
Baker McKenzie’s well-known Innovation Product Manager, Cem Ucan, is joining Leya, the genAI startup, to help drive the change he wants to see happen in the legal market.
Ucan, who is based in Istanbul, but is moving to Stockholm to be close to Leya’s base in Sweden, first worked as an associate at the global giant Baker McKenzie before jumping into legal tech in 2022. Now, he’s making the leap to join a start-up – and moving hundreds of miles – while also leaving behind a steady job. Why?
‘I chose Leya because it stands apart. They focus on specific use cases for M&A and disputes. It will be very useful. They also have a fantastic product roadmap,’ Ucan said.
Moreover, he stressed, he wanted to work with a company that was not just trying to achieve small changes, but really ‘change the game’.
‘10% faster does not really help, but if you can cut down time [for legal tasks] by 90% then the billable hour stops making sense. Then you have to look at how you structure legal work,’ he stated. ‘I want to help create that tipping point, that is why I am leaving for Leya.’
‘We need to change how we measure lawyer performance internally,’ Ucan also noted, i.e. move beyond time as a measure of value.
And Artificial Lawyer has to say it’s great to see a legal innovation expert talking openly about the problems with the billable hour. Often it can seem as if many people agree with exactly what Ucan is saying, but they understandably can’t easily share such views.
‘Baker McKenzie is an amazing organisation and I have been blessed to work with great people,’ he also said.
I.e. like others in this field, he really has enjoyed working within a law firm, likes the people, likes the work, but……feels his overall hopes for the industry are held back by structural barriers that are not going to change easily. Hence the move.
Or as he puts it: ‘Unless legal tech changes the narrative [of time = value] then there is no reason why AI will change things.’
Then Ucan noted that the focus on time also has real world negative impacts on people.
‘I think about the lawyers who burn out, it’s heart breaking. It’s easy to go with the status quo, but someone has to do something,’ he stated.
So, can legal AI really help? Ucan is convinced it can, (and so is this site…!)
‘People think value is created by time put in, but value is created when [the work product] is shipped to the client. In fact, more value could be captured via the speed of delivery,’ he observed.
So he has chosen to try and make a difference by joining a legal tech startup focused on leveraging genAI, namely Leya, which seeks to provide efficiency gains across several key areas of work.
‘They are laser-focused, they are attacking problems, and they are incredibly dedicated,’ he said with admiration.
No doubt his feelings about the possibilities of AI to truly transform the legal sector are also widely held, within law firms, inhouse and of course among legal tech companies. In his case, he believes the best thing to do right now to make those hopes become real is to join a genAI startup pushing forward the state of the art. Good luck to Ucan with his move and his endeavours, this site will be cheering him on.