Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
The Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast covers the startups that develop and sell legal tech products and services. Through interviews with legal tech startup founders, investors, customers and others with an interest in this startup sector, the podcast's host, Charlie Uniman, and his guests will discuss such topics as startup management and startup life, startup investing, marketing and sales, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how customers purchase legal tech. In short, the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast will focus on just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.
Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
How Israeli Law Firms Are Reshaping Legal Practice with Legal Tech
Israel's innovation powerhouse isn't just transforming cybersecurity and consumer tech—it's also transforming the delivery of legal services through technological advancement. In this fascinating conversation with Idan Sivan, CTO at Fisher Law Firm and founder of the LawIT Forum, and Omri Rahum-Tweg, partner and co-head of the firm's law and technology practice, we explore how Israeli legal tech is developing at lightning speed.
What makes the Israeli legal tech ecosystem special? For starters, the geographic intimacy allows startups to establish beta testing partnerships with law firms far more efficiently than in markets like the US. As Idan explains, "The market is small, the activity is small, so it's easier to gain access and to work together with law firms as a vendor." This creates a powerful advantage: Israeli legal tech companies can more often refine their products through real-world testing without the lengthy sales cycles that plague startups elsewhere.
Particularly fascinating is how Fisher approaches change management across generational divides. While senior partners might not personally use every new technology, they've strategically empowered tech-savvy team members to drive implementation. This pragmatic delegation has accelerated adoption throughout the organization, allowing the firm to implement AI tools across multiple practice areas—from automated contract analysis to sophisticated due diligence capabilities that can extract substantive issues from thousands of documents.
When discussing "agentic AI"—the concept of AI systems that can make decisions and complete complex workflows with minimal human intervention, both guests advocate for a balanced approach: identifying appropriate use cases while recognizing technology's current limitations. As Omri notes, "You have to be very picky and very careful and very mindful of the use cases you choose to select for this specific goal." Idan adds the crucial reminder that firms must "slow down a little bit ... you cannot talk about agentic AI and automations of legal processes if your lawyers haven't been trained for the basics."
Whether you're a legal practitioner curious about technology's frontier, an investor considering the legal tech market, or simply interested in how traditional professions evolve, this episode offers valuable insights into one of legal innovation's most dynamic ecosystems.
Welcome everyone. This is your podcast host at the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast. I'm Charlie Uniman. Welcome to everyone who is joining us and please, very pleased to be welcoming to the podcast as guests two people, two gentlemen from the state of Israel, a hotbed of technology generally and, I think, a place where, if WIS cybersecurity startups 32 billion acquisition recently I think it was by Google. Correct me guys if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If that is any indicator and I think it is Israel is a good place to build technology and, as Wizz shows, exit from. But let me introduce Idan Sivan and Omri Rahum-Tweg, both at the Fisher's Law Firm, a large law firm in Israel. I will let you introduce yourselves further, but I believe, if I have it right, idan is the IT guru at Fishers and Omri is a practicing lawyer at Fishers. So let me ask Idan. Since I've spoke to him before, I'll give him first tips. Say hello to the audience and introduce yourself. Tell them a little bit more about what you do.
Speaker 3:Great Charlie. Thank you very much for having us. So my name is Idan Sivan. I'm the CTO here at Fisher Firm, based in Israel. Of course, I also founded the Lawit Forum, which is a community of legal tech leaders in all of the big law firms in Israel, so very happy to be here. Thank you very much, Ali.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I apologize for not having mentioned the Law IT Forum. I've had Idan mention me there and I've looked a little bit around and I applaud Idan for having gotten that group of practitioners and IT folks interested in legal tech together. The more groups, the more communities, the better. Omri, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself?
Speaker 2:Sure, hi and thanks for having us, charlie. So I'm a partner here at Fisher and, from a practical perspective, I co-head our law and technology practice. So I practice anything law and technology and obviously a lot of AI law these days, because that's the hot topic right now. But aside from that and together we've done we co-head our internal AI committee at the firm. So we're in charge of the AI strategy and procurement of AI solutions for our internal practice here at the firm. And aside from that, I have some academic capacities as well. I'm an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University where I research and teach law and technology, with a significant focus on AI and law.
