Intro Music 

Tyler Finn

Why is technology the right leverage point for improving how a legal team works together? What does it take to start and sustainably grow a tech company? And how do you transition from a more traditional legal career to one leading a legal tech business? I don't know if they have all the answers to those questions, but today we are joined on the abstract by two of my colleagues, two members of our executive team, Shashank Bijapur, our co-founder and CEO, and of course Akshay Verma, our COO. Before starting SpotDraft, Shashank moved from India to the US, received his law degree from Harvard, and spent a few years practicing at White & Case in New York. Akshay also started his career at law firms practicing environmental law before joining Axiom in a sort of customer facing and strategy business development capacity. The time when they were really kickstarting the ALSP revolution. He then spent time leading legal operations at Facebook. He taught at Facebook, not Meta. And Coinbase before joining the SpotDraft team in 2023. Thanks guys for joining me here today in San Francisco at the SpotDraft Summit for a slightly different episode of The Abstract.

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Shashank Bijapur 

Thank you for having us over and finally, after requesting you for so many months, we've made it.

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Tyler Finn

Okay, Shashank, I want to start with you. Where did the idea for SpotDraft come from and how did you get the business started?

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah, so this was when I was at White & Case and I remember distinctly it was New Year's Eve and I was sitting and doing due diligence reports and I could see the ball drop in the background somewhere and I was reading New York Times, eating chinese food. And the headline said that there's a guy called Elon Musk who's making self-driving cars. And that's when it sort of hit me. Like cars are driving themselves, and here I am, you know, cutting and pasting words on a piece of paper over and over again. I mean, something had to change. And then I looked back and I said, what is the greatest innovation that lawyers have seen? It was a patch to Microsoft Word called track changes. That's when people started moving from sending faxes to red lines and track changes, and that was way back in 1994. Fast forward 2025, we are still stuck in the dark ages. So that sort of motivated me to start SpotDraft and make lives around contracting easier.

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Tyler Finn

I don't think I've ever asked you this before. I'm really curious, who was SpotDraft's first customer? Right, like who was the customer who said, okay, I'm in to try this new tech solution that no one else has tried yet?

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah, so when we started, we had a slightly different product, and then it was a very large Japanese bank. And like how most startups do, it was a lot of PowerPoint presentations and a little bit of product that got them sold. They were our first customer. And then when we moved to the workflows part of the business, it was this really large workflows company, interestingly, that took a bet on us. And we just went and hustled our way through, and that's how we got them as a customer.

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Tyler Finn

SpotDraft has definitely come a long way since then. Akshay, you spend a lot of time with our customers day in day out working with our customer success team. I think you've helped bring some outside perspective and rigor. I mean we have really good customer success, I think that's one of the things that we're known for, but you brought some of that outside perspective to CS. What about working with our customers, ways that implementations, you know, might go wrong because you implemented technology yourself for LegalWorks.

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Akshay Verma

Yeah, you know, I've been a buyer and a seller. This is my kind of second stint as a seller. Axiom was the first and in between those I had two roles where I was a buyer and technology was a big part of what I bought. And it's a journey, it's a journey for the buyer. And I think empathy goes a long way. Whether it's sales, pre-sales, BDR, customer success, all of those roles and functions require a ton of empathy. But that's not enough. I think you have to understand the persona and kind of their ins and outs of why they need to do things. So I brought a little bit of that perspective to the table for our customer success teams. And then beyond that, you know, things almost never go right. There's always something that pops up. And when you're the new kid on the block with a customer, and if you're implementing, you are the new kid on the block, guess who they look to point the finger at? Navigating that conversation is critical because it's going to happen. And that requires both the empathy that I talked about, but also the tactical aspects of helping a customer navigate those problems by telling them that there might be some things that they're not doing well that could be the cause of what's going on. That's both a cultural shift, but also an incredibly important tactic for success.

