining us today.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Thanks, Tyler. Interesting, maybe. Cool. I'm not so sure about anymore.

‍

Tyler Finn

Well, cool cool means different things, right? Not everyone has to be a rock star.

‍

Adam Stofsky

We're literally cool today. It's like sort of zero degrees up here in the Hudson valleys.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah, um I don't always ask this question anymore. I used to ask it more often, but I think it's interesting giving your career path and your career journey. Why did you want to become a lawyer? What what drove you to go to law school?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Interesting. I didn't want to become a lawyer. Actually, my my mom um mom was ah was a teacher right for years. She was a single single mom. I grew up with just my mom in Brooklyn in ah in the 80s.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And she ah I ended up going to St. Anne's, this really nice private school, and she had to be able to afford it.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And so she changed jobs and became a headhunter, like a legal recruiter, kind of in the 80s.

‍

Tyler Finn

Huh.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And so for my entire like late middle and high school year, she was placing big law lawyers into, before that term existed probably, big law lawyers into other jobs at big law firms. And she just told me over and over again how miserable so many lawyers were. I had in my mind, like I'm not going to be a lawyer. I can be anything but a lawyer. um Because she saw you know she she she saw this, frankly, kind of negative. People wanted to leave their jobs.

‍

Adam Stofsky

um But to answer your question, after college I was a bit lost, didn't quite know what to do, ended up traveling around the world for a year, just me and a backpack. $5,500 I was able to travel around the world for you. This is in the very late 90s.

‍

Tyler Finn

For a year?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Mm-hmm.

‍

Tyler Finn

Wow.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I spent three of those months in India and another month and a half in Nepal. That helped.

‍

Tyler Finn

Amazing.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It was much cheaper back then. Yeah, it was pretty cool. But ah during that trip, i kind of I ended up finding my way to various um kind of volunteering with various human rights organizations or like kind of relief organizations in various ways.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I didn't never realize you could like do that as a job and got very interested in the idea of doing human rights work.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mhm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Partly because, you know, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and, and I was just kind of compelled by the idea of doing this kind of work. Um, and ended up kind of pursuing that. So I got a home from this trip.

I actually, I was really into rock climbing and mountain biking those days. So I, I got a job at Eastern mountain sports and Columbus circle. And I was just like selling backpacks um while trying to find a job.

‍

Tyler Finn

Cool.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And this woman stumbled in. ah who with her um her wife, and they were trying to outfit themselves for a backpacking trip, and we were chatting, and she was the General Counsel, or I think Associate General Counsel, at the Open Society Institute, which was what is now Open Society Foundations.

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Much different back then, but it was George Soros' foundation, one of the major funders of human rights work. We started chatting, and and I said I was interested in doing human rights, and she said, a why don't you come in for a for an informational interview and just passed forward about six months, she became my boss, right? She hired me as a new legal assistant. And I was working in a general counsel's office of a big human rights foundation.

Now, I didn't really love the general counsel type work. You know, I was more just a substance of work, which I got involved in to some degree, but they kind of convinced me if you want to do human rights work and you don't have a serious subject matter expertise in a particular country or region, the best way to do it is to become a lawyer because the whole world of human rights is becoming a lawyer.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah, Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Legalized over the years. And so that's kind of why I went to law school. I had no particular other reason why it's like I want to do human rights work. This seems a good way in. And then when I got to law school, I actually loved it. I i found law just really compelling as a subject. so But that's how it happened.

‍

Tyler Finn

How'd you end up at Debevoise? You would think of that as the most traditional part of your whole resume, and yet that's the thing that stands out as almost like the most distinct or like the piece that adhering this story to about your interest in human rights way predating law school, which I didn't really know. um That's the thing that's different.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, it's interesting, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

That's the odd man out.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, so, well, you know, I, when I was in law school, I got sort of sucked into it, right? I loved it. I found it really interesting. And you know, you, I went to Harvard, right?

‍

Adam Stofsky

There's a lot of kind of, to be honest, a cultural pressure and prestige pressure to do prestigious things.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mmhmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And one of those things is going to work in a big law firm. And so, and I kind of thought, well, I kind of want to do human rights work. Wouldn't it be great to like make a little bit of money beforehand to be able to do that without worrying? and So I kind of thought, well I'll just do this, I'll do some on-campus interviews.

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure

Adam Stofsky

I just picked like three or four firms that I knew had good pro bono programs and they could do the things I wanted. And and these very charismatic ah partners at Demavoise, including this this ah this one guy, Mike Gillespie, who I think may have just either step down or take an off-counsel role and create a great guy, very charismatic.

Adam Stofsky

He just gave me the hard sell and said, you can do all these wonderful things at this firm. It's a lovely place to work. ah You should give it a shot. And so there's really this one guy that kind of talked me into it. um and And that's how I ended up there.

I did I did interview at some other places, but I think, I don't know, once you get locked into a place and get the idea that you could thrive there, that's where you end up up going.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

You know So yeah, that's that's pretty much it. It was really down to the end of the person.

‍

Tyler Finn

Was it hard to to leave and go back to human rights work? how How did that come about? Was that a gradual sort of, yeah, like I mean then then starting the New Media Advocacy Project, was was that a gradual transition or was that like, ah i you know i'm I'm kind of over the big law thing.

‍

Adam Stofsky

You mean, you mean deep in WL?

‍

Tyler Finn

I need to do something different. I'm gonna go and start this organization. How did that transition come about for you?

‍

Adam Stofsky

I'm trying to think back to give you like an honest answer because it's interesting, right? Like you get, you know, so I really didn't like big law life.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Like I really did. So I had done, I clerked for the ninth circuit and I was actually pretty bored during that job, which was already an indication that certainly at least appellate way. Everyone around, everyone around me loved it.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I had these brilliant peers. Obviously these wonderful judges. I was not into it. It's not my. oh I definitely needed a little more, a little more kind of action in my job. um And then I went to the lawyers' computer civil rights and the scholarship also, like it was much, much better.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I was much more in the thick of things. um But I found what I was really compelled by was more than non-actual litigation work I was doing. I was doing a lot of Katrina relief work, like legal, legal response to Katrina, which happened pretty much right after I started my job and a bunch of other stuff.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Even the fundraising, I kind of found more interesting than like, I mean, I had done so many depositions and defended so many by the time I finished my time there. I was just done with it. It was not mine.

‍

Tyler Finn

yeah

‍

Adam Stofsky

And then and then at the at the firm, you know, i did I really enjoyed aspects of it, but I found like I knew I wasn't going to last long. And I think it was it was um it wasn't to do with the people or the work. It was actually just physically, like I physically didn't like sitting still that much.

I couldn't do that. I couldn't even sit in their offices and just sit still and do stuff. This is why I hated depositions, because I just like, how do you, it would hurt my body to sit still for that long. I couldn't get my coffee in a deposit where people, other people love it.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They love it.

‍

Tyler Finn

Sitting kills.

‍

Tyler Finn

We know this now, right?

