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
Clarra Brings Order To Complex Litigation Chaos
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Email threads, shared drives, and spreadsheets can feel “fine” until you’re coordinating 30 firms, thousands of plaintiffs, and a calendar full of court deadlines that can’t slip. We sit down with Keao Caindec, CEO and co-founder of Clarra (https://clarra.com), to unpack what complex litigation case management really requires and why the biggest pain is often coordination, not just documents.
Keao explains how Clarra grew out of real-world needs from a complex litigation law firm handling antitrust, mass tort, class action, and bankruptcy matters. We compare purpose-built litigation workflows with more intake-oriented or small-firm platforms, then get specific about what breaks at scale: multi-party responsibility tracking, bulk docketing, complex calendaring, discovery flow, and the constant question of who owns the next action.
We also go deep on collaboration. Clarra’s permissioned workspaces are designed to let co-counsel, local counsel, and clients work from a shared repository without exposing everything a firm keeps private. Add in integrations with tools like NetDocuments, iManage, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and you start to see a realistic path away from the spreadsheet monster.
Then we talk AI for lawyers in practical terms: voice-driven time entries, agentic help for docketing and field population, document summarization, and analytics.
Subscribe for more legal tech startup stories, share this with a litigator or legal ops leader who lives in spreadsheets, and leave a review with the biggest workflow bottleneck you want software to fix.
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_01Hello, everyone. This is your faithful podcast host, Charlie Unim, with yet another edition of the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. And I'm here to bring a guest to the podcast who was involved with litigation, something which I scrupulously avoided as a corporate lawyer when I practiced. But I knew litigators and liked litigators. Some of them were my best friends. Nonetheless, uh enough from me and my background. Let me introduce K.L. Kindek, a co-founder and CEO of a legal tech application called Clara. How are you, Kao? I'm doing great, Charlie. Thanks for uh having me. Uh pleasure is all mine. As I said before uh you joined formally, we're talking about Clara. Uh and uh uh KO and I have had a previous conversation a little bit about Clara. We're gonna get a uh to know a lot more. But it is an app that deals with complex litigation. To me, as a corporate lawyer, all litigation is complex, but I it's a term of art in the litation space. Uh so KL, why don't you tell us what uh Clara does and uh in particular uh give us an idea of what its secret sauce is and how it distinguishes itself from the the other uh apps in your uh subspace in the legal tech vertical.
SPEAKER_00Sure.
What Clara Is Built To Do
SPEAKER_00Thank you. So Clara was founded in 2021. My business partner runs a law firm, a complex litigation law firm. And uh we were we were we both live in Marin, we're good friends, play music in a band together, and we decided I had you know run and built a number of tech companies, and he had built a law firm, and we decided let's go do something together. And uh we decided to take software that he had built for his firm that was designed specifically for managing large antitrust, mass tort, class action, bankruptcy cases, cases where there are multiple parties, you know, sometimes 20, 30, 40, or more different law firms involved. Um, and he he had built a platform specifically for that, and we decided that doesn't really exist in the market. So that's what we built Clara to do was to address the needs of firms that have that handle complex matters in particular, but also also other types of civil litigation, and uh it's built for scale and efficiency.
SPEAKER_01So
Why Generic Case Tools Fail
SPEAKER_01as I understand it, it's it's uh to be distinguished, Clara is to be distinguished from, if I recall our earlier conversation, other uh uh more intake-focused uh systems like Clio and Filevine, Lidify. They they they do what they do, but they're not as uh custom-built for uh managing multiple parties high-volume uh uh work that involves uh and I'm a little familiar with bankruptcy litigation, having advised on bankruptcy matters, that that can involve uh you know so many parties and so many uh jurisdictions, if I'm not mistaken. Is that a good way to characterize it?
