Online document provision is becoming increasingly popular among lawyers looking to offer their services in more convenient and streamlined ways. But Dom Woolrych, CEO of Lawpath, Australia’s leading online legal platform, is quite clear that documents are not the future of law.
Lawpath is Australia’s largest and fastest growing online legal platform backed by LegalZoom and LexisNexis. They’ve helped over 80,000 Australian businesses access legal services at a fraction of the time, cost and complexity of the traditional system.
I speak to Dom about automated legal services and that fine line between legal advice vs legal information in the provision of legal documents.
One thing I love about this interview is how Dom so nicely ties together lots of the different themes that appear on the podcast – law not being just about technology; the need to provide solutions, not just services; and the shift in power from lawyers to customers.
Apologies for the audio quality that my editor told me sounds like a bad, old-fashioned phone line! It improves at about the 10 minute mark, but the interview was too good not to share.
Here’s a summary of the things we talk about:
2:49 Who are LawPath and what do they do?
3:51 Getting started with document automation
5:40 How to determine what work should be automated
8:09 How automated documents fit into the bigger picture of LawPath’s business
8:48 “Documents are dead”
11:07 What comes next after the document loss leader
14:02 Legal advice vs legal information and the decision to not become a law firm
18:14 Lessons learned in the transition from traditional practice to establishing LawPath – being ok with risk, learning from other industries
22:04 The 5-minute rule
23:57 Dom’s advice – 1. Do it! 2. Reach out to legal technology companies. 3. Do internships and learn about what law looks like day-to-day.
Links
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