‍

Adam Stofsky

It entails exactly what sort of standing depositions. Anyway, sorry, my God, I'm taking a phone answer to this question. No, I knew I had this idea to start this organization that integrated video and multimedia storytelling into legal advocacy for years. And I think I knew I wanted to do it. And and going to DevAways was a way of kind of getting some private sector experience, making some money, and kind of just trying this thing um before I did it. There were a few moments in my best moments at the firm, I thought, huh, well, actually, like, this is Maybe I'll do this for longer. But at the end of the day, I think I knew I was going to leave. And then what happened was the financial crisis hit. And and everything kind of stopped. Right. Debavoys and the other like elite firms, weren't they weren't doing any lawyer layoffs. They mentioned some of these staff layoffs. And they were really firm about that. And they made it clear we're not letting anyone off. But it just got kind of boring for a while. It was like, you know,

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Partners negotiating conflict waivers for like four months and like nothing was really going on. And the firm actually, so I told um ah some of the litigation partners, hey, I want to start this this this company that does but does this really interesting work with video and litigation. And and they were incredibly supportive. They actually gave me like ah like ah like a research, like a billing code to like do research on and evidence and the ways. of And so they they were really supportive. And I think they actually, look they probably knew I was not going to be like one of their top performing partners. that like My guess is that for them, because they like to recruit. Everyone They want to recruit entrepreneurial lawyers.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They want to get interesting people at their firm. Having more alumni go and start companies and interesting social enterprises, I mean, that's a huge win for them. So um um my guess is they were, I don't know, maybe not that sad to see me go in some way. I was very happy I was doing something interesting. So they were incredibly supportive, actually.

‍

Tyler Finn

Was starting this hard, ah you know, fundraising, figuring out how to make it work. I mean, what, what were the early days of starting that light before you'd built a team around you or, or just trying to get it off the ground?

‍

Adam Stofsky

I'm starting Nmap. Yeah, I mean, it was incredibly exciting.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It was, I'm going to say it was actually not that hard to start, but really hard to maintain, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I think that was a little less than learn. I had like too much success early and luck early. So my first stroke of luck, and I say it really is luck, is I got this Echoing Green fellowship.

I don't know if anyone in our audience is familiar with Echoing Green, but it's ah it's ah one of the early and the first organizations that was doing like social entrepreneurship funding and really they thought of themselves as ah that's a kind of startup funder for social enterprises, both nonprofit and for-profit.

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So they were an early funder of like Teach for America, for example, and I think Citi, a lot of other really interesting organizations, yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn

Wow.

‍

Adam Stofsky

um Yeah, some some really some really great ones. and And so I got that. It's hugely competitive. I kind of just applied on a whim. They don't give you a lot. of Back then, it was like literally $60,000 over two years. It was a small amount of money. But it was a huge boost just prestige-wise and access to other funders. And just a lot of our early funders saw that Echoing Green stamp of approval. It's like getting that really good early investor, right, that just legitimized them.

‍

Tyler Finn

Totally. Sequoia is on your cap table and like the money just flows in and the customers are like, well, they must be good.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Exactly. Yeah. Totally. It's a bit like that. I mean, you wouldn't even call Echoing Green sort of like the Sequoia of of that that more of that more kind of niche world.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So that was great. And also I got to meet all these other entrepreneurs. It was very exciting. I didn't know anything about business actually. And like I learned a ton. um So that was a real boost. And then we just started getting all these other funders. We got a bunch of big human rights funders early.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Our work was interesting. It was very visually compelling. But then, you know, I, God, I could go for, we could have a whole podcast on the many mistakes I made. but So long story short, when you're raising money from like big institutional funders, we had funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Hewlett, Oak Foundation, Oak Society.

I mean, we we got a lot of the big ones and it was exciting, but it's very hard to sustain that, right? like They wanted like results and data really quickly. I mean, you're doing this kind of kind of soft intervention in human rights. I think it's really hard. to You're not going to get great data in one year or two years or even maybe five. It's really hard.

And so they were demanding what we really couldn't deliver. And then, you know, a lot of the grants didn't continue. I mean, some did, ah ah but but some didn't. So it was really, really hard to sustain. I overhired, you know, I mean, I made all the mistakes kind of newbie founders make ah so it was so starting it was actually not it was it was from a business standpoint not that hard um Sustaining it from a business standpoint was very hard because you're relying on a small number of larger funders One more thing I'll say about doing human this kind of human rights work, especially the work that actually emotionally it was really hard to Well, right.

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I didn't realize that it was just, we were editing videos about, you know, kind of torture cases and gender-based violence. And we we did this whole thing of a Haiti color epidemic and people are just dying of color and huge number. It was just really emotionally difficult to sustain, which is something I didn't realize kind of, a I should have, right? It seems obvious, but it didn't. So that was another interesting challenge.

‍

Tyler Finn

And when is this happening? I mean, like, when when are you doing this? And I ask to say, you know, you're creating this video content or is it like documentaries? Is it like, you know, as social media is emerging to raise awareness on social, like sort of like what, what, what, you know, waves are you riding or like, how are you trying to generate this sort of awareness and impact?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, it's so interesting looking back now with video being just ubiquitous, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So so I got started doing this in law school. So i was my second it was my 1L summer.

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I met this really cool like doctoral student at Harvard Law School, this guy, Felix Morca, who's a really brilliant Nigerian human rights activist. I want to do something like seriously adventurous, my 1L summer. So he ran this human rights organization in Lagos. And I thought, well, wow, that would be really cool. like Lagos, that's like a crazy place to go.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

um So I asked him for a job, and he he did all this work on economic, social, and cultural rights, so particularly housing. And so they did all this work on these huge forced evictions in Lagos, which there were many during the the dictatorships in the kind of the 80s and 90s.

There were a lot of just mass demolitions of houses. So I went over there, and my job was to write a a sort of a, do some research, empirical research, and write a new human rights report about a community called Morocco, which was a sort of almost like a town of 300,000 people that had been demolished by by the Lagos government and a core group of them had stuck around and had been fighting for their rights for years, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So my job was to kind of do some research and kind of develop a new legal theories of why these folks are entitled to homes, basically, or companies.

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Anyway, I brought this video camera with me. This was like even before digital ah SLRs became a thing. It was like this old school camcorder. And I kind of taught myself how to shoot documentary style interviews. And I actually got some training from some local Nigerian journalists. I sought them out. And I just started interviewing my clients just kind of for fun. It was like a little fun side project. But they were so compelling on on on camera. And I thought, huh, well, this is interesting. What if we like actually try to use their voices to pressure the government to like settle this case? So I brought to my boss and he's like, yeah, let's try it. um You still need to write the human rights report, but but do the videos. Anyway, I shot like 35 hours of footage. I spent my pretty much my whole tool l year like teach me how to teach myself how to edit using the like one of the original like Final Cut Pros on my little laptop you'd For any video editors out there, you would have to like wait. Every little like five-second crossfade, you would just like sit there while it rendered for 10 minutes. It would take four minutes. This is how old I am. So anyway, I made a video. I made this documentary. It was like an hour long. It was broken up into little chunks, sent it back to Nigeria, and we basically scared the pants off the Lagos government and actually began to sell out a slice of the case. That's the long story short. That gave me the idea, like wow, maybe this video thing could really make a difference.

