The following interview is a conversation we had with Jordan Domash, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsiv, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3M Raised to Power the Future of Legal Research
Jordan Domash
Yeah, thanks Brett. Excited to chat.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Could you just go ahead and kick us off with that quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, grew up in Chicago, started my career in consulting at one of the big management consulting organizations. Did that for a few years and knew I wasn’t going to go down the lifelong consulting path. So I joined a company in Chicago called Relativity. Relativity is one of the biggest success stories in legal tech over the past 1020 years. It’s the biggest player in e discovery. I spent eight years there. A number of different roles, including launching a business. Ended up leaving relativity after that long stint to start Responsiv. And Responsiv is a legal research platform for in house attorneys. Happy to go a bit more into what we do on the Responsiv side, that’s my background.
Brett
So I see your first role was chief of staff. I’m seeing more and more founders who are coming on and they had that role as well. What did you learn from your time being chief of staff and what was that experience like?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, chief of staff was amazing. And yeah, every company that has a chief of staff role means something a little different. At relativity, it was working really closely with the Founder and CEO supporting the business. At the time, we didn’t have a strategy team, so it was strategy strategic project communications. I did some of the strategic projects included revisiting our pricing M and a, but then really just got to know our product deeply. The customers, how do you market and sell and build products for attorneys, which could be pretty different than the general public. So I just thought it was almost a version of a mini MBA in technology and just seeing how really successful executives ran a pretty complex business.
Brett
How big was the company when you joined and how big is it today? Just for those listening who aren’t in legal tech?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, when I joined it was about 350 employees. And when I left about a year ago, it was at 1700, 1800 employees. So it’s a pretty big, especially for a tech company in Chicago, homegrown. It was one of the bigger success stories.
Brett
What was that like making the decision to leave?
Jordan Domash
Honestly, I have a lot of respect for relativity, but it went from, I think like many tech companies, it still started out as Founder, led, high growth, really focused on the product, moving quickly, and eight years later as a much bigger company, its private equity investment much more focused on profitability. And I think just became a different place and I was really focused on building and it felt like it was time for my next journey. But have a lot of respect for everyone over there.
Brett
Well, lets dive right into what you’re building. So at a high level, what problem is Responsiv solving?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, the problem that Responsiv is solving is to put yourself in the shoes. A general counsel or an in house attorney at a corporation, someone from the business comes to you and says, can we do XYZ? We have an employment issue, or there’s a new privacy regulation, and you need to effectively understand what is the law on that particular topic. And if I’m a solo GC at a tech company, right, maybe my expertise is in m and A or transactions and now I’m dealing with privacy or employment in all these different jurisdictions. It’s actually really hard to understand what is the law. Most of our customers have two options outside of Responsiv. They either use Google and do the basic research themselves, using whatever resources are available, or they’ll call outside counsel, which is really expensive.
Jordan Domash
And it’s hard to use that budget when it’s a low risk, everyday issue. And so we’re basically helping in house attorneys understand what is the law so that they can make a decision and move on to the rest of their day.
Brett
What’s it like selling tube in house attorneys? Do they have buying power or do they just have to pass it off to maybe the CIO or CTO for decision making? What does that look like?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, so first of all, it’s a very risk averse function. You don’t want to get something wrong. And their whole job is managing risk for the company. And so there’s a real sense of risk aversion. And I think to answer your question on the budgeting, it’s really dependent on the size of the company. A small startup thinks about it one way, massive corporations think about another way. I would say to simplify the budget piece, there’s budget for in house people and tools. And then there’s also a separate budget that often rolls up to the general counsel in terms of outside council spend. And so often when we talk to our customers, they could be pulling budget from their internal tech and people spend, but more often than not it’s looking at the entire legal budget.
Jordan Domash
And by leveraging technology they can be more efficient, which allows them to effectively stay budget neutral, even though they’re spending a little bit more on technology.