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Tyler Finn

I think most people, if they're thinking about SpotDraft, hopefully they're thinking about the summit or maybe they're attending, but they're probably also thinking about our recent Series B announcement. We raised $54 million. I think there's a lot of money flowing into legal tech. What I'm really curious about from both of you is the philosophy around fundraising because to me fundraising is obviously important. It's important to growth, it's important to keep the lights on, but it's just one part of building a sustainable business, right? The NASDAQ billboard that we were taking photos in front of is not the end point on the journey, I guess.

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Shashank Bijapur 

I think what's important is we find the right kind of capital from the right kind of people that help us in the growth that we want to do. We were lucky to find, so we've got a fantastic set of investors who are already invested in the company, and we have Vertex and Trident Partners who joined us. I see this year as being a pivotal year in how technology is moving. We've had about two and a half, three years of LLMs coming in, and if you see large language models, language as the operative word. You know, the toughest English that you're going to read, perhaps, after Shakespeare is that damn contract that reads, notwithstanding anything contained in this agreement and subject to clause 3.4.

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Akshay Verma 

Also written at the time of Shakespeare, though.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah.

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Tyler Finn

Now, first, after we just didn't.

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Shashank Bijapur

And it is a language that costs $1,200 an hour. So it's ripe for disruption. So you need the capital to invest in the team, invest in the future, which is AI, and invest in our customers who are really helping us grow.

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Akshay Verma

Yeah 

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Tyler Finn

Anything you'd add to that?

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Akshay Verma

Yeah, like at the end of the day, it's about trust, right? So these investors are trusting us, but they're also backing us and they see something in us. And to me, it's the start of the next phase in our journey. Ideas are everywhere. Shashank had an idea. Guess what? Guess what got us here? Execution. So, that obviously falls squarely in the CEO's lap to a great extent, but that's our next real challenge here is can we execute towards the goals that we set? And there's, you know, to Shashank's point, there's a lot that's changing. AI is really changing everything, including how we think about our products, how we think about our customers, how they think about us. So all of those things are going to be top of mind for us as we move forward with this new round. 

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Tyler Finn

One thing that fundraising does that you referenced is it allows us to bring on great talent, right?

And I do think, I don't want to blow up your ego too much, but it was a really big win for us to be able to bring on another super experienced member of our exec team when you joined us in 2023. You came from a legal ops background, but I think when you first joined Facebook and first sort of took on a legal ops role there, that profession looked pretty different, right? It's changed a bit. What did it look like at that point in time?

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Akshay Verma 

Yeah, that was six years ago. So it's not like it was a monumental time frame, but a lot has changed. I also realized this morning between Facebook, Coinbase and SpotDraft I've been all blue for the last six years. So that's kind of a it's kind of a cool thing. I haven't had to change my wardrobe much. The legal ops function I think is at the forefront More than it's ever been before we were just having an advisory board meeting before this before this podcast episode And we were just talking about how many of our customers were, you know, the main stakeholder has been a lawyer for almost the entirety of our U.S. entry is really starting. It really has shifted about a year, year and a half ago, where even midsize and smaller companies are now bringing on a head of legal ops to help manage the business side of the equation for legal departments. I don't think that stops. I think that continues to grow. The importance that that function brings to the table, the power that that brings to the table, I think those are all things that we are not only going to be able to benefit from, but that we're going to be able to serve in a much better capacity moving forward. So I'm all for it as a former practicing and recovering lawyer. I love this side of the equation.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah. And I feel like legal sort of is a laggard in adoption of new trends. They believe in precedent, they believe in stereo decisions. It takes a little bit of time for them to get used to. So if you look at how sales ops, revenue operations, DevOps, each of those has evolved, I think that evolution into legal came in a tad little later. The office of the General Counsel isn't a very modern one. It's one that's about 20, 30 years where it's suddenly blown up, especially in the last 20 years. And now, I think it is the world and the realm of legal ops to take over a large part of making legal operate smoothly.