For lawyers, right? And so that's where I got the idea of of starting Nmap. And so that's what we did. We really made for them. We did a variety of things, mostly the short form documentary style videos, storytelling style videos, to do several things, like pressure opponents to settle like we did in LEGO. It's like kind of outside of litigation.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

In litigation creates sort of demonstrative evidence or other kinds of evidence. A lot of the international courts don't really have evidence rules.

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They don't really have hearsay rules. So you can kind of do more storytelling. um And then also for community education.

‍

Tyler Finn

Interesting.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we would do, in addition to doing the advocacy work, we could educate communities on their on their legal rights. but Some of that is like the... the the sort of DNA, but we're doing it briefly now. But the whole idea was everything needed to be either really short, because they we're literally like chasing some African commission for human rights judge and their clerks who have like 90 seconds to watch something, or it had to be simplified for people who had no experience with law, like all those villagers in Haiti who were being impacted by the this color epidemic that was spread by the UN. So we simplified things and we shortened things and made them emotionally compelling.

‍

Tyler Finn

You talk about this work being emotionally exhausting. I mean, I've gotten to know you a little bit. i mean i think I think you're actually like a pretty like law you're very intellectually curious, but you're sort of like a logical, very rational person who wants to you know make things happen and drive things forward. and like Did you end up liking this work in retrospect? it Was was the that emotional side of it? Challenging, like really challenging to deal with and that's something that sort of like drove you away from it eventually. I don't know, I'm just curious, you know, who is who is this right for basically? Like, you know, who, like what what personality type is going to go and is going to really for a long time find fulfillment doing human rights, human rights work? That's almost the question.

‍

Adam Stofsky

it's like good i'm i'm thinking of It's a very well-framed question. i mean i think about I have to think about how to answer this. So from the just the business side of things, I did not like it.

I did not like raising money from foundations. It's actually really exciting because you like kind of get to get the money before you do the thing, and like they give you a lot of money, but you sell a dream. right It's a wonderful model.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It really like it can lead to some incredible results, but but I ended up finding it kind of arbitrary, um ah very frustrating. I felt like our our funders didn't really have a sense of how our business worked. You know, little things like the way there'd be a big gap between one grant ending and the new one starting. And it's like, I got this payroll I've got to cover every month. I'm like, I can't just ask them to go away for three months and come back.

Things like that. were really that's Everyone, I mean, if there's any nonprofit EDs or like, you know, CEOs or any manager, they'll know what I'm talking about. Like, it's really frustrating, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So there was that. and And I think that actually also played a feeling of instability, made all the other stuff, emotional challenges worse. um You know, I don't think it's really right for me in the long term, this kind of human rights work.

I don't. know that it's really right for anyone, it's really, really hard. um You know, there are certainly people who are kind of more thrill-seeking. I think of I have a friend who's a former Special Forces soldier, a good friend who's ah like a fire fire firefighter paramedic, and and he's like in the late 50s now, he's been doing it forever, or mid 50s.Folks like that who have a more thrill-seeking kind of personality, I could see them doing well with this.

‍

Tyler Finn

Through this

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think it's just, i but I don't know. I mean i think about like folks at ah larger human rights organizations, and they um I think there's a lot of trauma in those organizations, too, I would imagine.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think there has been. I remember i ah getting interested in kind of trauma in the workplace. I think it was an organization, I'm probably going to get it wrong, but it's the Dark Center for Journalism and Trauma, or Trauma and Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

And they had published all this interesting research on like the impact of covering wars and and conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan among journalists organizations. how did like Especially, like you know you there's editors editing video in Manhattan, and they never set foot in Afghanistan, but they're getting with these PTSD symptoms.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And actually, there was an interesting story about like, I think it was like game developers working on we were my co founder briefly as a former game developers were plugged into that world a little bit. And there was, um, I think it was folks working on like a Mortal Kombat game to the animator ended up because they were looking at reference images of like these horrible gruesome

‍

Tyler Finn

Oh. Yeah, right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And we're actually getting kind of PTSD symptoms as well. Really interesting, right? So um anyway, all this is to say is the research I saw indicated that like having like essentially like a stable work environment with predictable like comp, schedule, management, those are the things that built re resilience to to trauma, more than moral commitment, more than emotional support from your colleagues, a kind of stability.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I think there's no

‍

Tyler Finn

You almost didn't have that either, right? Like you're fighting every every six months to get funded and yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Didn't have it all. It was just me like and a bunch of people running.

‍

Tyler Finn

ah

‍

Adam Stofsky

It was very loosey-goosey. So I mean, lesson learned. Good management, good institutions, good support. And think So I guess I would say, I don't know if there's any like kind of person that's good for this kind of work, but but good organizations are good for this kind of work.

‍

Tyler Finn

That's really interesting. um and You think about the great work that a lot of small nonprofits do out there, but then you also sort of think about how financially precarious that work often is for the... you know people who are literally going and you know they're the ones who are going and bringing the meal or the socks or whatever to the the homeless or unhoused person, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Or they're the one who's out there in the field doing the field. Yeah, you think about oftentimes those people don't have a huge safety net. And I can imagine how that would be really tough.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, it's cool. I mean, actually, and this is, I work with a lot of, excuse me, I know a lot of farmers because I live up in the Hudson Valley. My wife, Anna, is a farmer and farmers are, they don't run, well, actually there are some nonprofit farmers up here, but those are actually ironically the best resource because they're like funded by a philanthropist.

‍

Tyler Finn

Okay

‍

Adam Stofsky

So all these local farmers up here, at did they live they don't they don't run nonprofits, but they live with that same kind of precarity. And they also see a vital public interest. So it's not just a nonprofit for-profit thing. It's more like any kind of small organization.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Anyway, interesting.

‍

Tyler Finn

um Okay, I want to ask you about the farm in a second, but last question on New Media Advocacy Project. What are you most proud of having accomplished there?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Like good question i think um What I'm most proud of, there's two things I would say. One is the the team we put together. um I just found is this group of incredible people who wanted to do this work and not get paid a lot of money to do it.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

People who are really creative and and and really and so yeah and we have people who are living in Nigeria, living in Mexico, and living here in the US. Those were were our kind of main centers were. And it was just a great group of people. And that's where I really i learned how to develop teams. I learned how to manage. to some extent how to how to manage And so so so I think that's easily the thing I'm i'm most proud of. It's usually what I'm most proud of whenever I do anything. But the other thing I'll say is like you know I have to look back. we we We had some real impact on a number of cases, particularly this Haiti Color case, among others.

