LawTech member
Office & Dragons
Co-Founders of Eagle Labs LawTech member Office & Dragons, Samuel Smolkin (CEO) and Matt Philson (COO), chat to us about their business.
Tell us about your business.
Office & Dragon is pioneering Transaction Development: helping lawyers and clients develop bespoke contracts for complex deals efficiently.
Document automation is great for your thousandth NDA, but has limited application to bespoke deals with many moving parts.
O&D provides a termsheet-like command centre for creating and editing contracts, letting you simultaneously update multiple suites of documents, or automatically spin out new documents from previous work. O&D works with any document and continues to work beyond first drafts.
The structured data in the “termsheets” is retained beyond the deal, so deal experience captured therein can be applied to future deals.
When did you start your business?
2019.
What's been your biggest highlight?
One of our most rewarding experience was a ""thank you"" email we received from a couple of our users in the Real Estate Finance team of a top AmLaw firm who had just started using Office & Dragons. They explained that not only did O&D help them spin out 350 mortgages in next to no time, but later when a term needed to change across all 350 documents at the last minute before closing, she was able to get it done in less than an hour. Our whole team felt really happy to hear we made a real difference for some people and made their working lives better.
Since that email, they went on to present O&D to their entire practice group and have become some of our greatest champions within the firm. O&D has quickly become the new way of working for the Real Estate Finance team -- in fact, we just did trainings for all of the new first year associates in the firm's Real Estate Finance and Corporate teams!
What's been your biggest challenge?
COVID has brought a host of challenges to every company. For us, one of the biggest challenges was in learning how to work together effectively while remote. The team was much smaller when COVID first started. We have doubled in size since the pandemic began. At such an early stage, getting to really understand your team personally, what motivates them, and what they care about is really important. We have had to make a very conscious effort to connect more with the team in an organised fashion, as we no longer have the luxury of just popping out for lunch together!
Advice for entrepreneurs starting out
Start with the customer and work backwards. Understanding who your customer is should be a priority. This goes beyond basic demographics, but speaks to who they are as people, what they care about, and what challenges they're actually facing. Building strong buying personas do more than simply help you identify whether or not a person is a fit for your business, it also helps you make more informed roadmap decisions. If you're planning to focus on, for example, building out a robust customer service desk this next quarter, but your ideal customer doesn't care about that, it suggests you might want to reprioritise!