By Ari Kaplan with Dean Sappey.
Ari Kaplan speaks with Dean Sappey, the president and co-founder of DocsCorp, a software company that develops a range of document productivity and security tools for law firms (and was recently acquired by Litera).
Ari Kaplan
Tell us about DocsCorp’s global strategy and how it is adapting to a more tech-enabled workforce.
Dean Sappey
What's happened over this last year has really accentuated and reinforced our strategy of enabling legal professionals to be much more productive at their desktops, including lawyers and corporate legal professionals all around the world. Whilst everyone moved to working from home, it is even more important that they be highly productive, rather than relying on teams of people in another room to help on certain document-related tasks. Our technology is allowing lawyers to be much more efficient in their creation, development, sharing, and pairing of documents.
Ari Kaplan
You recently acquired a Docuble, which helps law firms with styling problems in Microsoft Word. Why is that an important issue in a firm's workflow?
Dean Sappey
We see that most lawyers are receiving documents from many sources, but law firms generally want to ensure that all of the contracts and documents that they're creating in Word or PowerPoint have a consistent theme and style. Microsoft Word styles are very complex and lawyers really struggle to get paragraph numbering and other formatting options to work correctly. We were looking for technology that simplified that for them so with one click of a button, it could run through a document and either reformat that file into the style of that firm, or look for issues or problems and correct them. Now that we're working in a much more distributed way and firms are moving from having back-end processing teams in favor of empowering attorneys to do the work themselves, we needed to get those tools directly to the desktop. All of our other applications follow the same theory about making technology easy for and accessible to every lawyer. This was another part of the puzzle that we needed to fill, and in this case, it was quicker for us to acquire a technology that was new and provides some fantastic features, rather than to actually build it ourselves. Historically, we have built our products, but there is only so many new products you can build yourself. As DocsCorp has accelerated its growth, we're now mixing a combination of acquiring fantastic new technology together with integrating it into our existing portfolio.
Ari Kaplan
How will you integrate Docuble into your suite of tools?
Dean Sappey
Docuble will be added to the DocsCorp toolbar that exists inside all Microsoft Office applications. It will be an optional product for clients and will not just appear there automatically. A firm might choose to switch from a current application or purchase this is an add-on so it is a separate product. We don't believe that it's a good idea to inundate the firm with a huge number of functions and buttons if they don't want them, so our clients can choose which of our tools to use, and license each one as they need it. They only have as complicated a toolbar as they want, but should they want all of our applications, they are available in one integrated set of tools that work and look the same.
Ari Kaplan
Last year you acquired Verowave Technologies, the UK provider of document production and assembly software. What do you look for in companies you want to add to your portfolio?
Dean Sappey
The typical formula is to look for technology companies that have a lot of existing customers and recurring revenue, for which you pay a lot, but those technologies tend to be by definition, much older, so they haven't got as much life ahead of them. On the other hand, we look for much newer technologies that are still proven. They've got some customers, but they may be in a particular region and have not been able to go global, either because they didn’t have the bandwidth or due to limited marketing and sales resources. We look for products that are very new, i.e., two- to three-years-old in terms of their development so that we know they're scalable, and can work on-premises or in the cloud. We know we're not finding a lot of legacy code and they're very fast. We seek out products that are proven to be successful for their clients and that we can take to our 5,000-plus clients.
Ari Kaplan
What new features are your clients asking for?
Dean Sappey
Clients are asking for features that will make their lives easier and, ideally, they won’t even have to ask the software to do something because it will just know how to do it. They want features that they have to think about less and less. In the case of Docuble, rather than running a whole series of tests on a document and asking the user 1,000 questions to answer, this styling product simply fixes the document for you.
Ari Kaplan
Has anything surprised you about the way client preferences have shifted?
Dean Sappey
What has surprised me a little is that a few years ago, the view of all clients was that everything had to be in the cloud. Their preferences have not, however, gone that way and they have now realized that they want to continue using desktop applications for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. For work that we do every day, we see that we're much more productive if the work is on our desktop or laptop, wherever we are. Theoretically, we can be disconnected from the internet and keep doing all the work we need using all of the significant features and functionality that a desktop application can provide.
Ari Kaplan
What recommendations do you have for entrepreneurs who want to create appealing solutions like Docuble?
Dean Sappey
We were once entrepreneurs. My co-founder and I started DocsCorp 18 years ago with zero capital. We built our first product, which was pdfDocs at that stage, released it to a few clients, and then continued on working without any investment, which is unusual, though a lot of other entrepreneurs are doing it that way. First, get in there and just try to do it. Second, know your limitations. If you build a good product, particularly in this legal technology in space, it can go global and there's no reason why it should just sell in one country, state, or city. Recognize, however, that there may be a better path for you to achieve a great financial outcome or really change the world in terms of lots of lawyers using this product if you partner with other organizations. At some point, it may be beneficial to let a little bit of control go. Over the years, I have seen a lot of fantastic new products built by entrepreneurs who were great coders, but they never wanted to let it go. They didn't know how to build a sales and marketing team so the product never achieved a sufficient volume of customers. Be realistic about what your skill set is.
Ari Kaplan
How are you approaching growth in the current uncertain business climate?
Dean Sappey
We changed our growth strategy a little. In previous years, we were much more focused on attracting brand new clients by going to about 50 different conferences around the world. It is now more difficult to get in front of a brand new customer, so we have changed in our approach to growth by focusing on delivering additional technology to our existing 5,000 clients, rather than working harder to add another 1,000.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the
legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology at http://www.ReinventingProfessionals.com.
Listen to his conversation with Dean Sappey here:
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