But But just I think the act of bearing witness um is really important. And we interviewed hundreds of people who'd gone through terrible um situations, whether it's like yeah serious, serious stuff, you know, that you know that some of the stuff I mentioned, torture, gender based violence.

You know, disability issues, all kinds of stuff in countries like Armenia, Georgia, India, and Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico. um And so I think just that act of sitting and listening and recording stories um was really powerful.

Even if the ultimate impact in some of those cases was not massive on the rational legal case, it's really hard to do that.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm Someone told the story for that for the historical record Yeah Did you do you think of yourself like you're leaving this and and we'll get to in a second like I mean I want to talk about the farm I want to talk about briefly

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think just being there to bear witness is really, um it's just really important. I'm quite proud of that or someone has listened even in that moment, it's important too.

‍

Tyler Finn

You're moving on to the next thing. I mean, at this point in your life, do you even think of yourself as a lawyer anymore? Is that really the first thing that you would think of or the way that you would describe yourself or has your view of yourself changed a bit?

‍

Adam Stofsky

You know I think I always thought of myself as a lawyer, even though I hadn't practiced law in a long time. And it was a central part of what I think makes makes my enterprises interesting, right?

‍

Adam Stofsky

It's like um the the sort of very deep merging of sort of creative professions and law. I think if you lose the law, you lose a bit of what's special about it. And I think, so I've always kind of, I still identify as a lawyer you know to some degree,

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I really don't, I'm not a very good lawyer. You don't want to hire me like, well, you know, I don't know. I shouldn't say that. Maybe, maybe, maybe if I, if I'd not been a litigator, I would have done better, but I'm just, you don't want me to be out there hurting you or prosecuting your, or being involved in your civil case. It just doesn't work for me. But no, I think I still do think of myself. I think I always did throughout this. And, you know, yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I think I still do think about that. I think I never really lost that.

‍

Tyler Finn

So tell us how you ended up on a farm ah in Hudson, New York. ah what What led you there? I think it's one of the interesting things about you and I think it's also something that clearly has shaped briefly and the way that you've built the business. and We'll get into that.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, all right. So this is, I don't know. it's i've I've been up here 15 years now. It's still kind of hard. I mean, I grew up in Brooklyn, like the 80s, right? Like yeah when I literally did like Boston and San Francisco and DC and New York. It's like, it's just kind of, it's still crazy. So, no, so I left Debevoise, right? So like i I left after a few years. i um my my my My then fiance, we got be like got married yeah We had this like awesome loft on 22nd and 5th.

My brother Flatiron building it was super cool you know with a few other people. like So left my job, like literally like got married at City Hall, and like gave out an apartment up like in the same week. Let's just do it all at once. And then we went with this awesome... nine-week honeymoon, like but driving around the west, because I kind of knew I was going to start. I'd already had my fellowship, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I knew I had a little bit of this, this Echoing Green fellowship I mentioned.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I knew I had a little bit of money and obviously working at Debevoise in the mid aughts was a good way to make some money. So I wasn't like financially worried, but I thought, you know, let's live. My mom had a little house up in the Berkshires and I thought, let's like go crash there for a few months and live rent free you while I kind of get this thing going. And then we can move back to the city and do the thing that, you know, normal people do, right? They go,

‍

Tyler Finn

yeah

‍

Adam Stofsky

So wait we we we we we we moved, it we might maybe just crashed my mom's little place. Actually, I think she may have charged me rent now that I think about it, but it wasn't right. And and and and ah my wife was, she's English, so she was waiting for her green card to to clear.

So she kind of couldn't really work a normal job, so she wanted to find some volunteer stuff.

So we went to, us she was interested in in ah in ah in farming and and livestock. We'd actually visited one of my clients at Nmap, actually the guy who'd become my first client, this guy, Brian Concannon, who runs the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti,

Amazing organization, amazing guy. We had visited him and his wife. Sorry, this story is going to get a little crazy. in Okay, so on our road trip, we went all around the country. He and this guy Brian lived in this place called Joseph, Oregon, which is like this idyllic community in the like the near Hell's Canyon, like in eastern, northeastern Oregon in the Wallowa Mountains.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Absolutely gorgeous. I had no idea this place existed. We like went to visit him, and he'd had that he had this half-acre market garden right that he and his wife kind of just managed. He like runs a human rights organization in the mountains. It was totally crazy. I'd never seen this before. and I think my wife got really inspired by this garden. She's like, When I have an acre, I essentially have a little farm. She was like absolutely fired up. I think she was getting ideas. Fast forward a couple of weeks. We landed ah in and in in the first years. She wanted to kind of get involved with some agriculture. So we just went to the farmer's market and were asking around with all these people, hey, do you need help on your farm?

And this like one guy, ah this guy named is Sean Stanton, who's a wonderful farmer in Berkshires, he said, sure, show up. 6 AM on this day. Turns out he actually farmed one of the ah Dan and Dave Barber's family farm from like the Blue Hill kind of universe.

‍

Tyler Finn

Oh yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So he was plugged into the soul. Food thing, it was all very exciting. Within a week, she was like getting up at 5 in the morning to go milk cows at their dairy. yeah I've never seen a person take to something so naturally. It was kind of ridiculous. We've been married for like two months. I'm like, what are you doing? Like you're going off with this other dude to go milk cow. And Shawn is like this very strapping handsome farmer. like anyway But it was great. She loved it. um She said she wanted to stay up in the country. She's like, hey, can we stay here? And I was like, are you out of your mind? Like live up here.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I mean, it really genuinely scared me. I was already feeling a bit isolated, like kind of trying to raise money and start this thing. It was actually a little bit scary, like but I'm not having any, you know, entrepreneurs, there's a reason why most of them live in big cities, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Thrive on that kind of community support. um But I said, all right, well, let's look around. Her idea was to live closer to Hudson, where ah Amtrak train is. And so we found this this ah this farm ah called Kinderhook Farmer. We still live in a little town town called Ghent. And I called them up and said, hey, we're looking for houses in your area. It can be to get a tour of your farm. and they said Actually, we have a house for rent on the farm.

Why don't you come take a look? And it turns out that the managers of the farm, this guy, Lee Ranney, I'm introducing all these characters here. He, uh, was, was, uh, well, no, but seriously, like this whole time, my life, it's like, how was my life this, how did it get so interesting?Like I didn't, it was kind of all this stuff just happened.