Brett
What’s the general sentiment around AI today? I’m sure there’s a lot of hype and a lot of excitement for lawyers, but I’m sure there’s also some lawyers who are very skeptical. How would you kind of summarize?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, and it’s funny because I’ve been building AI enabled tools for attorneys for ten years. Relativity, where I was before starting Responsiv relativity, has had integrated artificial intelligence for the process of discovery, which is a very cost intensive and manual process. There’s been AI in this industry for a decade, but it’s been a long journey getting acceptance even in that specific vertical. I think today AI is far more mainstream. There’s real knowledge and interest in the underlying technology and I think most attorneys that we speak to, they know that it will have an impact on their profession and they’re excited to learn more. But there’s a lot of concerns, naturally. Are they going to make a wrong decision based on the information that the AI potentially hallucinated? Are they going to be able to share potentially confidential and privileged and private information?
Jordan Domash
So there’s a whole set of additional privacy and compliance constraints that are top of mind. And so it’s both, there’s incredible interest and it’s really easy to get a attorney to take a demo of what we’re building. But at the same time there’s a natural concern for folks that aren’t really close to the underlying tech.
Brett
Who is that ICP today, and what’s the journey been like to really uncover that ICP?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, it’s funny because we’re targeting in house teams. And so when I say corporations, that basically means everyone. But that’s in the legal world. Most of our peers that are building legal research tools are actually get the bulk of their spend from law firms and are building tools for big small law firms. For us, basically we’re the anti traditional legal research tool and that we’re hyper focused on the corporate use case. The folks that we’ve had the most concentration in have been regulated organizations that have the most complex legal issues. So that could be both financial and healthcare, and then also tech companies that are growing rapidly where every day is a new issue, something that they’ve never dealt with before, that they need tools to help support the business through their growth.
Jordan Domash
It’s mostly mid sized organizations, but we’re really targeting those verticals from small to big.
Brett
Who stands to be disrupted here then? If you’re saving budget from outside council, does that mean outside councils having some of their budget taken away? And are they hostile? Are they going to be hostile in the future?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, I mean, I think long term, if we’re successful, I think ultimately outside council gets to be disruptive. And I’m not here to say that at any point in time there won’t be a role in outside council. Outside council provides valuable expertise. They have a whole set of resources available where they can help support the company when they have the bet the company issue, the risky challenge that really needs expert support. I think what we’re trying to disrupt is at least today there’s tons of everyday issues that happen within a business. Everyday questions that come up, everyday risks that right now corporations don’t have a choice. They don’t have the basic information to make a decision on a legal topic.
Jordan Domash
So they pick up the phone, call outside counsel, spend $1,000, $2,000, because there isn’t really an alternative and they’re not going to outside counsel for that deep expertise. They’re going there just to get basic access to information. And so we believe by empowering in house teams with access to information that they’ll be able to make more decisions themselves instead of picking up the phone and calling outside counsel. And they’ll only pick up the phone and call outside counsel when it’s a real complex, highly risky issue that requires that level of expertise.
Brett
What’s the competitive landscape look like? Are there other solutions like yours or is the true competition just the status quo?
Jordan Domash
There’s a mix of different players in the space. The biggest legal research platforms are like Westlaw and LexisNexis and Bloomberg, and they’ve been around for a long time and their solutions are effectively like online libraries, online knowledge bases where they’re large sources of information, but it’s quite time intensive for an average user to sit through all of their content. There’s a couple of AI enabled tools that have been popping up on the market as well, but again, most of them are focused on the law firm use case and really trying to build a solution for the largest law firms in the world and the hundreds of associates at those law firms. Instead of really focusing on the corporate use case, which is a bit different.
Brett
I know its early days still here, but if we look at marketing, what is your marketing philosophy, your go to market philosophy?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, since we publicly launched, we have a bunch of paying customers happily using the product, but we haven’t really turned on our go to market motion yet. If you go to our website, its behind a waitlist. And so we have not aggressively gone to market in the way that we will. For us, it’s really about how do we target in house users and clearly articulate the potential value that we can provide. And that’s something that we’re still trying to figure out. What’s the pithy one sentence line that really articulates the category that we are playing in? Because legal research has such a connotation.
