#LegalTechLives with Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina
“The quality of the team is some combination of ambition, commitment, intellect/network, experience, and hustle.” — Josh Becker
For this edition of #LegalTechLives I spoke with Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina and leader in legal innovation. Becker has a wide range of experience that includes being a Co-Founder of Dice.com and head of corporate development at Agile Software, that was bought by Oracle. Becker also has experience as a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures and New Cycle Capital (Founding General Partner), at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and Netscape. He holds degrees from Stanford University (JD/MBA) and Williams College (BA) and remains active philanthropically with Startup2Startup and the Full Circle Fund.
Kathleen Killin: To start us off, can you give us a brief summation of what Lex Machina is?
Josh Becker: Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics is a new category of legal technology complementary to Legal Research. Our Lexpressions engine creates data sets never before available about judges, lawyers, parties, and the subjects of lawsuits. These data sets come from millions of pages of litigation information. You can think of us as ‘Moneyball for Law’ because with this data, lawyers can gain insight into the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce.
KK: How did Lex Machina come to be?
JB: Lex Machina started as a public interest project at Stanford Law School. You had large companies like Apple, Microsoft, Genentech, Cisco, who were getting hit by an increasing number of patent law suits and were looking for better information on who was the party suing them, what was their pattern of behavior, who was the judge they were in front of, and what should their legal strategy be. Mark Lemley, one of the top legal academics in the country, thought he could put together a database of patent litigation with the help of a legal founder and a technical founder. He was able to create that database, and realizing there was a lot of value they decided to spin it off as a private company but keep the public interest mission.
KK: I saw on your website that you can ask questions such as how long a certain motion will take in front of a specific judge. How in-depth can attorney’s get when asking Lex Machina for assistance before taking a litigation file? Or after taking the file?
JB: We provide the database and our customers have unlimited access to it. So, they can get right in the weeds and evaluate the chances of success for a specific motion before their judge, but they can also ask how long it will take them to get to trial, or if this judge is more inclined to rule for the plaintiff or the defendant.
KK: What is the best business advice you have ever received?
JB: Success is all about prioritization and delegation. So, reading the book First Things First by Stephen Covey was actually very helpful to me. Additionally, my board member Rob Siegel said “Let’s make mistakes through action rather than inaction.” People sometimes react negatively to the word “mistake,” but it’s an important mentality for startups to have.
KK: What advice would you give to a young CEO beginning their venture into the realm of entrepreneurial life?
JB: 1. Always be very clear of what milestones you need to achieve before your next round of funding.
2. Be willing to take a smaller piece of a bigger pie to get the right people around the table to help you.
3. As soon as possible establish a board with both investors and outside board members who are willing to ask the tough questions and hold your feet to the fire.
4. Being a CEO is all about managing people. Find opportunities to practice giving and receiving both positive and negative feedback.
5. Hire people who are willing to dive in and do whatever needs to get done. In a startup, energy and enthusiasm can be just as important as having the right resume and background.
KK: While a VC, what top three qualities did you look for in a start-up?
JB: All VCs are looking at the size of the market and the quality of the team. Some prioritize team over market… some prioritize market over team, but it’s always some balance between those two things.
The quality of the team is some combination of ambition, commitment, intellect/network, experience, and hustle.
KK: What is your best time-saving life hack?
JB: Working Sunday and Tuesday evenings with my assistant. After hours the phones are not ringing and the emails are not coming in every few minutes, so I can easily prioritize and get critical things done in these “off peak” hours.
KK: What are you currently reading? Or what is something else that you would recommend?
JB: Personally, I read a lot of non-fiction and don’t read a lot of business books. Some exceptions are Double Double by Cameron Herold and Selling in a New Marketplace by Brian Burns and Tom Snyder. Right now I’m reading Workarounds That Work by Russell Bishop which offers useful advice for dealing with challenges and obstacles.
Josh — Thank you so much for taking time to speak with me. I find Lexpressions fascinating! I also want to thank you for your advice to entrepreneurs and for passing on the best advice you have ever gotten. A trick that I do when sorting tasks is make a to do list, with subheadings of projects. After getting everything on paper, I then do a quick ranking of tasks to get the quick ones off my plate. At the end of the day, I then make my to do list for the next day which carries over any tasks I didn’t complete. Those then get priority on day two. I will add Double Double, Selling in a New Marketplace and Workarounds That Work to my reading list!