SPEAKER_00It is, and you know, we have great respect for um Clio and Lidify and Filevine. They're just different. Clio is built more for uh smaller firms with less complexity in their uh in the in the legal work that they're managing. Um, you know, there are certain aspects to it of just being able to have a even just kind of a single attorney responsible for a particular matter is just systemically a challenge for managing complex litigation. So Clio's not a great platform for that. Um and Litify spun out of a big injury firm, Morgan and Morgan, and Litify was also started by um uh a couple of PI attorneys, and their products are great. They're just designed more for large volume intake processing and then billing, but they're not designed for um managing and collaborating between law firms on cases, handling large-scale docketing and complex calendaring and um uh um and managing a lot of what we call a lot of the bulk operations of you know managing a uh managing a thousand plaintiffs at a time for a case or coordinating um across firms. When you think about a lot of the the this type of complex litigation in particular, where it gets difficult is um in determining who is going to follow up with what, right, and how to keep track with a lot of documents, discovery documents, court filings, party-to-party documents. It ends up being just a long stream of emails and a shared drive and and spreadsheets, really, which becomes very inefficient.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm chuckling because even as a corporate lawyer, uh handling matters that involved uh often just two parties, but each party had many advisors and ancillary firms from the two main firms, and and and uh back in the day trying to keep track of everything through email paper checklists that were emailed back and forth. Right. Uh, you know, it's a nightmare. And uh I I trust uh uh that uh uh what you've uh put together here is is addressing that that nightmare and and bringing order to the chaos. And I I gather Clara is agnostic uh when it comes to whether it's a plaintiff firm or defense firm, whether it's an enterprise. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we have many plaintiffs' firms as clients um that uh that handle a variety of litigation and um handle big mass torts. We also work with defense litigation practices by larger corporate legal firms like Womble Bond, Dickinson, um their coordinating council, national coordinating council for many different firms um uh or many different clients. And then also we also work with legal departments, right? So you think about it, right? Large global enterprises typically have a tremendous amount of litigation and liability that they manage around the world. They may have dozens of operating companies operating in a a hundred plus countries, and again, tracking all of that litigation um is oftentimes done by sending updates and spreadsheets to headquarters for an analyst to process and provide a summary for a board report, right? So Clara is really designed to handle a lot of the complexity. We tried to design it to be simple to use, but also very efficient.
Collaboration Workspaces With Permissions
SPEAKER_00And we also have something we call uh uh uh a collaboration workspace.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let's dig let's dig double click on collaboration because as I may have said when we spoke previously, I'm a big proponent of features like that, especially on the corporate side, where I think some of the corporate folks may be lagging uh behind their litigation, uh brethren and sister, and uh when it comes to building into their uh tools uh collaboration features. So I interrupted you. Go ahead and talk about the collaborative aspects of Clara. Sure.
SPEAKER_00Well, what we found was that uh law firms are obviously very concerned about privacy. So when they use a case management platform like Clara, they want to put everything in there, all of the documents, the timekeeping, the events, the deadlines, the tasks, all the notes and communications, all the email communications getting logged. But they're not very fond of sharing that and sharing access to it with their other co-lead firms or co-counsel. So what we developed was um a private workspace that you can create within Clara. So um as as kind of a separate workspace entirely, so that workspace can be used to invite external parties to, external users to, like your co-leads or your local council, or even your client, um, or opposing counsel if you'd like. But the space allows you to track things like deadlines, your tasks, shared tasks across firms. You can assign a responsible party to handle certain tasks. You can share um and post all of the court filings, but also you know, depositions that are taken locally, or discovery and plaintiff's forms that need to be shared. Everyone has access to a single repository, and um uh and it's connected to either our storage or it can be connected to Net Documents, iManage, Google Drive, or OneDrive, so that everyone has access to it, you know, with the right permissions and they can collaborate.
SPEAKER_01And and do I recall correctly that what I'll call external users can don't have to pay a uh a fee to join in on a uh a workspace as you described?
SPEAKER_00That's right. So if you're a client of Clara, you can spin up a workspace and you can invite an unlimited number of external users, you know, your your co-counsel basically for free. It's not unlike using, say, a project management tool like Asana or um or a DocuSign or something like that. You can invite others and uh they can collaborate. And of course, if they like Clara and if they need if that other external party wants to leverage Clara and other parts of their business or start another workspace themselves, right, they can do that and just become a you know a subscribe to Clara. So it's it's all pretty simple.