Jordan Domash
When you tell an attorney, oh, you’re building a legal research tool, they think Westlaw, they think about one of the platforms that’s been around for a long time that’s really targeting those big law firms and not something far silk lawyer that we’re building today. So I think it’s something that we’re still working on.
Brett
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Brett
And how do you convince people to make that change?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, it’s a great question. And these tools are woven into many attorneys day to day. So it’s a hard ask to suggest that they move off of something that they’ve known and loved for many years. To be honest, most of our early users are folks that use west law or LexisNexis early in their career. Maybe they were an associate at a law firm and they were using those tools. Then they became a more junior attorney at a corporation. And again, we’re doing some of those research tasks, but now they’re on a small team, they’re in a senior role, and they dread having to go back into a platform like that. And so they’ve basically given up doing traditional research and they resort to Google or outside counsel because they don’t have time to go read 30 cases.
Jordan Domash
And so our early target customers are those folks, the folks that would say that they don’t do legal research because the process of sifting through all that content is something that they don’t have time for anymore. And they’re actively looking for a better way to get access to basic information.
Brett
I know you’re private, and I know it’s early, but can you share any numbers just to tease our audience with some of the growth and adoption that you’re seeing?
Jordan Domash
Yeah. So we aren’t sharing numbers on revenue or valuation, but I will say that we launched the product just at the end of last year. So we announced the company in November of last year. We had a set of design partners last year and we’re already in just three months. We signed up a number of paying customers that are actively using the product really successfully across the verticals that I discussed. So we’re seeing really rapid growth and we’re excited to build on that.
Brett
How did you find those design partners?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, it’s funny. So it started out with a couple of folks in my network. I’ve been in legal technology for a long time and so I built a number of relationships which enable us to get started really quickly. And so start with a few folks in our network that were really in the target audience, believed in the vision and identified the pain point that were articulating. And from there it’s honestly been mostly inbound interest and word of mouth. We’re now at the point where most of the new customers that we’ve signed in the past month or two have come from referrals from existing customers. And so we haven’t done any marketing. We just had our first salesperson start this week.
Jordan Domash
And so our entire base of customers have built off of those few early users, and now they’re sharing about their success with the product through their network.
Brett
I was reading an article earlier today and it was talking about how legal tech startups last year raised 725 million, which sounds like a lot if it’s your personal bank account, but if you look at an entire market, that’s not a huge sum compared to, you know, say, cybersecurity or martech. Why do you think legal tech isn’t raising anything close to what cybersecurity is or marketing is. Why do you think that is?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, so one thing I would imagine, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would imagine over the last twelve months versus the years before that, we’ve seen a massive increase in fundraising. Because AI is so applicable to legal, like large volumes of unstructured data, it’s a big opportunity to create real efficiencies. So I would imagine that story is changing and we’re seeing a lot of buzz around legal technology now more than ever before. I think it’s interesting to wonder why we haven’t seen real investment in legal tools historically. I think when we talk to VC funds, we ended up raising a great round exactly what were targeting. But you talked to some venture capital firms. There’s a reticence of investing in legal because there hasn’t been a ton of success stories.
Jordan Domash
I mean, there’s relativity, which is a multibillion dollar outcome. Ironclad, Carta. But a lot of the legal tools that had been started, they’re kind of SMB tools for law firms. And when you think of law firms, it’s a highly concentrated industry. There’s 200 big law firms in the world, and it’s hard to build a scale business when you’re targeting such a concentrated industry. I think for us, the real upside is how many corporations have attorneys and there’s thousands and thousands of potential customers for us. And we’ve seen ironclad and Carta and some of these other legal organizations build real businesses because they’ve treated legal not just as a risk center or a cost center. When you look at ironclad, by creating efficiencies in legal, they’re actually enabling the business to close deals.
Jordan Domash
And so I guess a long winded answer, just because over the last 30 years, there’s not that many massive success stories. I think there’s just been a skepticism of exploring legal until recently.
