Hi Makers, I'm Robin, AMA about legal tech, automation, fundraising and more.

@abadesi Sneaker Fund: I was a little bit like a hedge fund manager: People (OK, friends!) would invest cash, I would use the money to buy assets (sneakers) in the expectation that the assets would appreciate over the life-time of the fund (1 year). New sneakers, in the right circumstances, can be a pretty rare commodity, so if you can get your hands on them, you can make good money. My investors ended up making a pretty good return (one guy used the funds as a house deposit!). The best return we made that year was on a pair of Nike Air Yeezys that someone was desperate to sell. I think we made 40% in three months! 💵💵💵. NLP: I didn't have any! When I realised I wanted to start a legal tech company, and I started talking to customers about their problems, I quickly realised that reading and understanding contracts was causing lawyers a lot of grief. I began by reading as many academic papers as I could find about machine learning, and that led me to natural language processing - and while my linear algebra is still quite 'rusty' I knew enough to know what skills I needed on my team.

@yanniks I was a lawyer for 6 years at Clifford Chance and Boies Schiller Flexner. But my journey into legal tech began when I was sent to work for one of the firm's clients for 6 months. While I was there, I realised that while a lot of what lawyers do is deeply contextual (and complex), much of it isn't - especially when you're a lawyer within a company. My ambition was to use technology to automate low-complexity legal work, but I didn't really have a more developed idea than that. Before quitting my job, I wanted to build a prototpye to test two hypothesis: (1) Would people use a technology to get legal advice that they would ordinarily get from a person?, and (2) Could you fully automate a task that a human lawyer currently does? I spoke to Joshua Browder the Founder and CEO of DoNotPay, a robolawyer startup in the US and he gave me the inspiration to start my own similar thing to test my hypothesis. I made a chatbot that helped tenants get their rent deposit back from their landlord (which in the UK is still a major issue), and thankfully it worked. People used it and managed to save thousands of pounds using the application. So I knew I was on to something. Now I'm focused on using similar technologies to automate the work lawyers do in a business context.