Speaker 1:Well, I am about to be celebrating my 50th anniversary of graduating from law school and back when, I started in I hate to say it 75 of the prior century.
Speaker 1:the University of Chicago was fairly forward-looking as far as academics were concerned a lot of law and economics, but no computer-related coursework and Gen AI. And AI was really an abstruse academic topic that law professors wouldn't take a second look at. Things have changed, so we're going to talk about some of that change and I'm going to get right into it by inviting Idan and Omri to give us a little bit of a pre-see, a little bit of an overview of the legal tech startup scene in Israel. I know we have an exciting technology scene generally in Israel overall, but how about legal tech? If you were talking to a potential investor, how would you describe what's going on in Israel as far as legal tech is concerned?
Speaker 3:Okay, well, israel's legal tech industry is growing quickly. It is full of energy and creativity, just like any other Israeli tech. We're seeing an exciting mix of innovations, especially in AI, chat tools, document automations and workflow optimization. If I were talking to, as you mentioned, a prospective investor, I'd highlight the creativity, I believe, and the agility of Israeli startups. It's a community that knows how to solve tough problems, particularly and the ecosystem is still relatively young. So it means that you know there is a lot of significant opportunities here. You know to lead and grow for, as you said, a potential investor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess I would say first off, do you find the legal tech startup community and we're talking principally of vendors there, but I presume it also includes practitioners and academics, as is the case here in the US? Are people in the vendor side? Are they looking to sell, not only internally to law firms in Israel, but is there a push to go international, as so many legal, as so many techs in Israel have, and make their offerings available around the world? I certainly welcome the opportunity to have you know the brains and thinking power behind what's going on in Israel legal tech made available to practitioners here in the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, generally speaking, they definitely do. I think that's, you know, that's kind of the general symptom, right, of Israeli startups generally in any sector. So Israel is sort of like a huge beta testing site, right. So they have very direct and, you know, informal ties to the industry here in Israel. So it's very easy to move quickly and to have some pilots and design partners. And if we're talking about legal tech, they do that with law firms in Israel and then they have the capacity of harnessing, you know, this know-how and the experience they had with really very fastly moving within the industry to export these ideas and concepts outside of Israel on a global scale. That's obviously an economic aspiration, but I think it makes sense as a model generally.
Speaker 1:You know one of the things that you said that struck me and I hope that this is the case in Israel. Let me contrast it with the situation, at least in part, in the US. If you're selling to the larger law firms in the US, there's a long sales cycle, many layers, too many layers sometimes, but understandably so. Law firms are going to be careful and cautious of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Dare I use that word. I would hope that it's the case and I'm riffing off something that I gathered from what you just said that legal tech startups of any sophistication in Israel, given the more tightly knit community among more significant law firms in Israel and I presume legal techs can get their offerings beta tested can actually get lawyers at these firms, small and large, to try this stuff out and allow them to iterate and refine their product. Is that the case there? Is that what Fisher participates in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. Again, as, like Omri said, the market here is small, the activity is small, so it's more easy to gain access and to work together with law firms as a vendor. Yeah, I'm speaking, so we are seeing that case in our firm. So we can see that a lot of POCs and the engagement is very strong and very high and proactive, because, again, of the geographic location get the greatest use case that they can achieve. Of course they will look abroad and they will expand, of course, to US and Europe markets.
Speaker 1:Well, I am addressing the investors out there who may be listening, and to the legal tech startups here and elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 1:I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup in the legal tech field to be able to get its proof of concept out there and then to actually work hands-on with law firms in getting that proof of concept refined and getting a sense of where the product market fit lies and testing their go-to-market strategies. So listen, investors and potential partners of Israeli legal tech and I have no financial interest in any Israeli legal tech and I have no financial interest in any Israeli legal tech take a look from here to the east and recognize that these legal tech vendors, given the geography, given the tight-knit community and given the sophistication of legal practice that I imagine goes on among the larger firms in Israel, the vendors just get a leg up. They get it done more quickly than often could be the case Not always, but often could be the case here and probably with less money spent in doing it. So I applaud that scene. I would imagine that your Law IT Forum contributes to getting vendors and law firms together, where that hands-on experience is so important.