SPEAKER_01Very good, very good. Well, keep working uh so well as you have been on the collaborative aspect. And uh corporate uh players out there, if you're listening, and I hope you are, um you heard that Clara even allows opposing counsel in subject to limitations and and of course permissions. And as a practicing lawyer, there were often times when I wanted not to have to email back and forth and uh even slack back and forth with counsel on the other side of the deal, the counterparty's counsel. I wanted them right where I could talk to them in the app, um and and yet be confident that they couldn't see or write to things that I didn't want them to see or write to. So uh corporate guys get on the uh stick and and make that happen too. Um well that that's a an excellent uh uh picture of what Clara does. And and I can imagine that if someone tried to do it for uh even something like Asana, let alone a spreadsheet, it it's much better to have all the litigation specific aspects of practicing law built into the into the tool.
SPEAKER_00You know, there there are there are oftentimes questions we get, you know, what why should I use case management when I can use a project management tool or airtable or something like that? And um you can use those other tools, but as you as you start to grow and things become more complex and uh and you handle more cases, they tend to break down because those systems don't connect well to things like calendars and email and um you know your your other back office legal systems and accounting. And the real value of case management is to bring all of that together. So whether you're using Clara to handle all of those things, or whether you're connecting to your back office adorant and 3e billing or QuickBooks or using your own document management system, Clara allows you to kind of bring all of that together into a single system where you can manage everything and also have rich analytics and also leverage AI.
Practical AI Inside Daily Work
SPEAKER_01Let's get to the uh the AI piece and and we're gonna talk about AI uh both in terms of what Clara brings along with its AI uh features, and then more generally, some of KO's views about uh AI in the legal uh industry. What what what is Clara doing on uh on the uh front uh that can best be described with two letters, namely AI?
SPEAKER_00AI, I love it. Yes, no, AI is tremendous. We're we think uh at Clara, we think of AI as as fuel, really. It's just a great thing to add to the engine to make everything run faster and better. So within the application itself, we try to put it in as often as we can into places that can can can help, you know, even saving a couple of seconds here and there. So taking care of things like creating a time slip. You can just speak into Clara and say, I spent three hours appearing for a CMC for the Infinity Motors case, and it will find the matter, find the uh your, you know, your your leads codes, your task codes, and activity codes, write a description all in about three seconds. So you barely need to think about it. It's like being able to dictate uh um a time slip right into Clara. So attorneys love that, saves them time, and it's um it's also kind of fun to do, I would say. Right. And it also allows you to just keep up with timekeeping as opposed to trying to reconstruct how you spent your time going.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yes, the bane of every lawyer's uh existence.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So, and we do things like populating fields, we use agentic AI to populate fields to make it easier for paralegals uh to handle large docketing um and calendaring uh tasks. We obviously use things like summarization and tagging and um uh with documents, and we're continuing to add additional functionality, but I would say one of the most interesting areas is uh around leveraging, truly leveraging generative and agentic AI, whether you know you're connecting Clara to Claude co-work or uh leveraging some of our other capabilities that um we're working on and um and an AI assistant will be work rolling out.
