By Ari Kaplan with Alex Babin
Ari Kaplan speaks with Alex Babin, the CEO of ZERO, a company that provides productivity automation software for law firms.
Ari Kaplan
Tell us about your background and the genesis of ZERO.
Alex Babin
Like many startups that originate in Silicon Valley, we began with a problem we had ourselves and wanted to solve, which is to increase productivity for professionals. It grew into a company that now has 80 employees, many clients, and several different products. We started attacking this problem from an automation standpoint of view and have continued with that vision.
Ari Kaplan
Why are law firms leveraging productivity automation technology?
Alex Babin
Every enterprise in the world needs tools and techniques to increase productivity, but for legal, it is much more obvious given that law firms live and breathe by the billable hour. After all, if you spend some of your time on non-billable work, you are losing money and it often means that your productivity is not on a level that helps you stay competitive and efficient. Ultimately, increasing the productivity of each individual knowledge worker within a law firm helps the entire organization increase profitability and work satisfaction. Legal professionals are typically overwhelmed and we always said that no lawyer went to law school to file emails or capture time. They want to practice law, so we help them automate routine, non-billable tasks.
Ari Kaplan
How do you incorporate artificial intelligence into your software?
Alex Babin
The most important part of every single product we have is a cognitive engine we call Hercules and this cognitive engine basically mimics the human decision-making process and without it, no intelligent automation would exist. This engine understands what the user is working on, including the client or matter to which each element of the work belongs, and leverages AI artificial intelligence for classification and categorization to offer extra automation. For example, lawyers spend several hours per week filing manually filing emails and documents in the document management system. ZERO automatically classifies every single email and document in an individual’s inbox and automatically or semi-automatically files each saving all of that time.
Ari Kaplan
What should legal professionals trust AI to complete and for which tasks should they retain control?
Alex Babin
We should start looking at this question from a helicopter view as we can separate the work that legal professionals are performing into two categories. One is practicing and the other is the business of law. There are many tools that provide AI systems or automation capabilities to lawyers, but it is ultimately a creative profession so lawyers and legal professionals should retain full control over the practice of law. On the business side, AI shines in supporting the work that consumes time and distracts people from billable matters. It mimics decision-making and how users work without disrupting the original knowledge management process. That is where legal professionals should trust and apply AI most.
Ari Kaplan
ZERO recently announced a $12 million series A investment round. For what type of expansion will you leverage that capital?
Alex Babin
We have grown quickly in the past year from about 20 people to over 80 and that growth was dictated by the market. We have many new clients and want to provide white-glove service to them. We treat them as partners, which means we need more team members to not just build new products or increase the quality of our AI, but to provide high-quality service to our clients. There are so many potential clients in the pipeline and many of our new hires are focused on delivering our products and ensuring the quality of our engagement with our clients remains high.
Ari Kaplan
How have you managed the company's growth during the pandemic?
Alex Babin
We have always been a distributed team, with three major offices in Silicon Valley, Canada, and on the East Coast. The company’s growth was driven by what was happening in the market. As our clients became distributed and embraced remote work, the requirements for more automation assistance increased dramatically, which helped us to work with clients faster and better. Prior to the pandemic, you had to fly to meet a client and spend time coordinating a meeting, but now everything is remote and our team can run many projects simultaneously. This dynamic actually changed the way we operate and has improved the speed of each engagement.
Ari Kaplan
How do you see the appeal of automation evolving?
Alex Babin
Legal professionals are relying more on what technologists can provide for them, rather than doing things manually given that they can leverage support paralegals, assistants, and associates while working from anywhere. They also need to rely on their own work and perform tasks they had been delegating to others so it is nice to have technology and AI helping with this. Taking work off of one’s shoulders is a goal that everyone is interested in achieving right now.
About the Author
Ari Kaplan (http://www.AriKaplanAdvisors.com) 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 and his series at Legal Business World
Listen here to his conversation with Alex Babin.
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