Speaker 3:So kudos to the legal tech scene there.
Speaker 1:How about investors in Israel? Is there an investor crowd that looks to legal tech? I imagine there's an investment crowd in Israel that looks to tech generally. How about legal tech? Does it attract homegrown money?
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting question. So obviously there are plenty of VCs in Israel, right? So Israel kind of Israeli homegrown tech investors generally, and some of them definitely do invest in legal tech, israeli legal tech startups, because we've seen so you know, generally speaking, when you look at Israeli legal tech, so you see some of kind of more incumbent legal, you know technology service providers, that kind of move into AI and they're mostly bootstrapping. But when you're looking about the actual startups, they need funding and they gain funding and most of them do that from Israeli investments. But I wouldn't say that there are legal tech designated VCs in.
Speaker 3:Israel.
Speaker 2:Quite frankly, I'm not sure there are any globally, I mean at least not significantly. So we do see significant investments into legal tech in the recent, let's say, couple of years with the AI trends, but these come from the more incumbent VCs, sometimes even family offices or private equity. So that would mostly be the case in Israel too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm delighted to hear that there's a community of VCs and even private equity types, family offices, that recognize legal tech. My audience has heard me say probably too often they may groan when I say it again, having been involved in one fashion or another with legal tech for decades now. I have said several times it's a 30-some-odd year overnight success. And if someone had asked me when I retired from the practice of law 11 years ago, when legal tech existed in the US, it was not an unknown thing. But if someone had said to me in 11 years even shy of that, seven or eight years from when I retired, you would see both post Great Recession, where I was still practicing law, but post pandemic and now with the availability of AI that generates language, that we'd have the investor interest we now have. I would have said you're silly, you're smoking something, you're pulling my leg. But in fact it is crazy exciting and crazy busy from an investment side. Sure, it doesn't attract the crazy busy from an investment side. Sure, it doesn't attract the often multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in every and any case, as is so often the case in consumer tech, for example. But there are some big players out there.
Speaker 1:And as to your point, omri, I will say that I met an Israeli legal tech. I'll mention some of the people, or at least the company I met in Israeli Legal Tech. I'll mention some of the people or at least the company I met at regrettably, don't remember the people's names met in Israeli Legal Tech at something called the TLTF Summit, and TLTF is the legal tech fund, and actually in the US, headed by a fellow named Zach Posner, there is a fund that is almost entirely, entirely directed at legal tech, participates as a lead investor and in groups of investors called the Legal Tech Fund, as I just said, and at their summit which they've done now for the last three years and I was fortunate enough to have been invited to go for the last two years down to Miami this year, coming up in Austin, texas I met some people from Darwin, if I'm not mistaken. That is a legal tech vendor that I think originated in Israel. Are you familiar with them?
Speaker 2:Yes, they're of course yes.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And they seem to be doing quite well, and what you've said I've heard echoed by them back in December, that it's a good scene, a good place to be in Israel to develop the tech, and they've had some significant success in reaching around the world to make their offering available to customers everywhere, especially here in the US, where they're well known as well. How about partnership opportunities? You see that going on, that is to say, not mergers and acquisitions, not outright exits, but joint ventures, strategic investments, any of that happening with the legal texts in Israel, with vendors and other potential strategic investor players from around the world?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if you're looking at what we can do good or best here in Israel, so Israeli startup really excel in AI chat assistance and offer solutions ranging from AI-powered contract review and litigation support to compliance management and access to justice tools, all of which are aligned well with global demand, right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Areas present great opportunities for international partnerships because the technologies scale well across jurisdictions and collaboration can quickly leverage each partner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, of course, the language barrier is not there. You know virtually everyone. Unlike we parochial, rather confined thinkers when it comes to language use, we Americans I think Israelis up and down are conversant in English and shouldn't pose a problem. So, given the technology talent, I would think that partnerships are, you know, are an enviable opportunity for anyone outside of Israel to look towards Israel, to team up and take advantage of partnerships and integrations with tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely Well, currently the market in Israel is very decentralized and divided into very niche solutions, right? I believe so. It's the same, I believe, in US and also in Europe. Next two years, we will start to begin to see consolidations of solutions through mergers of companies and we can see two or three unified platforms. Right, that can do a lot of what the niche products are doing today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's always an issue Not always, I exaggerate. It's frequently an issue with a lot of technology, and often very much so with legal tech, that you have what are called point solutions. Best of breed right an end-to-end solution where they can and where they can do so without sacrificing the advantages and quality that a point solution can provide by its focusing on a particular area. So I agree with you. I think there's going to be consolidation, there's going to be integration, joint ventures and partnerships, as well as outright acquisition.
