Could a digital art project that allows nonlawyers to emulate the look and feel of a lawyer-drafted letter signal a new wave of free, open-source tools for legal consumers? Will a tech startup attracting significant venture capital drive down legal costs for private market investors, and thus doom a lucrative revenue stream for many law firms?
One is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek attempt at giving nonlawyers a cheap way to clap back at an opponent—without hiring an attorney. The other is a serious AI play, and just one example of the legal technology companies that have been on the receiving end of billions of dollars in investment during the last few years.
Both upend traditional notions about the way legal services should be delivered. For law firm leaders grappling with the implications of rapidly developing technologies like artificial intelligence, they may serve as something of a case study on the kinds of challengers they are likely to face as tech disruption marches into the legal marketplace.
Some of those potential competitors may appear to be little more than quirky distractions. Others are aiming squarely at the heart of the legal business and are already making moves to win credibility and clients. But when it comes to tech disruption, it’s critical to keep an eye on both.
Gravitas Without Legal Fees
On May 9, Kendra Albert, a New York-based public interest and technology media lawyer, and Morry Kolman, a multimedia artist and software developer, debuted Heavyweight at the 7x7 conference in New York. With the tagline “all of the gravitas, none of the fees,” the site says that it allows users to “create important-looking letters in seconds.”
A review of the site shows that it does present official-looking documents that appear, at first glance, to have come from a law firm. A drop-down menu gives users the option to create a custom letter or to select from a list of potential recipients or scenarios and adjust them to their specific needs.
For instance, users can generate a letter to a freelance client with an overdue payment, a formal request to a landlord who has failed to make a repair, or a “wage and hour” letter to a business that is failing to pay employees overtime.
At the top of the letter is the name of a fictitious firm and its fake partners. Users can adjust the number of partners, the firm’s age and even the floor where it is headquartered. The identities of the partners can be adjusted using a drop-down menu that sources names from the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower ship manifest, town representatives in Greenwich, Conn., former Enron executives and equestrian riders. Site users can also increase or decrease the “snootiness” of the firm, which essentially changes the font used in the letter.
‘Extremely Law-Firm Looking’
Heavyweight’s creators say the idea is to “democratize the aesthetics” of legal representation. “Sometimes, you don’t need a lawyer, you just need to look like you have one,” Albert wrote in a blog post. Albert describes the site as a free, online, open-source tool that “lets you give any complaint you have extremely law-firm-looking formatting and letterhead.”
Critically, however, Heavyweight never uses language claiming that the letter was written by a lawyer. The idea is that the look of a letter will change the power dynamic between the letter writer and the recipient “just based on the aesthetic elements alone, at least if the person who receives the letter isn’t really looking too closely,” Albert wrote
The project was inspired, in part, by recent experiences that Kolman and Albert have had involving law firm letterhead. Kolman’s art project, “Traffic Cam Photobooth,” was targeted by a cease-and-desist letter from the New York City Department of Transportation, which he described on Twitter as an “oh s---” moment.
Likewise, Albert’s law firm, Albert Sellars LLP, released a statement on Trump administration executive orders targeting large law firms which said, “F--- that fascist nonsense.” The statement used the firm’s formal name and logo. At the Heavyweight announcement, Albert said the response to the statement prompted thinking about the way law firm documents convey a sense of “officialness that is independent of any actual substance.”
A Largely Positive Response
Albert and Kolman have not received feedback from users who have deployed the tool, they recently told Newsweek. However, most of the hundreds of Twitter responses to the idea have been positive: “Lawyer here: dying laughing”; “call it modernlawfare. It’s like Call of Duty, but shooting cease and desists”; “this is hilarious and useful.”
But a few questioned whether the efforts cross the line into the unauthorized practice of law. It’s an issue the creators have grappled with.
Kolman tweeted: “Now I know what you're thinking, ‘isn't pretending to be a lawyer like, really f---ing illegal?’ And it is! But we never do that. Nowhere in Heavyweight do we ever use terms like "LLP" "JD" "Esq." "Bar" or anything that would represent some claim to legal status.” He noted that a closer look at the template reveals that “these are just names, places and dates (there's not even a professional title on the sign-off!) but together they combine to create an effect much stronger than the sum of their parts.”
In the blog post, Albert wrote that “I don’t actually think the letterhead will pass an inspection from anyone who is really paying attention, which is part of what makes it an ethical project, but also less useful for faking a lawyer.”
Private Markets Clients
Albert and Kolman have emphasized the satirical side of Heavyweight. But the project does have serious undertones, and it’s worth noting that it debuted at the same annual conference, 7x7, that featured the launch of the first NFT (non-fungible token) in 2014. And in the digital world, jokes, games and art projects sometimes cross over and become real businesses. Google started as a college project. Slack, the now ubiquitous messaging tool, was created by developers as they built a failed online game.
In all likelihood, Heavyweight will remain in the realm of digital art and satire, and it may not inspire others to try their hand at building similar open-source legal tools. Yet, law firm leaders shouldn’t count on that—especially when venture capitalists are devoting serious money to disrupting the legal space.
On July 18, for instance, Covenant, a New York-based startup, closed a $4 million seed financing round led by Flybridge Capital Partners, a venture firm focusing on AI-related investments. Covenant’s seed round is one drop in what is becoming a very large legal tech bucket. In the last year, four-fifths of the $2.2 billion invested in legal-related startups have been related to artificial intelligence.
What makes Covenant somewhat different is that it bills itself as “a technology company embedded in a law firm.” And it has a very specific goal of reaching a premium client space that is often the purview of elite firms—private market institutions, such as endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, among others.
The firm was co-founded by Jen Berrent, a former WilmerHale partner and one-time chief legal officer of WeWork, and Richard Perris, the former general counsel of CVC, an investment management firm focusing on private markets work. At present, it is offering AI-powered limited partnership agreement review, most-favored nation election analysis, non-disclosure agreement markup and diligence in helping complete the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Form ADV.
Berrent said the firm aimed to slash the time it takes to review and analyze documents without sacrificing quality, she told CityBiz. Covenant is achieving this goal, she said, by deploying multiple AI models to increase speed and efficiency while ensuring all AI output is verified by experienced attorneys. The result is cost savings for clients and better data to help them make business judgments.
“Clients have not requested more smarts or output from legal minds,” Berent said in an earlier LinkedIn post. “Rather, what clients want is more technology that facilitates interacting with each other and with data.”
The Art of Disruption
Industry disruption often begins with smaller startups that well-established players may not perceive as a threat.
In what has been called an “insanely clear” explanation of disruption, The New York Times, in an internal corporate report on innovation, wrote that as disruptors improve their products and adapt to new technology, their offerings often become more acceptable to customers and begin eroding the market share of longstanding industry players.
Law firms have long been largely immune to tech-related disruption. AI appears to be changing that. Firms are now beginning to face a growing array of new challengers—some of them well-funded. Many, however, are small and appear to pose no risk to established firms. But firm leaders concerned about disruption should stay alert. Ask anyone in an industry that has seen time-tested ways of doing business disrupted by technology, and it’s likely that many of the biggest threats came out of left field.
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David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy, creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.