Brett
On my other podcast, Unicorn builders, I interviewed Jack Newton, who’s CEO of Clio, and he was talking about the importance of thought leadership and all the thought leadership that he’s done as he’s grown that company to the massive scale that it’s at today. Is thought leadership going to be a priority for you? And if so, what’s that thought leadership plan or strategy going to look like?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, for sure. A, it’s hard to build a brand and b, brands are super important and you can’t build a brand without adding real value to your customers. And I look at the space that we’re innovating in legal research. We’re using artificial intelligence. It’s a space that many attorneys are interested in and they want to learn a lot about. So for us, thought leadership is probably going to take on a few roles. What is artificial intelligence? How does AI work in legal tools? How do we address the common concerns that all attorneys have, or adopting artificial intelligence? And then even most importantly, we’re actually a legal company first and AI company second. And so how do we actually solve legal research problems? By leveraging a tool, artificial intelligence.
Jordan Domash
And so also describing how you can be far more efficient by leveraging tools like Responsiv is going to be a big part of our strategy. And so I also echo how important.
Brett
Thought leadership is from that $3 million round you raised. What were like the takeaways or what was something that you learned throughout that fundraiser?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, I mean it was interesting. I think we raised pretty early on in the lifecycle of our company and we had only started it a few months ago, a bunch of different learnings. I think one is really interesting meeting a bunch of venture capitalists and how different their philosophies were. A handful of folks, including Greylock, who we raised around from, came to the table with a very clear point of view of how generative AI was going to impact the economy, how specifically it was going to impact legal, and how our platform could fit into that thesis. And that was pretty compelling for us. Someone who had a very clear thesis predefined and a lot of venture capital firms, it seemed like they hadn’t quite developed that thesis, were in the process of gathering information.
Jordan Domash
And it was pretty interesting to see just the big divergence in philosophy and theories on what we found is obviously very hot platform in technology. So that was one thing. I think the other thing is I don’t know if I necessarily realized how tight knit and connected the VC community is. Everyone knows everyone and there’s a lot of conversations that were happening between folks that we had talked to, investors that were already engaged. And as big as the venture market is, its also quite small.
Brett
Trey, lets imagine I come to you and I say, Jordan, I want to start a legal tech startup based on your last ten years in this ecosystem. What would be the number one piece of advice that you give me?
Jordan Domash
I think the market in general talks about legal as one problem. In reality its several major categories and even within those categories there are very specific workflows. So discovery is one major problem, contracting is another category, diligence transactions is another. So there’s big anchor categories in which within each of those categories, there’s a ton of different workflows. And we’re doing highly focused on legal research for in house users that’s very different from discovery. And so I would be hyper focused on a specific workflow and a specific use case and a customer profile that really has a big pain point within that use case. I think we’ve talked to a lot of folks innovating in legal, and a lot of them, maybe they were doing AI at Google or AI at Microsoft, and they’re getting into the space.
Jordan Domash
I don’t know if they have a appreciation for the complexity of some of these really narrow workflows. And it takes a long time to get up to speed on what you really need to deliver around the product to actually be used by a legal team or an attorney.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, the big picture vision is we want to be the partner to in house attorneys. So that means a few things. One is providing them access to relevant legal information for whatever question that they’re asking. So that could mean employment, privacy, regulatory compliance, whatever questions they have coming up, and then providing them access to the most important legal content, whether that’s cases, statutes, regulatory guidance, legal analysis, and so going deep into the information retrieval process. And it’s not just for individual questions, it’s for 50 state surveys or other workflows, that could actually be 50 questions at once. We also want to support our customers as they’re converting that research into something actionable, whether that is generating a template or a clause or a policy. And so we look at ourselves as partners to basically what attorneys need to do in their everyday lives. Amazing.
Jordan Domash
I love it.
Brett
All right, Jordan, we are up on time. If there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Jordan Domash
Yeah, responsiv.ai. Check our website. We also have a LinkedIn Responsiv or just send me an email. Jordan, excited to connect with anyone who’s interested in chatting.
Brett
Awesome, Jordan, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
Jordan Domash
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate it.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. Bye. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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