Law School Partnerships Give Firm's Tech Subsidiaries a Product Education
Law firm tech subsidiaries are partnering with law schools to develop pro bono tools, but insights gained from those projects can yield long-term gains for tech companies hungry for feedback on their platforms.
November 01, 2019 at 08:30 AM
4 minute read
Last week, Brigham Young University's (BYU) J. Reuben Clark Law School announced that it would continue its ongoing partnership with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati's legal tech subsidiary SixFifty. Students from BYU's LawX legal design lab will work with SixFifty to create a pro bono solution that streamlines the asylum application process.
Sure, students will gain some hands-on legal design experience, but it's also potentially a big win for SixFifty too. Partnering with law schools may give law firm's legal tech subsidiaries the opportunity to not only improve future iterations of their existing products, but glean valuable research and development data that they wouldn't otherwise have the resources to obtain on their own.
"It's already born fruit and it's going to bear fruit moving forward," said Kimball Parker, who serves as both president of SixFifty and director of LawX.
SixFifty, for example, is already reaping the benefits of the last application it partnered on with LawX, an online landlord-tenant mediation tool released last summer called Hello Landlord.
That tool used SixFifty's document automation engine as a foundation, which has been primarily featured in the company's security and privacy compliance solutions. With its focus on the property rental relationship, Hello Landlord potentially exposed the engine to a broader demographic of users.
The feedback they've received has already resulted in changes being made to the way that the engine will interface with users across future products. "We collect all of that feedback. That's so valuable for us as we're kind of making a tool that gets to be used across the legal spectrum," Parker said.
Tomu Johnson, CEO of Parsons Behle & Latimer's tech subsidiary Parsons Behle Lab, agreed that collaborations with law schools are fertile ground to collect feedback from users who, unlike lawyers, are not distracted by the pressures and demands of the billable hour.
He said that Parsons Behle Lab has collaborated with the University of Utah on a few tech-based projects, and while those experiences have afforded them some valuable insights in the past around user engagement and even pricing, the education sphere isn't a completely low-stakes testing sandbox.
For starters, universities have a reputation that they want to protect, and products that fly under their banner need to perform at a high level. Plus, while feedback from pro bono projects can be useful to a company's future development efforts, it isn't always gentle.
"When you're designing something for free for a public institution, that doesn't mean that people will forgive you for lapses in your product. In fact, they are even more critical," Johnson said.
Aside from a unique testing ground for products, law school collaborations can also afford a company some much needed manpower.
Student collaborators potentially afford tech subsidiaries the opportunity to engage in research they may otherwise be too resource-strapped to attempt. For example, BYU students working on Hello Landlord spoke to dozens of landlords and tenants in attempt to discern what an optimal mediation would need to look like in order to meet their needs.
One trend that emerged was a desire for solutions that intercepted a legal problem before it reached the courts, which Parker indicated will continue to influence the direction in which SixFifty develops litigation-based tools in the future.
"All the knowledge that we're gaining from one of these projects is building on itself as we do ones moving forward," Parker said.
Less clear is whether or not any of these law school partnerships could actually turn a financial profit for a tech subsidiary. Gordon Smith, dean of BYU Law, said the technology that's created by LawX belongs to the university but could be transferred out to SixFifty in exchange for royalties.
"I'm not planning my retirement around LawX, but certainly it would be nice if they created something that was not only hugely valuable to individuals but hugely profitable too. That would be awesome," Smith said.
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