SPEAKER_01How
APIs And Claude-Powered Workflows
SPEAKER_01is uh uh the challenge of making these integrations coming along? Has it uh for from from the perspective of someone like you who actually uh manages uh the business that runs an application in the legal tech vertical? Is integration something that has uh uh kept up uh pace with uh, for example, all the agentic uh offerings that are coming on stream, or is that still a uh a challenge that uh has much much more to be done to overcome it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, I was I I'm I'm pretty blown away. So I I in terms of how easy it is to now leverage some of these capabilities. So we have spent a lot of time building, I think one of the most comprehensive uh REST APIs uh for a case management system. So in addition to being able to, you know, get information from Clara through our API or push information into Clara, we also developed what are called uh API endpoints that you can call that allow you to understand the schema, the structure of our data within Clara, or to um uh uh uh pull all of the you know the the potential drop-down values that you can use. And we were recently working with Claude Cowork, which came out with some new plugins with legal skills, sure, and we connected Clara up to it, and uh we connected our API and Claude went through it, was thinking, and it said, Okay, I now understand all 220 of your API endpoints. How can I help you? Right, and it went through and we asked simple questions first, you know. Um, tell me how much time did we spend on a matter? Um, uh, who has been spending the most time um on in this practice area, right? And then we asked it to summarize cases based on financial position, strategy, and uh and overall positioning. And it was amazing. It put together extremely thoughtful reports, you know, 15-page reports. And what was the most interesting was that because it it understood our data structure and our API, it was able to just kind of ask questions of the data as it went through and built its own thesis. And you could see that doing, you know, it using all kinds of different um parts of our API until it had all of the data that it needed and then it constructed the report. And that is why I think you know the the future is gonna be less about building AI functionality and specific tools, but it really is gonna be about understanding how to leverage all of the different AI tools that are out there.
SPEAKER_01Right. You know, imagine uh some law firm person, be it a paralegal, be it a lawyer, uh, or even a uh a so-called legal tech engineer at a law firm, having to uh parse all those endpoints in a complex API. Uh I can't imagine how much it would cost and how many uh gray hairs that person would grow. But then along comes co-work uh and the bingo, you have it in in probably minutes, and it can deal with it. Uh I can think of no better word than intelligently.
SPEAKER_00It is. Here, I'll give you an example. This was it we I asked it to summarize um the availability of a number of you know people for a for a uh a new case. I asked Claude Cowork that. It put together a summary and I said, Well, that sounds great. Okay, now um create tasks for those individuals in Clara. And it came back and said, I'm I'm you know, I'm trying to calendar those, but uh I can't find the event code categories that I can use to calendar them. Wow. And it said, should I use task codes? And I said, no, task codes are for time slips. And it thought and it said, I've reviewed all of the prior calendar items and built a table of event codes, and I'll use those to determine the right event code. So it just kind of figured it out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love it when it does that. And and then on top of it, it makes it available to the reader or user in a in a very helpful table that would have taken hours for some human being to construct. Now you gotta you gotta backstop it. You gotta I'll I'll I'll say what everyone is saying. You have to be the careful lawyer um or other professional law firm and in house department and uh and recognize uh where uh generative AI tools can can ramble and and and the like. But if you're willing to put in the work there, I can't help but say that the additional work that may be required to you to do the backstopping is going to be dwarfed by the Work that it did for you that got you to the point where you're just doing the backstopping.
SPEAKER_00That's right. I mean, I I I look at tasks as being either better to be AI-led and human verified or human-led and AI verified, but you have to have the human in the loop.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's right. Um, how long has Clara been uh on the scene commercially? Am I right? Four years, Ms. Wellde?
SPEAKER_00Four years, yes.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, actually, we started at the very end of 2021. So operating nearly four years.
SPEAKER_01Yes, okay, wonderful. Well, in that time, and you've had experience in business um outside of your more recent work with with Clara, which sounds like uh you're doing a bang-up job with your team. Uh
Startup Lessons From Customer Listening
SPEAKER_01what um what are some of the challenges looking more broadly and perhaps speaking to c uh topics that might be of help to our listeners who are themselves heading up uh legal tech uh startups? What are some of the challenges that you've you've learned the most from? What have you uh had the most success with? What are you most proud of? What are some uh, let's call it startup business advice you can give from your years with Clara and and even before?