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Tyler Finn

Do you think that legal ops, I mean, we can get into like some actual topics here too. Do you think that legal ops as a profession is headed in the right direction? I mean, I see and I haven't been working with legal ops professionals for as long as I have with GC's, Office of GC. I see a ton of potential here, but I wonder sometimes if too much attention is just focused on maybe the most successful people in the legal ops space and not enough on some of the folks who are kind of day in day out doing the tech implementation, let's say.

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Akshay Verma

Yeah. I think, you know, if you look across the cross-section of job descriptions that are on LinkedIn right now for legal ops roles, you will see a pretty broad spectrum of what they look like. And that to me is an indication that the market still does not fully understand the value proposition, the power that it can bring to the table, and really what it is. So there'll be some growing pains. What's really great to see is the proliferation of the role itself and the number of roles that are open and the openness. We just saw a great acquisition by TechGC who acquired a legal ops community called Blink. To me, the marriage of those two roles is not only necessary, I think it's going to be a great thing for all businesses moving forward. 

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Tyler Finn

Why were you looking for someone with a legal ops background when you were thinking about hiring for the COO role? I'm curious for your view on that and then sort of why you wanted to step into this.

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Shashank Bijapur

I think legal ops role perhaps the logical growth journey for every legal ops person is to become the COO of a company and lead operations pretty much across the board. If you look at what Legal does, it is the connective tissue for all of the departments of the company and LegalOps is that connective tissue that connects Legal to the rest of the business. So it is a role that they've done before, they've experienced before and Akshay especially comes with a background of knowing the market, the people, understanding, great understanding of the business, and has a lot of empathy in how he leads. So he was a very natural choice for us.

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Akshay Verma

I don't know that I would have thought about a COO role at all, to be honest. It's really, I think, now that I'm in it, or actually even before that, when Shashank first raised it with me, in fact, I remember exactly where we were standing at CLOC in Vegas. And I was actually telling him, you have some great ideas for you. And he's like, no, no, no, no, you misunderstand what I said. And I said, oh, so I hadn't really thought of it. But you know, some of the best roles come along that way. And now that I've been in it, it is a very natural evolution. And part of my own kind of evaluation of the role beyond the company was where would I go next? What's next for me in my growth journey as an individual and as a professional after having been at two giants and having done two of those roles? What would be next? And I didn't have a great answer for myself and it's not like it was gonna stop working tomorrow. So this felt like it could be a really cool new step and then I did a little bit of research and like nobody had really done it before. I think maybe one or two people had taken on similar types of roles. So that was exciting in and of itself. It's a space I knew really well. Obviously it's kind of a return to my birthplace in a lot of ways, kind of going back to a company that was founded in India. But I think just from an operational perspective, I had seen and touched so many different aspects of what I do now at the two companies that I was at previously it really was a an opportunity to take that skill set to the next level

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Shashank Bijapur

So you went from working at two big giants? To laying down the foundation of the next big giant 

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Akshay Verma

Exactly. 

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Shashank Bijapur

Great Move. 

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Akshay Verma

The next blue giant.

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Tyler Finn

Blue is the color of trust. You know one of the things that I like to do on this podcast is as people move through their careers, we can say this in different ways, people who have kind of slightly winding careers, or I heard a term that I thought was interesting, spiral careers. I was listening to a podcast with Arthur Brooks a couple days ago.

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Akshay Verma

Hopefully not spiraling downward.

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Tyler Finn

No, no, no, no, no,no. I like to explore the mindset that's sort of required to make some of those shifts. You were a lawyer, now you're the founder of a business and you're the CEO, you were a lawyer, now you're the COO I mean, I guess the first question is you know, do either of you think of yourselves as lawyers anymore? Is that an important component of your identity?

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Shashank Bijapur

I can go first. I mean, I think lawyer first pretty much in everything I do. Interesting. But, and it takes a little bit of time to think that taking a risk is okay, right? You don't have to operate in areas of black and white. You can take a risk and that's fine. That takes a little bit of doing. And the second thing that I had to change was doing it quick, doing, getting the first version out, making it quick and dirty, and just getting it out there is more important than just waiting for that perfect version number 23 execution dot doc X being rolled out. 