Speaker 2:And maybe just to quickly add on that, in terms of kind of, you know Ross, you know jurisdiction partnerships, I think another plus side of the Israeli market, aside from, you know, not having you know language barriers, is that the Israeli legal market itself, when you look at transactions and you know legal documents, so a lot of the work is actually in English documents, so a lot of the work is actually in english and a lot of the work is, um, you know us, kind of uh, um oriented or focused, and there are a lot of cross-border transactions which, which you know uh, feed right the development of this supporting technology as well. So the the, the, you know the struggles, the pains that israeli, that Israeli legal tech startups face when they better test their products in Israel, are very much similar to those that US counterparts or US tech vendors will face there, which makes the integration or the collaboration almost seamless in right, in that respect.
Speaker 1:You know I'm going to depart from some of the questions that we listed, and it just occurred to me. I don't want to lose the thought and I ask both of you as practitioners in your respective fields of IT and legal practice Is the agentic AI set of buzzwords and ideas affecting Israel? And I think it's real, but I do think people haven't quite gotten their arms around it. Has that begun to permeate the way that lawyers in Israel are thinking about Gen AI and legal vendors, the ability to set these AIs loose, to make decisions on their own? I say that with eyebrows raised to being able to multitask, to integrate with different other applications automatically. Is that a hotbed of activity in Israel as well?
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting question because Idan and myself are thinking about this quite often recently, so I think it kind of, you know, it's spot on right, idan. I think this is something that we've been discussing amongst ourselves. I'll start and I'll let maybe Idan complete this, but I think that, from a professional perspective, on the legal services side, I think that as an end game, we definitely want to get there with respect to at least some of the services that we provide. But we look at it from a very kind of cautious perspective, right, because there is a limit, at least in the current state of technology, to what you can expect to actually automate and you have to be very picky and very careful and very mindful of the use cases you choose to select for this specific goal, right, or for this specific type of technology. But as an end game, definitely, that's the holy grail right Of of what AI could bring to the table these days. The way to get there is quite challenging, right, and quite complicated.
Speaker 1:No, those questions, those issues have not been solved technically. But, as I am fond of saying, the worst that AI will ever be is today. So every day it gets better. I think the answer not thought original to me, of course is to have sandboxes carefully test and then, always at this stage of the game, at least have a human in the loop and peering into what the AI is doing, checking results before the results escape the attention of the human at the firm.
Speaker 1:But how unimaginative I was when I first heard of agentic AI. I was thinking of the days where I was a young associate doing almost paralegal work and trying to put signature pages together for a deal closing and thinking, oh, how wonderful it would be if a chain AI could just take that over and make it all work. Little did I know that my lack of imagination was at work and really what we're talking about is a lot more serious decision making and automation, but done with great care. And I'm heartened to hear that a firm such as Fisher is taking it as seriously as it is. I think it almost has to take it seriously, because I was just reading an article that was talking about agentic AI and questioning its usefulness given the current state of the technology.
Speaker 1:But towards the end of the article the author said flipped the viewpoint and said are you going to be a problem for your clients? Are you going to be in trouble if you're not using agentic AI at some point? Are you going to be as zealously representing your clients as you should be under ethical requirements here in the US and, I'm sure, israel and elsewhere, if you're not getting the assistance of AI agents? Are you committing malpractice, not because of a goof that AI agents have made, but because you haven't employed them to make sure that they cover ground that you might never have been able to cover? So these are very, very interesting days and it's the best time to be around in the legal tech field.
