Is AI For Legal a Two Horse Race? Conversation with Spellbook CEO's Scott Stevenson

Don't Crown Harvey and Legora Just Yet

I don’t buy the Harvey v. Legora two horse race narrative and neither does Spellbook’s CEO Scott Stevenson. We ought to take him seriously, given that Spellbook is one of the early smashing success stories in AI for legal. Scott’s what Y Combinator founder Paul Graham terms a cockroach, in this case because he survived the previous legaltech winter. You’ll have to listen to Episode 38 of Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted to hear more.

Hey there I’m Zach Abramowitz and I’m Legally Disrupted. And it’s been a minute.

In the coming weeks, I will share how I’ve been investing more energy into video podcasts, why I’m doubling and tripling down on this format and how that will show up in this newsletter and everything else I do. What I will say now is that we are starting to feel really good about the content and we are already seeing it in the data. Audience and subscribers have started to grow organically and more importantly, people really like it. Some are reaching out to me and telling me how much they enjoy the podcasts (especially on YouTube) and how it has helped them separate signal from noise. Others frequently tell me they are preparing for interviews for law firm/in-house AI roles as well as startups by binging my podcast, and it’s working. Others (from C-suite down to the front line) are using it to learn about which products they should be demoing or trying to replicate in Google AI Studio. Some people (cough, cough CLM companies) get in touch to challenge one of my takes. And I appreciate all of it.

But, the thing we are hearing the most is that people laugh when they listen, including unconfirmed reports of beverages going through the nose (our most important KPI).

If AI-first soda-snorting laughter sounds like something you need in your life, then I encourage you to subscribe on YouTube or find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Search “Zach Abramowitz” and/or “Legally Disrupted” on your app and we’ll come up.

Scott and I went deep for nearly an hour, and it was one of my favorite episodes to date. In addition to challenging the Harvey/Legora narrative, we talked Claude for Legal, SaaSpocalypse, the advantage of selling direct to lawyer, the risk of AI to software startups, the reason evals are BS, the real metric to measure and the number of talented teams (all human) entering the AI for legal market. Shout outs in the episode to Jonathan Levy from YC plus the folks at Sandstone, TrialKit and Learned Hand.

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