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Akshay Verma

I'm gonna say Shashank was probably a much better lawyer than I was. Maybe this was inherent. I never really gave a shit about risk. And I don't mean that I would just go out and do stupid things, but to me the calculus was always very different. And it showed up in my feedback in my law firm days. Well, we didn't go deep enough on this issue, but the outcome is the outcome. So in a lot of ways, I kind of fell into a role where risk-taking was not just okay, it was necessary. You cannot go build a business without taking massive risk. And I mean massive risk. You know, financial risk, personal risk, all those kinds of things. You can't do it. So you have to have the makeup for it, you have to have the stomach for it, and then you have to have the judgment for it. And I found a lot of satisfaction in being able to navigate those issues from a risk perspective, which I think is difficult for most lawyers. So I've really enjoyed that shift for myself.

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Tyler Finn

I do have a lot of people who are now doing different things. I mean, I have some GCs on and heads of legal ops, but also people who are doing things that are very different. To what extent do you think that a good exec team needs balance or needs these different sorts of lenses to view the business or view opportunities through. Because, I mean, I'm not trying to push a narrative, but I certainly try to have guests on who are doing things differently and who have taken those risks. It's not to say that we should neglect the idea maybe, I guess, and I want to hear what the two of you think, that, yeah, maybe one member of the exec team should be a little bit more conservative, and that's a very important role to play. We shouldn't shortchange that, I guess is what I'm saying.

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah, I agree. And when we sit on the table, the founders, Akshay, we all come in with varying different opinions or methods to get to the same end. But if we align on the end being the same, getting the different opinions on the table is important. And sometimes you just end up not realizing the importance of perhaps going slow or de-risking or taking that extra risk. And you're just so used to thinking.

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Tyler Finn

For those who are listening to the audio version of this, Akshay raised his hand as the guy who is pushing faster, faster.

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Shashank Bijapur

So I think it is important, but it's also important to make sure that you're all on the same page and that kind of percolates down to every other bit of the company.

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Akshay Verma

Yeah, I think balance is key. And the best way to do that is to hire people that don't think like you. So I tend to be the person who pushes and like, hey, let's do this. We have other people, even outside the exec team and senior leadership, who are a little bit more cautious and ask questions. And to me, as long as there's a lot of safety in the dialogue, then we will arrive at a decision and a path forward that we agree upon. Whether or not it works remains to be seen and we can always recalibrate. But I think having that dialogue is critical. 

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Tyler Finn

Are there ways that other execs who might be listening can take intentional steps to create that sort of safety for different opinions or different views to bubble up or rise up?

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Akshay Verma

Yeah, I mean, it took me a really long time to get here. As a human, self-awareness is really important. So what are you like? Who are you? And then having the discipline and the intention after that to make sure that we gravitate towards people we like, but to not just hire people you like because people you like tend to be like you. And so I think avoiding that to a great extent is a really important thing and I think it's a discipline.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah, I hear not necessarily hiring people like you and also hiring people who are way smarter than you. I mean, then you know you're in safe hands.

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Tyler Finn

You both, as we've talked about, have transitioned away from practicing law full-time. And I think there are a lot of people out there who are happy lawyers. I really do, who likes the profession. But there are also a lot of people out there who are unhappy lawyers and think that they maybe should be doing something different. Finding whether it's more meaning or more happiness in their careers

