The founding of LexInsight

LexInnova Technologies has traditionally been a Patent and Litigation consulting firm, and a pretty good one at that! We have hundreds of clients from all walks of life, from Fortune 500 companies to independent entrepreneurs, and we are quoted frequently by the likes of Forbes and WSJ.

Feedback from clients

During the course of our projects, we had the opportunity to have close interactions with attorneys, litigation support professionals and legal executives from major corporations. A common theme that came up during several of these discussions was a shared discontent with “staffing agencies” - firms who provide attorneys on demand for different legal services. Common grievances that we came across:

1. Hiring attorneys through staffing agencies is expensive! They charge a high markup over actual billing rates of attorneys.
2. There was high turnover among hired attorneys, which hurt law firms pretty badly after they spent weeks training the person.
3. The agencies had a small talent pool, and it was difficult to find attorneys with specialized skills, like foreign languages, or subject matter expertise.
4. There was no consistent and objective system for performance evaluation of attorneys. Law firms were often stuck with poor quality people.
5. The entire process lacked transparency.

These discussions really piqued our curiosity. Was this an indicator that the legal services industry was finally ready for its Uber moment? But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. For the success of any two-sided platform like Uber, both sides need to be equally dissatisfied with the status quo, and be ready for a change. Did the contract attorneys feel the same about staffing agencies? We decided to find out!

Feedback from contract attorneys

As a litigation consulting firm, we have done eDiscovery document review projects before. So, we reached out to our network of contract attorneys to gather their viewpoints about staffing agencies. We were quite surprised (and glad) by what we found. The discontent with staffing agencies was not limited to law firms. Contract attorneys were equally dissatisfied with them as well! Their key grievances with staffing firms were:

1. It was difficult for them to maintain a steady and consistent stream of work. They had to depend on the law firms to pick them for projects.
2. They had very little control over the projects they were staffed on, or their billing rates. Issues with billing and overtime were also quite common. The entire process was handled in a heavy-handed way by staffing firms, and lacked transparency.
3. It was very difficult for contract attorneys to find work on their own, and they had to depend almost exclusively on the staffing firms for work.
4. The opportunities to network with peers in the industry was very limited. Their networks were limited to the staffing firms they worked with.
5. There was no consistent and objective performance evaluation process for top performers to stand out.

LexInsight is born!

Through our discussions with both sides, it became increasingly clear to us that there was need for a marketplace that can offer legal services in a transparent, predictable and affordable way. Thus, LexInsight was born!

The landscape of legal services is vast, and not very well defined. So, to test our idea, we decided to limit ourselves to eDiscovery services, and start with a strong focus on Document Review. LexInsight is the world’s first and only marketplace focused exclusively on eDiscovery services, and we have built it from the ground up keeping the needs of eDiscovery clients and professionals in mind.

LexInsight open beta is now live!

We have launched the open beta for LexInsight last week, and over the next few blog posts, I will take you through the product and how it works. You can sign up for the open beta by visiting www.lexinsight.com. We understand that we are not quite there yet, but we are working hard to add new features and functionality every day. Please let us know what you think about our idea and the product in the comments below. Each comment is read with care, and we always respond! Look forward to an exciting journey ahead! :)