‍

Tyler Finn

you could have You could have just been living in Chelsea and working in a skyscraper and instead.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I sort of done that. I know. Oh my god, I think about it sometimes. Anyway, so this guy, Lee, ran the farm. His wife, Georgia, they ran this farm. Turns out Lee was an is an ex-lawyer, so he like went to University of Michigan and practiced as a pretty like serious corporate lawyer in Detroit like in the 80s, doing like leverage buyouts and just doing all kinds of stuff.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yes.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And then at the age of, so I felt safe with him, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

All right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It's like, he's like his lawyer. So then in, ah and then around the age of 40, he just like quit to go raise cattle. He grew up on a yeah and on a th farm, and you know, in, in um you know, in in the ah western part of Michigan. And he was like, you know what, I don't want to do law anymore. So he and his wife moved to West Virginia and they started raising calves basically. And so they had a cattle operation there. Anyway, they had ah another friend who was an investor, bought a bunch of land up in the Hudson Valley, and then decided to start this farm and called Lee and Georgia and said, you want to come farm this with me? And thus they started Kinderhook Farm up here. And so I felt very safe with this guy. I was like, oh, and so the idea of living on a farm, like with the community around, some people that I was comfortable with was very compelling.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we rented this place. And within a year, my wife Anna had created a job for herself on the farm. They had a bunch of sheep. She was interested in sheep, and then she ended up getting a job as a shepherd, literally, among other things, but but and and and grew this operation into one of the kind of most impressive kind of grasshead lamb operations in the Hudson Valley. So that's kind of how, and we're still here, 15 years later.

‍

Tyler Finn

And I mean, well, my only experience, to be honest with farming is I watched the show that Jeremy Clarkson did called Clarkson's farm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh, yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn

I don't know if you've seen it. Being a farmer is hard. This is not like easy work. And also somewhat emotionally challenging is animals get sick and die and you have to make decisions, you know?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh, every day they're making life and death decisions all the time. I mean, it's yeah.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh, yeah absolutely. i I've seen a bit of the show. Actually, I mean, it's a little unrealistic because he has a backstop of a lot of resources, obviously.

‍

Tyler Finn

Well, yeah, I mean, the yeah, the guy's super wealthy.

So it's kind of a, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

No, but i think I think he does raise a lot of the issues that commits really, really hard.

But I will say, like as an entrepreneur, I've now been an entrepreneur for, I don't know, 15, 18 years, however long it's been. I mean, when you live around farmers, you live around like ultimate entrepreneurs. right That's what they are.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They live and breathe it. They're hustling all the time. So that was really exciting. and that that has been I think my view of what entrepreneurship is has been really exciting. I mean, it might be one of the reasons why we're we're still bootstrapping briefly.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah

‍

Adam Stofsky

It feels more possible seeing what these farmers do.

‍

Tyler Finn

Being an entrepreneur is not all about going to Y Combinator, although that's great, or raising $7 million dollars and then $25 million dollars and then $50 million. dollars There are a lot of other businesses, great businesses that you can build ah in a very different way.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Well, most businesses really, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Most is, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Probably 99.5% of businesses, I'm guessing, I don't really know, but something like that, right? good

‍

Tyler Finn

So where does Briefly fit in? And where did where did where did briefly how did Briefly come about? Where did this idea to help? you know and And I mentioned at the outset some of your corporate clients, but you also work with a lot of sort of legal aid organizations.

‍

Tyler Finn

um it Where did this idea to take somewhat complicated legal concepts or processes turn them into fun animations, trainings, um distill them for people who are not lawyers or who do not want to, you know, dig in deep and understand the concept of an indemnity, right? Where where did this idea come about?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, yeah so it came out of, I think it was a natural kind of our crew out outflow, outgrow, growth from NMAP, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we were doing we were like explaining legal issues to try to win cases. And I think we just got really good just got good at it. I got really good at like at explaining this stuff quickly. I got really good at putting together teams of creatives to make these little short exp explainer videos.

That's hard too, right? And I was like, oh, I can actually find these people. And that's mushed together, the peanut butter and jelly of kind of technical, legal, and business knowledge with kind of this exciting all these creative skills.

So I kind of got good at it. And then, you know, I got frustrated with some of the advocacy work we were doing. Like, it's really hard to win big human rights cases. It takes forever.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

But Actually, like, educating people about what their rights are, preventing these issues. That was really compelling. So the I already had even just a few years into Nmap, I had this idea that we could kind of do this. And And then we ended up getting a project with a coalition of legal aid organizations led by a sort of aite a clinic at Fordham Law School. And ah by this this really wonderful lawyer-in-law teacher named Dora Galicatos, who I thought don't know if she still runs the Phyric Center over there. Really great group of people.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They were having, so after the financial crisis, there was a huge epidemic of, as you would imagine, like consumer debt cases in the in the and the courts in New York, literally hundreds of thousands of cases.

And these organizations, ah the law for law school clinics and legal aid that set up this kind of coalition of groups to to kind of show up in court and just try to help people, because usually these these cases, right, the the debt collectors use the courts kind of as like a debt collection system, right, to help them collect on these debts.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They're often the third party.

‍

Tyler Finn

Forcing function of sorts, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

exactly Right. So it was just, it was just all a bit, it all felt a bit lawless and weird. And usually if like someone just shows up to court, like the case gets dropped.

Cause that's not how did these guys thrive on default judgments. This is like my memory of its works.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Right. So like they, they, they, they, they sue like. a thousand people at once, most don't show up, they're able to collect some of the money and then they make a bit of money off the debt that they bought. I think that's how the model worked. Anyway, so but they were like drowning in like thousands and thousands of people. And so we put together this idea of actually creating video content to help the lawyers educate people about their rights kind of before they met with them or provide public information.

So that that was ah that still remains ah it's a really cool project and that's kind of how this whole idea got started and how actually maybe if we're clever about how we teach people about law,

we can solve a big problem at scale, right? Not like trying to win this one case, but like if we can just get 1% of people who are being sued for consumer debt to to actually just show up or answer their complaint and the case gets dropped, that huge ah ROI for what whatever this product costs, a huge impact.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

so So it kind of came out of our work. It it wasn't the natural kind of work we did at Nmap, but it was kind of came out of it. And then I thought, well, this feels like a company. People should pay us to do this.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And also, I was getting really sick of like foundation fundraising and getting really interested in tech. I had a lot of friends who were starting tech companies at the time. And so I thought, all right, I'm going to do this.

And so I kind of So so I so I decided to leave and map. I handed it off to an amazing, wonderful guy who was our successor, Steve Stein and um and and moved on ah to start ah to start briefly. So, OK, so going back to this fundraising idea. So I was like this nonprofit dude. So you go to like nations and you go say, hey, I need half million dollars to do this exciting thing.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I kind of thought that's what I'm going to do briefly.

‍

Tyler Finn

Uh huh.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Right. That's what I knew how to do. And I very quickly learned two things. one is that it doesn't really work that way. I guess it could. I don't know.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm

‍

Adam Stofsky

I've never really, I've not i'm not raised VC money, right? I've raised a lot of non nation, but never, so like, you know, it's kind of hard to just sell a dream.

‍

Tyler Finn

Hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

You have to like show an actual, you have to show that you're providing value to the customer.

‍

Tyler Finn

Product, revenue, customer growth, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Exactly. You have to have a incredible ah credible ah path. I had none of that. right I was like selling dreams. and yeah I wasn't actually raising money. I was more just having individual conversations with folks.

And I was really being told, yeah, that's not going to fly. You've got to really change the way you're thinking about this. And then I just kept hearing all these kind of horror stories about people raising too much money and then like the laws of economics crashing hard.