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Akshay Verma

So, you know, I came into this very unintentionally so my lens is a very kind of backward looking one, a lot of hindsight. But about six years ago, I started teaching a class at Santa Clara, which is exactly on this topic, or at least it touches on these. It's called Critical Lawyering Skills, and it's about career pathing in the law. And the first two weeks with the students, we do a lot of introspection. They start to at least expressly and on paper write down who they are, what do they care about, what gives them energy? All the things that you never talk about in law school, right? And most people just don't, we were not brought up to really think that way. And it doesn't mean that that's the path you follow. But I think that introspection is key. And again, when I look back after being at Axiom for about six months, I was like, why did I go become a lawyer in the first place? And I look back and I was like, this is what I was meant to do. I was meant to do business, but it never crossed my mind. And now that I look back on it, I look at the level of satisfaction, creativity, problem-solving, human interaction, all of those things are things that I really thrive upon when it comes to a career and a job and a role. Those were not things that I found to be present when I was practicing law. And so I think if you can understand that about yourself, then it opens up a lot of doors. If you're already in law school or you graduated, it takes a little bit of courage. For me, I've been practicing for six years. It takes a lot of courage to be like, I'm gonna put this license away. And I've worked my tail off and I passed the bar and I was working gargantuan hours a week and that was my identity. And so I had to remove myself from that before I could really start enjoying that role. And then it just took off after that.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah, I think, and I'm speaking specifically to in-house lawyers, there is this conception of legal and the business. I feel legal is a very essential part of the business. Because every dollar coming in or out is because somebody has signed a piece of paper. That legal has been involved in some form or the other. They know how to mediate, they know how to, they've done pretty much all of the buying and selling and been involved there. They know how boards look, operate, and decide. I think they should look at this as a natural progression into what they call as business. And just because you went to law school doesn't mean you need to be a lawyer for the rest of your life. I think there are opportunities far varied based on what you've learned at law school and what you've practiced so far. 

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Akshay Verma

And I think technology is providing so much more of that opportunity now. I think that's the coolest thing about it. The opportunity is far greater now than it ever was.

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah.

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Tyler Finn

Let's talk a little bit about tech. We're here at our summit. It's all around AI. I think I know the answer to this piece of the question, which is, you know, how do you think AI is going to evolve the way that in-house legal teams work, and will it evolve the way that in-house legal teams work? But I think the other component to this is, where is that change going to come from? So how is this going to happen? What might happen for in-house teams? What's possible? 

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Shashank Bijapur

So I keep saying this, that AI is not going to take away jobs of lawyers, but somebody, a lawyer with AI is definitely going to take away your job. Knowing how to leverage AI to do what lawyers do on an ongoing basis is very important and essential. I feel the way intake works of work, the way research works, the way we are able to navigate contract negotiations, redlines, all of that is going to change in a very fundamental way because of what AI is able to do. It's going to be much more accurate, much more precise, with better recall than any other human possible. So this is now going to be a necessary toolkit, almost as much as you know Word. And need to have Word in your daily job, you need to know how to leverage AI to do your job better. 

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Akshay Verma

Yeah, Richard Suskin came out in the mid-90s and said every lawyer is going to be using email in the next five years and the entire legal profession laughed at him. 

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah. 

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Akshay Verma 

So to me, you know, I'll echo everything that Shashank just said. It's a tool. It's a tool. It's not going to replace jobs. It is going to replace or enable tasks. And if I was to put my legal operations hat on and I look at a legal department, there are a ton of manual tasks that lawyers do. And so the very crux of legal operations is to set the legal department up for success by having the lawyers and the department focus on core strategic work. 80, 90, I don't know, there's a large percentage number, I don't know what it is, it depends on the department, of those tasks do not fall into that category. Yet they're being done. They're necessary, they need to be done, but it's not really legal work. So I think that's really where AI can be an enabler and a superpower for lawyers. We have to learn how to use it. I'm teaching my kids how to use it safely and effectively, hopefully. Hopefully not cheating on their homework. But it has to be a part of their makeup as they progress in their own lives. 

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Tyler Finn

We heard in the first year, I think, after Chat GPT was released, about a lot of the risks associated, and that's fine, I mean, that's sort of how new technology comes out. We should think about the risks.

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Akshay Verma

You mean the lawyers pointed out the risks?

