How do you rebrand a legal AI company? How do you leave behind the old identity of a young startup with amusing robot images and a disruptor vibe, and create a new identity that chimes more with the character of an established legal tech company?
Well, here’s a good example: LawGeex, which has just undergone a major rebrand, though it has kept its name. Its new branding can be seen on their site in full from today.
Many readers will already know of LawGeex, (hint – there’s been an advert of theirs on this site since Artificial Lawyer started taking adverts). The Israel-based legal AI company has a focus on contract review and operates globally, often working with corporates ranging from Sears to Randstad, to professional services firms such as Deloitte, as well as some well-known law firms.
Now, of course, you may say: ‘Corporate identity? Branding? Messaging? What’s that got to do with anything that really matters to legal technology?’ The truth is though that how lawyers perceive this still relatively new wave of technology is vital to how they approach it and respond to it.
Getting attention as a disruptor, newly arrived on the scene to shake things up works in some settings, and at certain times, but the world moves on, and so does the level of market knowledge. As legal AI doc review matures, and as more companies and law firms make use of it, selling methods also need to change.
This doesn’t mean the AI tech is less important, far from it – in fact it’s now even more important as it has a truly strategic impact on a business. It’s also many times more widespread in terms of legal market uptake than just a couple of years ago. But, as people get more used to certain concepts, such as machine learning or NLP, so too their attention moves onto other aspects of what a certain application may be offering.
To that end, Artificial Lawyer had a chat with Shmuli Goldberg, VP Marketing at LawGeex in Tel Aviv, to find out how they handled this transition from marketing as a new startup to marketing as a key part of the legal landscape and the best friend of lawyers.
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‘We spent eight months on the rebranding process,’ he explains.
They spoke to customers and they engaged with their 100+ employees and they tried to understand where the old brand needed to change (see below).
Exactly what was going to change was not certain at the beginning. But change was definitely coming.
‘We have a Ferrari, in terms of our product, but the website felt like a Skoda,’ Goldberg adds. ‘It felt like a startup [website], but now we are in a different place. We also know that competitors are getting better, so we need to keep ahead.’
In some cases the design process saw a single step take over a month to come to a decision, this was because any decision they made would be a long term one, and that understandably was a major business choice.
‘We had many options at some stages, but we just had to make one decision,‘ he adds.
And the final decision was a dramatic one: they would stop telling people about technology, and instead focus ‘100% on the customer’.
Goldberg explains their logic: ‘Big companies hire top lawyers to be their inhouse legal counsel. But, this is a very expensive resource. The challenge is that they are often not used efficiently and are doing work that should be automated.’
‘The legal team should be seen as revenue generating deal makers, not as blockers,’ he adds.
I.e. not blockers in the sense they are saying ‘No!’ to the CEO’s plans, but rather that they are slowing everything down (and costing a lot for the company by doing so) because they are handling too much process level legal work. What they should be doing is using their great talents and experience to deliver really valuable legal input for the business.
This then evolved into the following: lawyers that become submerged in process work can’t shine, can’t be truly themselves, can’t show the world their genius, or their ‘star’ qualities. What LawGeex wants is to serve the lawyers with their tech solution so that they can really be what they want to be, and are capable of being.
The message then became: lawyers want to be rock stars, not working as the roadies lifting and carrying heavy boxes all day. They want to be the ones really rocking the business, not doing the lower value work.
Hence…..Lawyers…..Rock Stars…..Lawstars!
And that’s how they got to lawstars, which is a central part of the new messaging. I.e. it’s not about their AI tech, it’s about helping the lawyers to focus on great work again.
‘We want to free up legal teams so they have time to think and be part of the business,’ Goldberg says. ‘Lawyers join companies because they want to be part of the business.’
This is what businesses want as well. They want their expensive lawyers they have hired to provide as much value as possible, to really do great legal work that matters to the profitability and success of the company, not to do the low-skilled work a paralegal at an LPO could provide.
Naturally, LawGeex is there to provide the automated legal AI doc review tools to take away some of that process work around contracts. As Goldberg says: ‘We are there to serve the lawyers. We are the roadies that allow them to be rockstars….or….Lawstars!‘
As the marketing gurus always say: ‘Sell the benefits, not the product.’
What do you think of the rebrand? It’s certainly a sign of the times.