Speaker 3:Turn it back to go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:No, it's okay. Yeah, in case of like. In case of like, a gentry added things that you said um, what we, um, me and noomi are always talking about, we need a little bit to slow down a little bit to like, let the technology sink a little bit, let it stay for a while, because, as you're considering and thinking and you know developing, you're like I don't know, throwing everything that you've done for the I don't know past month or so, because there is a new technology and new demands and a new hype and new buzzwords and you know everybody is like moving forward without letting things settle down a little bit. Let it sink, let the people train a little bit. Okay, you need time to get all of your lawyers in the firm trained on the technology. You cannot talk about GenDKI and agents and automations of legal processes while your lawyers haven't been trained for the basic. So we need to settle it down a little bit right?
Speaker 1:No, I appreciate that. Thank you, I think that's an excellent point. We can't get ahead of ourselves. That's why I you know, I like the idea of establishing sandboxes at law firms that can afford to put the personnel behind it and develop that sort of technology where things can be tested at some lower risk level than would be the case if you actually put it into operation. If you actually put it into operation, and where the settling that you're looking for, idan can be achieved by, in part, putting it to work, but doing so in a controlled environment and using the sandbox to test things and actually almost do software-like tests to see the output and tweak it. And I want to segue, because I think what you just mentioned Adan about training is a good way to move to the next point that we had discussed previously in my list of questions.
Speaker 1:In the US, things are a whole lot different than when I, a whole, whole lot different than when I first started getting interested in legal tech, let alone when I first started practicing law. Again, my listeners have heard me say that when I became enamored of technology personally and started talking to my then partners at law firms about using tech, I was reminded that we build by the hour. Let's not get too efficient, and I don't think that was said greedily somewhat greedily, but not entirely so. I think people were cautious and, as I said earlier, lawyers have to be cautious Now I think people at law firms of all generations are more open to dealing with technology. Regrettably, it was the pandemic that had a hand in making that.
Speaker 1:So what is change management at law firms, like in Israel? I'm sure you have older partners. I'm sure you have middle level and junior partners, young associates. Is it a generational thing? Are there fusty older men and women who say I'll have nothing to do with it? Or is it a little bit more open-minded? Because of the experimental side of Israel generally, the fact that it's on its toes with technology? Tell me about change management, training lawyers, their receptivity, receptiveness to training.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I think first of all it obviously depends on the law firm right. There are different law firms with different, you know, kind of general outlooks at the profession and different cultures, but I would say generally speaking, that the Israeli legal market is much more receptive to technology than other jurisdictions.
Speaker 2:And that might be because of, as you said, the Israeli tech scene and the reason that technology is a big deal in Israel and everyone you know looks at new technological developments and wants to be part of the, you know, part of the trend. That's one reason. I think another reason is that you know we have clients or you know technological organizations that would push for that right. They want to see technology embedded in their acquisition of services, right In any profession. So that too, and I think, in terms of change management. So you know I can attest to our firm right.
Speaker 2:So I would say that there is a difference between the strategic point of view and the actual hands-on experience.
Speaker 2:Obviously, you know more kind of senior partners at least some of them would struggle more with the hands-on concept right of shifting to new hands-on experience, shifting to new practical tools, but that's true to any, I think, any point in time.
Speaker 2:So it just becomes more difficult to adjust to new technologies from a hands-on perspective. But I can definitely say that if we're looking at our senior management, even the most senior, they understood very fast, very quickly, that there is a strategic question here and they moved very quickly to entrust this kind of strategic handling with individuals who AI strategic kind of you know policy at the firm, and I think that this is a very, it's a very smart move in the sense that you know, you understand that there's a big deal, there's a change that's going to be big right for the industry. That's going to be big right for the industry, and you understand that you do not have the hands-on capacity to fully understand it, to fully implement it yourself, so you entrust it with other powers, right or other forces at the firm that could actually do that, and I think that was a very interesting move here at the firm. It was a very interesting move here at the firm. It was a very, uh, very early adoption both of the technology itself but also of the kind of understanding that this is the next thing in our profession. And you know, as of today, I think it yielded um, pretty good outcomes in the sense of how quickly we progressed and moved forward with the technological development and how ready we are to implement new technologies as they come along, because they keep coming along right Every day, every week.