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Tyler Finn

Correct.

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Akshay Verma

Oh, okay. How about that?

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Tyler Finn

But I guess the question to the two of you is, are folks still too risk-averse about this? I mean, some of this is, you know, some of this has been solved for, right? You wouldn't allow all your software engineers to go and get their own personal licenses to chat you, but you have an enterprise license and you're not going to let it train on your data, meaning on super important, valuable parts of your code base. So, not all the societal issues with AI have been solved, obviously, but some of these issues that are very relevant to corporate lawyers have been solved. But are people still thinking about this in too risk-averse a way, do you think? What's your experience with that right now?

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Shashank Bijapur

I think there's a little bit too much of risk-averse behavior that's going on here. I mean, there's risk in driving a car, catching a flight, and going to the gym. The question is, can you do things safer and take all the precautions to ensure that those risks can be mitigated and systems today including what SpotDraft is building and launching soon has pretty much eliminated the risk of hallucination by grounding and ensuring that the right sources give you the information and you see where the information is coming from. So they're getting better. So if you look at it, do you guys know when, in 2008 when Apple launched its App Store, what was the number one paid app? The app was, it was called Flashlight. It did, yeah, that was the number one paid app. And do you know what was the number one free app? It was an app called iBeer, where it just showed a beer and you could just pretend like you were drinking.

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Tyler Finn

No way. 

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Shashank Bijapur

And today, just look at what smartphones can do. You have, it's your work device, it is your entertainment device, your health device, communication device, it's evolved. Today we may be in the iBeer or the flashlight era of AI, but it will only evolve. It's a lot better than that. Yeah, 

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Tyler Finn

It's way better than that. 

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Shashank Bijapur 

It just took, what, two months to get to 100 million users? The telephone took 70 years to get there. So that's the difference.

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Akshay Verma

I think as humans, we tend to approach new, un-understood things from a place of fear. It's a natural thing. When you add lawyers to those humans, it becomes even more exaggerated. So yes, I think people will approach this from a place of fear and that's okay. I think it's very natural. I think it's a natural cycle that we'll go through. How do you break through that? You educate, you learn, you learn to trust over time. You will learn to trust the output of AI over time. The more that you use it, the more that it learns and then the more that you will start to trust it. To me, that's just a matter of time. But for the time being, yes, there are going to be all kinds of trials and errors and misconceptions and all those kinds of things are going to happen with AI, but it's inevitable. It is absolutely inevitable and it's necessary. I think it's going to be a great thing for our economies.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah. The way I would approach this problem is if you bring AI on, think of it as a lawyer fresh out of law school. You need to train it, you need to give it the right guidance, you need to reinforce learning and it will get better over time. But that investment is needed for it to become truly 100% near human-like in its output.

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Tyler Finn

I think that I'm asking questions, but I also have one perspective that I would add here which is, you brought up self-driving cars earlier. I think people are very focused with new technologies on errors of commission, right? Like the self-driving car didn't see that one pedestrian and hit the pedestrian, and of course, that's not a good thing, right? We feel bad for the pedestrians. We ask ourselves, how could we improve the cameras or the LIDAR or the software or whatever it is? There's also errors of omission, right? Like, meaning, if you don't have self-driving cars, freeway deaths aren't gonna go anywhere. And those numbers, or pedestrian deaths in cities, which are at an all-time high, that number's gonna stay at an all-time high, right? It's not gonna go anywhere. So, I mean, there's a sort of like, there's an error of omission by choosing not to leverage new technologies sometimes as well.

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah, you don't want to get sued for the missed comma. Let the machines do it and they probably do a way better job than what humans can. 

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Tyler Finn

Yeah, this is kind of an interesting one. You worked at a law firm, you worked at a law firm, this is going to be a topic of a panel that we haven't heard yet, but do you think that AI is going to really meaningfully disrupt the law firm business model? What's required for, it seems like something better has to emerge. Like there's some really great things about law firms and some partners give fantastic advice that are worth every penny of their $2,500 an hour. But it seems like that business model is ripe for disruption.

