Product owner and law firm partner are incompatible concepts

The legal business is simple. In that sense, you learned, lost, or won several cases, and became more adept at communicating with clients, now you are professional. To support this thesis here’s proof: zero percent of law firms go bankrupt in their first year of founding. It doesn’t happen even after two years.

Legaltech is another story. Here you need to try to find a problem, then come up with a solution, then develop this very solution, design it, find monetization, then pivot it all and start over. Outside the legal world, this is all taken care of by the product owner. But that’s why we are lawyers, to desperately believe in our humanitarian forces. Based on my own mistakes, I deduced the following strengths and weaknesses of a law firm partner as a product owner for a legal tech product.

Pros:

• Lawyers are quick to figure things out. To a lesser extent, this applies to chemistry and physics, but we will figure it out quickly in the new market and business model.
• Good presentation skills. We have to talk a lot. In court and during negotiations. Maybe not always in the topic, but we more or less know how to make presentations and pitch.

Cons:

• Too humanitarian thinking. Business is numbers. Especially legaltech. CPC/CPA, ROI, and other KPIs.
• The habit of quick feedback. Winning in the court. Or we have been doing due diligence and get “thanks” from the client for the report. Lawyers love to work on meaningful projects. At a significant company. Making products is like running a marathon with your eyes closed. It seems fast, but who the hell knows whether we are running in the right direction.
• Intolerance to criticism and craving to argue with everyone to the point of bloodshed. And can you imagine a ton of negative reviews on the App Store? Or a wave of negative comments on FB about your product? It is difficult to control yourselves and not be rude to users who do not understand anything about your divine product.
• Love for the past. We are old school. Even millennials. Why do we need a Telegram channel — we are good at social networks.
• Verbal nouns. Lawyers speak well orally, but their writing is too long and confusing. This is a professional deformation: to try to be extremely ambiguous in expressions if you don’t understand the topic very well.

The product owner manages people who are much more knowledgeable about their subject than he is. He doesn’t have to be Salvador Dali but he needs to understand that pink on the bright green is shit and that chatbots are killing mobile apps. He can pitch investors in the elevator, write the most courteous response to an angry comment if the SMM specialist is sick, rank user stories by importance, run for pizza for the team the night before the release, and distinguish UX from UI and java from java script.

A good partner in a law firm will certainly perform worse in this role than a bad product owner.

✍️ Dima Gadomsky