And so so So when we started, when we started briefly, I think this was the first, my first real lesson in entrepreneurship, like real and and that nonprofit entrepreneurship is not real entrepreneurship, but like, you know, real starting a for profit company. So we had this, I just had my first child at the time, and I was trying to think through, okay, how this legal information thing, how is it actually going to make money? How are we going to actually get paid to do this?

‍

Adam Stofsky

So what we landed on was this idea of making legal content around life events. This is how it all got started. So I thought, did you know this, Tyler?

‍

Tyler Finn

Huh.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I'm not sure if you knew.

‍

Tyler Finn

Now.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I still think these ideas are really cool. So we we um but the idea was, OK, the way the legal profession is kind of works, it's all based around these like very legalistic practice areas.

You have estate planning lawyers and the family lawyers and the area education lawyers.

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure Yeah

‍

Adam Stofsky

They're very cabin in their practice area. They're very specialized. And also kind of laws often separated from like things like personal finance or benefits, employee benefits. My thought was, excuse me, let's unify all of that stuff, but around actual life events, like the the way people live their lives. Having a kid, becoming a caregiver to a like disabled parents, returning from their duty, like or going through a natural disaster. These things, let's pull together law, ah all the different legal areas, um personal finance, employee benefits, and sell it to companies as a kind of benefit, um kind of formalizer, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Huh.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we actually had some really promising leads. It was really interesting. um and But like I knew I was going to have to raise VC money to actually make and to get an MVP to make it really credible.

‍

Tyler Finn

Aha.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Right um and and so and But I was already getting the idea that I wasn't really sure I wanted to do this. or i don't know if i want to like cause I just wasn't sure it was gonna work, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I wasn't sure it was gonna work. And I just didn't feel comfortable taking money if I didn't have, but if I wasn't, I mean, I'm sure it's too strong, we but if I didn't, if I was really uncertain that this was could really, you know, it's like, ah, I don't feel, that feels weird to me.

‍

Tyler Finn

Conviction. Yeah. Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we were still plugging away at it. We had a couple of really good potential customers. And then I, but it turns out at at the same time, we were, like I mentioned that consumer debt, project we did, we were kind of getting, this is me and my co-founder who I had met.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

He was Scott as a former, he was, as as I mentioned, he was a video game developer and UI UX designer for many years, wanted to get out of that, do something creative. He got excited by this. He had done some animation work for us in the past.

And so he got excited about this. ah He became my co-founder. So he was the art and design guy and I was the law guy. And then, and we started, we were kind of doing just some side hustle projects with ah new york ah The New York State courts, the New York City Small Claims Court, to help them locate court users about their new online dispute resolution system. A couple legal aides were giving us money to like make some explainer videos to help educate the public. And at a so I remember it was and it was in September of 2019. I'm going to say looking back, this is definitely the correct call to make, looking at what happened in public.

It's like, you know what? This life event thing is cool, but like why don't we like do more of what we're already making money doing? like People are paying us like real money to do this. Let's do more of that. And that was like the the pivotal moment that I think made briefly into briefly. right Instead of chasing ah an idea that was never going to happen, really, um we started doing more of what was actually making us money. And so I did a webinar.

The multimedia content crash course for lawyers, which we still do all the time. And I like tucked it away in like late December. I was like, if I just do, I want to like screw it up the first time, but just a few diamonds.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I sent the invite out to a bunch of listservs, especially with delayed access to justice world that I was plugged into and 450 people signed up for the thing.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm. Wow.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I panicked. I didn't know what to do. I was like, oh my god, I have to buy a new webcam. I have to like figure out how to do this. Where do I go? I have to upgrade my Zoom account. like What do I do? And it went really well.

And that just kind of things were off and running. we had that We had a list. We had all these interesting organizations interested. And so we kind of shelved the life event stuff. Thankfully, because like two months later, and the pandemic happened, and eight of our folks were not concerning themselves with buying expensive new innovative benefits.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mhm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They were trying to survive.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mhm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

um And then meanwhile, everyone was trapped at home needing more content. And so we started making legal explainer videos, mostly for legal state courts and legal aid organizations. And that's kind of how it really got going about five years ago.

‍

Tyler Finn

So that's an interesting thread to pull on and something that you and I have talked a bit about before and have some ideas around, which is ah I think a lot of lawyers that we both know are trained to be persuasive or trained in argumentation. um But you talk about you know a multimedia crash course.

Law school, law firms, the practice of law doesn't necessarily train you to be a great sort of like broader communicator, i to have the instinct to write three bullets for your CEO instead of a three-page memo, or to make sure that You're well lit, and your audio is clear when you're speaking on a Zoom call with your colleagues, recognizing that like maybe a bunch of your coworkers are a little bit scared of you because you're the general counsel of the company. And they think that not all the time, but sometimes when the general counsel is on the call, that means that something's going wrong or someone's going to get in trouble, right? um Those are just two sort of like cliche examples, I think. But like Like, let's talk about this a little more, this idea of briefly not just sort of distilling complicated legal concepts, but also helping lawyers communicate better and communicate with people broadly in like ways that they actually understand or that resonate with them or that are empathetic to them, right?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, right? Like in law school, we don't get any comms training of any kind, right, at all. And, and actually, I don't think law school particularly trains us to communicate well about law, actually, you know, and putting aside all the other stuff you mentioned.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah

‍

Adam Stofsky

Like for example, um but we're working on this incredibly cool project with Albany Law School now. We're actually helping them build their new FlexJD program.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

They mostly online JD, super innovative. It's a great group of faculty, a great group of people. And we're working on this, we're doing we're doing the first year lawyering class now. It's basically the same first year lawyering, like legal writing and research class I had, you know, when I was a while. And they're like, They're still teaching a lot of the same stuff, how to write an objective memo, like how to distinguish a case, all that stuff. And I do think that's important. I actually think even though like not many objective memos are going to be written by humans in the coming years, because that's probably one thing that Gen AI is really good at, I do think that the discipline is still important,right.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mhm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I don't know if photographers like still learn to use darkroom is this as part of their discipline i don't know like you can imagine that still being useful as part of training even though it's you're not going to use it as a professional ah but like and ah but they don't really go they don't really

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

You learn that stuff really rigorously in law school, how to write an objective memo, how to spend so much time on like citations and how to really do this stuff from a technical standpoint, which is important, but they don't talk about it. They don't talk about the other stuff. How do you actually explain this stuff to someone who's not another lawyer in one of these very formal settings, court in particular, or maybe in a negotiation around a contract or a legislative hearing or something like that.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm

‍

Adam Stofsky

They don't teach it at all. And so like we we really come out of law school ill-equipped to talk about what we have expertise in. In fact, we we kind of become like, it changes our language, right?

We start using all kinds of funny words without realizing it. I think law school really changed how I talked for a time.

‍

Tyler Finn

Can I mean, I know that you like, you have a personal, you like games, you like video games, your co-founder is a video game developer. um I'm curious what you think. and And then you have this ability to not just talk to lawyers, right, but that to work with the animators or work with the voice actors to make these videos.