Speaker 1:Every day, every week, every day, every week indeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's the case. It would be an always kind of changing atmosphere, at least in the next few years, right? So I think that's kind of a very brief overview of what we experience here at the firm and I think that's a very interesting position to be in Go ahead here at the firm. And I think that's a very interesting position to be in, yeah, Go ahead, go ahead, idan.
Speaker 3:It's very interesting to have a case study, maybe to understand how law firms have changed rapidly. Again, I believe it's because of the AI revolution in adopting technology. I've CTO here at Fisher for eight years now and it's like 180 degrees in what I imagine or have been like in the place that I work. There is a lot of change in the way that management see technology Okay, so it's very interesting. It should be like a great study to do.
Speaker 1:I agree, and the insight that you're both giving me is one that hadn't occurred to me before and, having retired 11 years ago, I think I retired again when legal tech was a thing and people knew what it meant. You didn't get crazy looks if you talked about legal technology, but I think I left just before again because it was pre-pandemic and pre-gen AI, just before lawyers at all levels in all sorts of firms, but particularly older lawyers at big firms, finally began to get it. And what I think I've learned from Omri here is that some of the more senior people at law firms in Israel, I'm sure, in the United States, europe and elsewhere in the world are by now saying United States, europe and elsewhere in the world are by now saying, all right, we may not be the most facile users of legal tech, but we, having the experience we've had at the firm and being senior in the firm and having strategic responsibilities for the firm's future, we appreciate the impact it will have and we will allocate resources and we will allocate people's time to develop and work with and integrate with the tech. Even though we, with many years still of practice ahead of us, may not be the most active users. I think that's a very valuable insight, one that I hope and believe is the case at US firms elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 1:But you nailed the point there, omri and Idan for me, by pointing that out, and with the most money at stake financially and the most experience in figuring out what the law firm is all about, its culture are on board, and the fact that they may be getting more on board, even though they're not going to be typing the keys, hitting the keys and moving the mouse to use the latest Gen AI solution, if they're behind it, that's what we need. Very good, let's bring it down to use cases. Let's bring it down to tech. I want to know, omri you're a practitioner as well as a fellow working with Edan on IT for the firm-related matters what's your tech stack like? What do you call upon Edan for advice and help when it comes to use cases and actually applying tech to your practice? And you can speak to Fisher more generally too.
Speaker 2:So there are a few use cases that are kind of more general and go across the board and we actually use various AI tools to enhance our work in these use cases for a while now across the firm. So, if you think about speeding up drafting processes, analyzing red lines in transactions, following playbook positions in different types of clauses and commercial agreements, all of these are already included in various AI tools that we use and they serve a lot of practices around the firm. Right, because this goes across the board. You know, for almost any ongoing kind of commercial support practice, right, it could be a tech practice, it could be an M&A practice, it could be a, you know, a real estate practice. So this really kind of is already implemented throughout the firm and it's more of a kind of an ad hoc use cases in terms of using the technology for work that you have in front of you right now. But what we're trying to achieve, which is the kind of more challenging aspect of how to implement these technologies, and this is where, you know, idan's technological expertise comes into play and our close relationship with some of these Israeli tech startups that function, as you know, sort of, let's say, design partner. You know, kind of we function as design partners for them and we work on these issues together is trying to take bigger field-specific use cases that are very time-consuming in the sense of kind of low-level work that they require, formalize them, reverse-engineer them from a professional perspective not from a professional perspective, not from a technological perspective, Exactly and then try to translate them into technological solutions that you know may be, you know, compounded from one specific by one you know, from the features of one specific vendor, but may require, you know, shifting in between different solutions that we use and kind of harnessing different types of technologies to follow through and kind of automate, let's say, maybe not the entire work, maybe I don't know 70, 80 percent of the time-consuming work. And, by the way, touching upon what we discussed earlier, this is exactly what we envisage, you know, agentic AI coming into play, so making it easier and less time consuming to even shift between different features right, not just within one specific tool. And this is our big focus right now. And I have to say again, touching upon what we just previously discussed in terms of how management and senior management is involved, we allocate a lot of time in between the team leaders here at the firm right, the practice leaders to have one-on-ones to break down their professional practices, their professional use cases to try and see which ones are more suitable for this type of kind of you know, to try and see which ones are more suitable for this type of kind of you know, ai enhanced work. So just to give a few examples. So due diligence processes that's obviously a very immediate use case that we're working on and we're already implementing AI into both in terms of summarizing documents, a lot of different types of agreements that we go through in the due diligence exercise but also in the sense of extracting substantive notions, so kind of red flag issues from tens, dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of documents, depending on the exercise. So that's one very obvious use case that we already work on.