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah, so. 

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Akshay Verma

How long have we been saying that?

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Shashank Bijapur

When you charge for something by the hour, it means that efficiency is not going to be your friend. So you can't be, if you are more efficient, it hits your revenue numbers. You want tools to be more precise, but efficient, I'm not sure if the Amla 100 is open to doing that. That said, that model is going to fundamentally change, which means that you're not going to hear lawyers saying, I signed, or businesses saying, I signed a hundred million dollar deal listening to a robot lawyer, no. But the business model of the law firm is ripe for disruption. It may not be the existing law firms, but new structures will emerge where input is not the metric, output is the metric. So a deal, $500,000, comes what may, because all of the costs that go into that, when you add AI plus human as a way to get the output done, is far more predictable. And you can run with more scale. You can only do, what, heck, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, but add AI to the mix, you could do 300. 

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Akshay Verma 

Yeah, I think a lot of this is going to be in the hands of customers and clients. I worked very heavily in the exchange between corporations and outside counsel in terms of pricing and business models and so forth. I've sat across the table from chairs of the AMLA 50 and asked them flat out, what will it take for you to adopt a more holistic approach to alternative fee arrangements? And they just kind of looked at me and said are you kidding like why would we do that? And there's no incentive to Shashank's points. There's no incentive. So it has to be forced. I just, it wouldn't make business sense for them to do it. Maybe somebody cracks that nut great. I think there are some smaller firms who do that. But when you look at the largest ones, we're talking, you know, the Kirkland's and so forth. We're talking six to eight billion dollars of annual revenue. Are they gonna carve that out to be more efficient? Absolutely not. So what are they going to do? It's either a volume game which means they're cannibalizing something else and right now if you look at the kind of where law firm work is going to technology providers and alternative legal services providers and in-house legal departments. So they're already getting cannibalized and they're reacting to that by increasing their hourly rates and charging more hours. That is not sustainable, but I still think it's going to take clients to force the issue on leveraging AI, and we'll be talking about this tomorrow. I have a nice question teed up for Joe. Not just leveraging AI, but I need you to show me, law firm, what's the benefit I'm getting from this? So if something cost me $50,000 without AI, it better cost me, I don't know, 10K without AI, 15K with AI. I think those kinds of conversations are going to have to be forced.

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Shashank Bijapur 

And the innovation here is in pricing. AI may be the driver doing it, but the end benefit to the customer is price. The moment you change the pricing model from an input to an output as a metric, it changes the realm of the game.

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Tyler Finn

A last substantive question for the two of you before sort of traditional closing questions. You know, I mean, we talk about legal teams needing to maybe change their mindset, in-house legal teams, needing to change a mindset around AI, or law firms need to be leveraging this and passing the savings on to their clients. What responsibilities, though, do we have? I mean, this summit is called Beyond AI Hype, right? What responsibilities do we have as tech providers or as vendors to make sure that adoption of AI isn't just sort of successful, but that it's also responsible and that it's sustainable?

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Shashank Bijapur 

I think one is educating everyone on how AI works, the pros and cons of it, and what can and can't be done. Second is being ethically responsible in how we train the AI and what it's able to do. I think these two are very important. And third is eventually to contribute to education to ensure that the next generation of people are AI ready. That is, I think, important that we make the change not just for the people now, but for the coming generations as well, and ensuring that they're always future ready and future proof. 

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Akshay Verma

I think as a seller into the market, the only thing I would add to that is transparency. I've sat on a few different AI panels in the last two or three months, mainly to learn, actually, from the other panelists. And one theme has been consistent through the entirety of those panels, which is transparency. We want transparency. That's not a new concept in business, but I think it's a really badly needed one, particularly in AI. How do you train your model? Where does the data sit? Those are not new concepts. You're a privacy guy. Yes. You came from the privacy world.