‍

Tyler Finn

I'm curious if there's anything that you think that lawyers have to learn from, you know, folks who are in those more creative disciplines or the animators or voice actors of the world.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many things that I think lawyers have to learn from people. But I think lawyers know that. right It's why like these webinars we do, I'm always amazed at how many people show up to them. There's a thirst for this kind of knowledge, a thirst for part of it's like just wanting to learn to communicate better, but also it's using technology and interesting ways to communicate better.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So yeah, I think there's a lot, there's so many things that lawyers have to learn. There's a bit of a softball question, Tyler. many But, um, yeah, like, so for example, we have this wonderful slide we use where we show like a legal document.

It's like a big block. It's like a law review article, I think. And it's just huge blocks of text and it's great writing, right? It's really interesting. But then, but then we show what a graphic designer sees, like learning what they learned on their first day of their graph.

And it's just these ugly boxes that are just organized and offered like anxiety inducing, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I think. all the ways in which words exist beyond like the words themselves, how they're presented, where you're seeing them, it's really important to like the level of, of, um of like stress or comfort you're inducing into whoever's watching and that's really, or reading them or listening to them.

‍

Tyler Finn

see Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And that's really important for persuasion, right? I think like, you know when you I think the best litigators understand. They need to like communicate with some like in their briefing or whatever, their motion, with some like busy clerk who's got a million other things to do. And so they know how to like really write concisely and persuasively, knowing like almost the physical environment in which this clerk exists. right They know, all right, I've got two minutes. I've got this time. I want to make it as easy or as possible to say yes.

So I think kind of taking that way of thinking and broadening it out into really engaging, but how are you like, you're you're in the business of communication, you're in the business of persuading. How do you do that in in the universe of everything else aside from just the legal argumentation?

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And that's what I think. And I think especially, I think all creative professionals are good at this, but I think video games in particular, I think are good at a real concise like economical communication of ideas, often complex ones.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So that's why I like this. I love that we work with these game game devs on this. It's a really cool skill set they have. um The ability to communicate something arcane and, you know, video games are weird, right?

There's all this complex stuff and they can communicate it often in three seconds. And I think that's really interesting.

‍

Tyler Finn

How have Briefly's customers evolved over time? um And sort of you know where do you want to take the business over the next year or two?

‍

Adam Stofsky

So we started off working primarily with state courts and legal aid organizations to do more of the stuff we were doing in that consumer debt case. Right So we were in the we that we were like you focusing on public education, kind of scaling the work of of of what these lawyers can do.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm-hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

And then we pretty quickly saw the applications of this for the private sector. So started working with um with more in-house teams, as you mentioned, some of the wonderful clients that we have that you mentioned. um and law firms as well, tackling a whole variety of other problems.

How can we improve speed up the B2B sales process in a whole variety of ways by improving the understanding of contract terms, either by by customers and counterparties or by sales teams, procurement teams? Can we kind of avoid the many mistakes that can slow down a deal?

‍

Tyler Finn

Sure.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Particularly around things like, and do you mentioned indemnities. I mean, this is like a real i mean that that's going to be a thorn in commercial lawyers and salespeople's side for a long time. but be Like this at the margins like speed things up and There's a huge amount of value there better compliance training we live in an increasingly complex world like can can we Can we make the sort of often unfund business of compliance training and education just much more engaging and more useful and actually reduce risk? There's a jillion different use cases that we're exploring um in our work. It's really for focusing now on um things like law firm profitability. Can we educate? So lawyers don't get educated in comms. They also don't really get educated in business, at least mostly done, right? So trying to, this is a real problem, right? like

helping So helping lawyers get a set of both soft and hard skills, actually, to better communicate value to their clients, to understand how to do things like billing and invoice, to just understand the way law firms make money and operate as good businesses. That's another use case for tackling now, where I think there's a ton of value. So I think where where but where we are now is in a period of great growth and creativity, really engaging with customers on but what what are What are all the things that good, short information can do to make my business better?

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It's really fun. We're also in the legal aid side of our work, really trying to not just create better public education and do those wonderful things, but really make the work of lawyers more efficient.

Can we actually help these organizations represent more clients because their meetings are a little shorter because they're not explaining like stuff over and over again? Or can we make their meetings better so they can focus more on the actual facts of that client's case instead of explaining the basics?

we can offload some of that to kind of a client onboarding experience, all kinds of stuff. So where but that's where we are now, right? As in this period, I think of real, and it has it has um challenges, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Believe Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

We're not, it's not like we have our contracts product and we have our like law. We're kind of doing a lot of, we're really operating almost as a kind of tech enabled agency now, right? Thinking through these very deep problems.

So, okay. So then to go to the the rest of your question, like sort of where are we where do we see them as it's going? So I think, There are several things that we're trying to do. One is, but i'd say that but I'd say the main thing we want to do is kind of to platformize this to some degree, right? Probably just to make it make it a little more scalable um for us, but to also give our, ah when we make all this wonderful custom content, right? and And we think because all these AI tools are making our process cheaper and easier on the production side of things, we think we can like beat the price of many subscription-based like video libraries, compliance libraries over a time window of say three to four years.

So our work is a bit expensive, but it's fully customized and begins to pay for itself very quickly. And we our hope is to build a kind of get a bit of a platform environment where ah clients can much more easily manage their own content, integrate the content they make with us, integrate the content into pretty much every SaaS platform they have, whether it's their you know their their CLM, their CRM, their internet, their LMS, whatever it is, to make it seamless, and also to edit and update content.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Easily, right? So an executive leaves, it's very easy for us to like slot a new person in, you know, give them a very easy way to do that. That's very affordable. So kind of really productizing and, and kind of, um yeah, platformizing. These are like kind of cheesy words, but you get what I'm saying. really i think That's where we're looking for the next next couple of years.

‍

Tyler Finn

And I think AI is going to make some of that customization or, you know, if not annual, even more frequently sort of updating easier, ah which I think is a ah huge tailwind to ride potentially over the course of the next year or two.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Look, we've gone 56 minutes and now we're first mentioning AI, isn't that?

‍

Tyler Finn

And yeah. That's pretty good, actually.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It is worth noting that it's like we use a lot of AI tools and it's like, for a little while I wonder, well, is this is this like a major threat to briefly?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Like are people going to be like making their own videos using AI? And I actually really think like what we do is really hard to do well. No one's going to be going into like some video app that comes out next year and say, maybe an awesome video explaining the innovative version of my contract. It's not going to happen, but it's making our pushing our costs down significantly and making our ability to respond, to change things. It's great. It's amazing, actually, but we we're able to offer our kind.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think the move towards custom is really interesting. and And that's where I see things going.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think it's going to go that way with apps as well. like It's you know going to be much, much easier to make your own kind of custom LMS or whatever you want to make you know in the next, I don't know if it's two years, but five years, I would imagine.

‍

Tyler Finn

hmm.