Speaker 2:But what we're trying to achieve, for example. So think about, if you think about, capital markets work. So drafting prospectus right, sure For a new IPO, right From scratch. This is a very structured document, right In the sense of how it's drafted, but it's very time consuming to, you know, add the right data, which is practically factual data, right Into different segments, right and portions of this type of legal document. This is a classic example, from our perspective, to where AI work could do big chunks of the work, and we're working very closely with our capital markets team to formulate, as you said, some sort of a sandbox to test some solutions that we've compounded together to tackle this issue. So this is an interesting example that we're working on right now, but it's just one example, though, and we're trying to kind of replicate this thought process into each and every practice group at the firm, and you know you can imagine how time-consuming that is.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:And it requires a lot of time both on the Don's and my part, aside from our kind of day jobs. But at least from our perspective it's worth the while and this is the only real way to achieve some real progress in automating real professional, substantive work.
Speaker 1:Well that investment and it does cost. There are opportunity costs galore in spending a lot of time, money, brainpower, devoting yourself to the sort of work you just described. Can't help but believe that the ROI on that will be remarkably high once the implementation takes place. I was talking in an earlier podcast that I recorded with a company here in the US and in Europe that works on patent prosecutions and applications for patent and I got to thinking and I wasn't a public markets lawyer when I practiced only as a very junior one All of the work that goes into dealing with the Securities Exchange Commission and putting together an initial public offering.
Speaker 1:It's laborious, there are real judgments to be made, there's obviously real top of your license skill called for in counseling your student IPO client, but so much of it. Even dealing with the examiner at the SEC, the people who are responding to your prospective submissions, your S1 and drafts, even dealing with them. It can be made a whole lot less burdensome and even probably better from a substantive standpoint if you can bring AI into that fold with the proper testing, with the proper sandboxing and, to Idan's point, with the proper training, because you can have all these wonderful implementations. And you can have all these wonderful implementations and you can have lawyers that are willing to use it, but they have to be brought in, not being techies themselves, necessarily, and taking up the learning curve in a way that's suitable to them. It sounds like you've got a good approach to it, omri and Idan. I look forward to seeing what's going to go on and, fisher, we're going to keep in touch. I hope for sure to learn what happens in the future at your firm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:I can't thank you enough, both of you, for being a guest on the podcast, really getting into what's going on in Israel and really getting into what's going on in the actual implementation and use case side, as we did laterally in the podcast. So thank you for joining me on the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. I mentioned to Omri that I haven't been to Israel yet. You can be sure when I get there I'm going to look you fellas up and make sure we get together for coffee.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and you're definitely going to be our guest. You're definitely going to be our guest here, so we'll take care of that.
Speaker 1:I will take advantage of that and, needless to say, if you're in New York, let me know, then you'll be my guest. And, as people have heard me say, they tell me, despite the fact that I lived in New York for almost 40 years, they tell me New York still has a few good bars and restaurants. So they didn't all close after.
Speaker 1:I left so I can show you a good time, good food and good drink here. Thank you both. Look forward to meeting you in real life and continue with all the success that you're garnering at Fisher with LegalTech. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in LegalTech startups and enjoyed this podcast, if you're interested in legal tech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free legal tech startup focus community by going to wwwlegaltechstartupfocuscom and signing up. Again thanks,