That's exactly the way that you talk about data and where it sits and how it flows. 

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Tyler Finn

Governance. 

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Akshay Verma

Exactly right. So I think that kind of transparency is gonna be valuable as well.

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Tyler Finn

Final set of questions for you. My traditional closing questions for the guests. Your favorite part of your day today?

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Shashank Bijapur 

For me it is innovating and working with the team and just that energizes me a lot. It's amazing to see all the different ideas and how we can grow and what we can do next. I think that is amazing. And second is watching that joy in the face of a customer when they say that I use SpotDraft and it really changed the way our legal department operates. It's the joy of building and showing value that really, really makes me happy.

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Akshay Verma

Mine's almost always about people. It's great to see everybody here from India. Yeah. I work here half a world away, so it's really nice to connect with everybody live. And the second one is I get to go watch my son play basketball at the game in about an hour, so I'm really looking forward to that.

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Tyler Finn

Well, I was gonna say, should we have you guess the other one? Do you have a professional pet peeve?

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Shashank Bijapur

Oh, yeah, for me it is...

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Akshay Verma 

Wait, are you gonna guess mine?

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Tyler Finn

That's what I was... I was just thinking that could be kind of fun, actually.

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Shashank Bijapur

I think bullshit. 

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Akshay Verma

Yeah.

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Shashank Bijapur

That's very high up on your radar. And the second one is lack of honesty and transparency.

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Akshay Verma 

Yeah, I'd say those are two big pet peeves. I think for you, it's not having information in a timely fashion.

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah, for me, time is very important. And second is whenever the answer to any problem tends to be, oh, it takes more time and more money. I get that, those are the only two things that are constraints.

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Tyler Finn

Is there a book that you've read recently or that's been important in your career that you'd wanna recommend to the audience? 

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Shashank Bijapur 

I think for me, the transition from lawyer to founder, the book that made that happen for me was Zero to One. I think it was foundational in more than one way as I still keep going back to that book. And the second one is The Hard Thing About the Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I think it's just, you know, running a company is hard and you need to take a lot of hard decisions. Just getting that decision matrix done right, it's a great book to read. It's almost, you can't read it page to page, you just have to open the part that's really problematic at this point and just read that one chapter and then close it back up.

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Akshay Verma 

Good textbook. 

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Shashank Bijapur 

Yeah. 

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Akshay Verma

Mine's Getting Naked by Peter Lesioni. Once I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and my former manager at Facebook was really big on the lessons that came out of that book. He wrote a second book called Getting Naked, which is about a management consulting company. And the protagonist goes through a pretty amazing character arc in how he learns to navigate and push back on clients and customers. And now in the end, that actually ends up getting him a lot more business and amazing satisfaction out of his work. And it's something that I'm hoping to take to our sales and customer success teams.

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Tyler Finn

Interesting. My final question for the two of you, a traditional closing question. It's if you could look back on your days as a young lawyer, both of you at the firm or at a firm, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

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Shashank Bijapur

Do not watch Suits. And read John Grisham and imagine your world is going to turn out like that. The reality of law is very different from the entertainment of law. So young kids out there, please do not base your life decisions on books and movies.

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Akshay Verma

In part I went to law school and did litigation because of a few good men. So that's a good cautionary tale. I think for me, I wish I would have known, I don't know how realistic, I wish I would have known just what else was possible with a law degree. Yeah, and everyone will go through their own journey around that, but I think if I had known, I would have had a little bit more intention around my path, but it is what it is, and I love where I am, so, but I wish I would have known a little bit more back then.

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Tyler Finn

Well, Akshay, Shashank, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract here at our summit in San Francisco. This has been a lot of fun for me. 

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Shashank Bijapur 

Thank you for having us, finally. 

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Tyler Finn

This is the first time both of you on camera together, hopefully not the last. We should do another one of these next year. 

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Shashank Bijapur

Yeah, absolutely. 

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Akshay Verma 

Sounds good.

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Tyler Finn

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

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