SPEAKER_00That's a great question. Um, you know, one thing, I've I've been a lifelong entrepreneur since I can remember, since I was probably nine years old. Ah. And uh from nine years old, you know, making things and trying to sell them at my parents' parties.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And uh, but one thing I've learned is when you start a business, you never really know when you start it, where you are going to be. Uh well, where where what products are really going to be successful, where you're gonna make your money. And um you have to start and listen to the customer, right? And be able to adjust. That's probably the biggest thing is being able to start is one of the hardest things to do, and being able to listen and not get caught up in seeing the world only from your perspective, and that is a constant, constant um discipline that I think you have to have to not be afraid of starting something new that's different, and also listening to be able to change. And uh, I think especially in today's legal tech market, where the tides are shifting, the ground is shaking, depending upon who who who you are and how your shareholders are feeling. And uh you really need to be nimble and be willing to um uh embrace all of the changes in the industry going on to be successful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you've got to be constantly learning yourself. And the learning should be focused first on the voice of the customer. And then then I think on just learning about what's happening in in the world uh uh more generally. I'm not talking about the Middle East, of course, or things like that. Obviously, that has an impact on on business. But you know, in in the world of legal tech, things are changing so rapidly with AI and with the forms that firms are taking. Law firms are changing, uh, and uh judges are changing the way they're handling things, all of which can have an impact on your business. Be a constant learner. Don't put your certainly don't fall in love just with your product uh uh uh out of the gate. And and don't fall in love too much with it uh at any particular juncture. Be prepared to uh pivot, be it a major pivot or a more minor one. Uh I think you and your co-founder, you know, were were fortunate, and if I could make it easier for startup uh leaders, uh do what they KO and his uh co-founder did, find a blue ocean that really hadn't been addressed in a vertical like legal tech and go for it. But that's not always easy to find. Instead, what you have to do is talk to a hell of a lot of customers or potential customers before you even build your first piece of code. And then from there keep listening.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And be prepared to iterate like hell. Uh and uh if you succeed, uh you'll be doing what Clara's doing, building with AI, uh making life better for lawyers that uh, you know, when I retired probably would have uh keeled over with uh uh delight. It can you keel over with delight? I think so. Uh and uh if they could see what could be done with tech, and especially if they're complex litigation uh lawyers dealing with uh multiple jurisdictions and many parties.
SPEAKER_00Uh it is a lot of fun. You know, the the the I I wouldn't say that lawyers are the biggest adopters of new technologies or uh are are are people who love all of the change from a technology perspective, but it is a lot of fun from my perspective to um get to the point where we implement Clara and um see how how easy it is for them, how intuitive it is, and how much they enjoy it and actually use it. That's where it's just really exciting, and we love to then um you know get recommendations from clients on where they would like to see our product evolve.
SPEAKER_01And there you go.
SPEAKER_00And we uh even when we choose to build new features, we often name them after the the the customer. You know, the we have the Eric feature and the Susan. Very good, and uh, it's a lot of fun, and everyone gets a big kick out of that.
SPEAKER_01I I uh I want to get to how people can reach you in a minute, but I I heard you say enjoy using a product. You know, there's some consumer apps, and of and I'm a big iPhone and Apple guy, and of course, part of the part of the uh uh uh point of being an Apple guy is you enjoy using the products, you enjoy the software. Right. Now that's mostly on the consumer side, but uh just think if you can be a lawyer or any other business person, enjoy the software that you're having to use every day. Uh you know, take take uh uh a a leaf out of uh chaos book and startups out there trying to factor in a little bit of enjoyment when it comes to dealing with your software. You'd be amazed at how people will come back to it with a smile and keep recommending it.
How To Reach Clara And Kao
SPEAKER_01If people want to uh learn more about uh you and Clara, uh what are your coordinates? How do they find out more?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Yes, the best place to go is to our website, clara.com, cla R R A.com, and you can reach me at uh K O, that's K-E-A-O at Clara.com. I'd love to hear from you. And whether you're a partner uh uh or a law firm, someone in the industry or an entrepreneur who would uh just like to connect, please reach out to me.
SPEAKER_01There you go. And that that's listening to the customer and potential customer again. Kyle, thank you so much for for joining us on the podcast. As I say to everyone, I I've uh had the uh honor of podcasting with. I look forward to meeting with you in real life. There may be a West Coast trip uh sometime in my future in June uh out in uh Northern California. And if I can find a way to get on your calendar if I have time myself, I'd love to do that.
SPEAKER_00Love to see you, Charlie. Thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_01Thank
Community Invite And Closing
SPEAKER_01you for listening to the Legal Tech Startup Focus 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 www.legaltech startup focused.com and signing up. Again, thanks.