‍

Tyler Finn

A widget for every problem and every company and every need, yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think so, right? I mean, we don't know yet. um But it certainly seems much more possible than ever did before.

‍

Tyler Finn

All right, some fun questions for you as we start to wrap up. The first one, and I ask these pretty much all of our guests, ah your favorite part of your day-to-day?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh, my god. mean There is there room is there like is no day-to-day. It's always so different. um

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think my favorite part of my day to day is when I get to like talk to are customers about a new idea, right? It's really fun, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Okay.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Or like Or like the project kickoff meetings, right?

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Everything is like a blank slate. And a lot of these folks are lawyers or they're kind of legal ops people or like a COO kind of person. And and they don't don't know how this works.

And it's really exciting. We're going to be making cartoons or we're going to be doing these cool videos. So there's something incredibly fun about that. I mean, you can often take people out of their legal work into something that's a little more creative um to solve a big problem for them.

So I think that's something they did a day. Those don't happen every day, unfortunately, hopefully but it was good ah eatings every day. But but I think that that's the most that's the most fun part by far. It's it's really ah It's really a blast.

‍

Tyler Finn

Do you have a professional pet peeve?

‍

Adam Stofsky

Oh God. So a professional. Okay. So you're taking some risks here. Okay. So like I'm the CEO, right? So it's like my job to like stress out about all the things that no one else stresses out about.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yep.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So be we, so when you're in the process of like selling a product, it's especially if you're the founder, it's kind of your thing. It's really emotionally charged. It's stressful. And we, I often, there's certain people who are like email responders like me, I'm always like, Hey, got your message. Thanks so much. I'll get back to you. Whatever. But some people, they just don't do that. It's not, it's not a bad thing. It's just a style thing.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

But I feel like there's so many times I'm just, I send this, I send the contract over or I send the proposal over. I just get no response. There's like 37 other things they have to do before like close the deal with briefly, but they don't.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

But it's, that's all fine. It's just a style thing. But like the not sending of like simple email acknowledgments that drives me crazy. I don't know. i me it' just the first Like I'm a stress ball and I worry about deals falling through at the last minute.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

But I think that's like a little bit of a, just send a quick email and say, Oh yeah, I got the contract. Uh, I'm real busy, but I'll get back to you next week. Oh my God. That would make my life so much better.

‍

Tyler Finn

Maybe I should do more of that.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I think that.

‍

Tyler Finn

That's fair. Yeah. i I feel like I'm pretty responsive. I try to get through my inbox, but that's fair. Like even, uh, I'm not going to get this to this for two days.

‍

Adam Stofsky

It's probably too much to ask folks to send those emails, it really is. is I think this is just like saying, please assuage my anxieties, but but ah but but it's it's ah it's a thing that works for me.

‍

Tyler Finn

Uh, a book that you'd recommend to our listeners.

‍

Adam Stofsky

um Oh man.

‍

Tyler Finn

You can take this any way you want. Yeah, you know.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Okay, I have, oh boy. um Yeah, there's so many there's so many really good ones. All right, I'll take this in a... Since we were talking about video games, I'll take this in a slightly nerdy direction. Actually, maybe it's not that nerdy.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So I got, I used to read like fantasy books as a kid. And then for like 20 years, I didn't read any. And I kind of got back into it during the pandemic. It was all this great new um ah modern fantasy. So I'm going to recommend two, ah one that are very different, but but equally awesome. One is called The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

‍

Tyler Finn

Okay.

‍

Adam Stofsky

I love this book. it's it's ah and I don't want to recommend any like big non-fictions, but you're getting like fun fiction books.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So this is a book about a a group of like master thieves living in this this kind of fantastical version of Venice. and they're not But they're not normal. They're not like burglars or pickpockets. They're con men. So your hero is this kind of rogue-ish

‍

Tyler Finn

ah

‍

Adam Stofsky

almost Robin Hood-ish kind of con man who runs these elaborate columns stealing huge amounts of money from the elite of this city. And it becomes, this gets involved with this crazy conspiracy and there's lots of adventure. It's really, really good. It's a series, but the first book can just be a standalone.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

So The Lies of Locke Lamora. And then a similar genre, but a very different book. um ah It's ah a book called The Fifth Season by N. K. Jefferson. She's, ah she I think she's like the most decorated, one of the most decorated science fiction writers. She won like, I think the Hugo Award for all the novels in this trilogy, like three years and a row or so.

Um It's called the Broken Earth trilogy, but again, the first book can kind of be a standalone. And it's a book that manages to tackle a lot of really politically charged issues, particularly things like climate change and racial justice in a way that's like incredibly compelling and exciting and not kind of preachy in any way. And it's just a brilliant novel. So the fifth season by N.K. Jemisin and The Lives of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

‍

Tyler Finn

I'll be honest, I'm not a big fantasy reader. I mean, you mostly read nonfiction, and those both sound very interesting. I will...

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, I think they're good. I think they're good books for folks who are like a bit put off by, you know, elves and dwarves and magic and that kind of thing.

‍

Tyler Finn

Right.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Like they're they're they're they're kind of cooler. They're cooler fantasy.

‍

Tyler Finn

Awesome. All right. ah As we wrap up, my traditional closing question. If you, Adam, could look back on your days as a young lawyer, just getting started, just at a law school, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

‍

Adam Stofsky

i wish i well I think I knew this in my kind of heart, but never really was able to live it. is that is that the When you get into the, quote, real world, the trappings of prestige matter less than you think they do.

‍

Tyler Finn

Mm hmm.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Right so like That Ninth Circuit clerkship I took that I really but should not have taken because it was not a good job for me. You know, a lot of the things I did that were to kind of chase prestige rather than just do the things I wanted to do and were good at. I think that's what I wish I'd understood better and what I'd advise most you know young lawyers, or really any professional coming in, is do good work. Sure, just having a fancy law school on your resume might help, absolutely, but it's not going to help. What's really going to help is like getting getting out there and providing great value. ah Being a good person, I think that stuff matters way more.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yes.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Life's too short to make decisions based on what anyone else wants you to do in terms of, well, I shouldn't say that. We should do what other people want us to do, right? we're not We shouldn't live our lives hedonistic and selfish.

‍

Tyler Finn

Yeah.

‍

Adam Stofsky

You know what I mean, right? like Don't do things because like you think it's going to look on your resume. Well, do that to a little bit of a degree, but really focus on what um what you're good at, where you can provide the most value. And I think that that's what i wish i'd known as a young and it is especially bad i think it illegal ah so that's what i would that's what I wish I had

‍

Tyler Finn

and someday move to the farm if it will make you and your wife happy.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Exactly, right? Yeah. yeah even if Even if it slows your career down, these are the choices that make life kind of rich and interesting.

‍

Tyler Finn

Adam, this has been a lot of fun for me. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract.

‍

Adam Stofsky

Yeah, same here, Tyler. thanks Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

‍

Tyler Finn

And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in, and we hope to see you next time.

‍