Pop Quiz, Monday with Alex Solo, Co-founder at sprintlaw
The Pop Quiz, Monday is a fun little exam that we love to give to savvy business people. The examination is not a surprise after all since the interviewee already knew about the questions in advance. However, we can always pretend and have fun with the scenario of a young entrepreneur sitting in class nervously biting on their pencil. They are ready to take a pop quiz on a chapter that they were supposed to read the night before. Instead, they played Metroid all night on their SNES (Oops, this was me in high school). The real purpose of the pop quiz is that this is a fun way to introduce business tips from real-world experiences that you cannot learn in a classroom. We want to thank our interviewee for being a good sport and volunteering their time to answer a few questions to help our community grow from their knowledge.
I want to introduce you to our guest today who will be taking our Pop Quiz, Monday.
Can you please tell everyone your name?
Alex Solo
What is your job role?
Co-founder at sprintlaw
Tell us about your company?
sprintlaw is a law/tech firm that’s transforming the way business legals are delivered by bringing technology, efficiency, and simplicity to law. Founded in early 2017, we’ve provided legal assistance to over 1200 Australian startups and small businesses with our small team of expert lawyers supported by our custom-built technology.
What do you love most about your job?
The best aspect of my job is the variety and the need for constant learning. I enjoy the challenge of having to gain a working knowledge of so many different professions — marketing, finance, operations, recruiting, sales — and then getting the opportunity to apply that knowledge immediately and see the results.
What motivates you to get up every day and go to work?
I’m motivated by the mammoth task of realising the vision that my co-founder and I have for our business — to transform the delivery of business legals using technology. It helps that the journey so far has been gratifying, in watching our company grow from a little idea in my and my co-founder’s minds into a fully-fledged business, supported by an excellent team, that’s helped hundreds of business clients.
How do your co-workers inspire you?
We encourage open idea sharing in sprintlaw, and I’m always inspired and amazed by our team members innovative and creative suggestions and ideas. Each of our team members brings their own unique perspective to business problems and the progress our business has made has truly been a collaborative, team effort.
How do you have fun at work (team building, pranks, etc..)?
We’ve got a pretty cool workspace, which is nothing like a traditional law firm — it’s an open-plan, co-working space with music playing all day and cute dogs roaming around. We also have weekly Friday lunches, Monday trivia nights at a local pub and monthly team dinners/nights out.
What are some of the challenges of your job?
I’d say switching between different mindsets is a challenging element of the job. On a typical day, I could start out churning through digital marketing and website usage data, then have a call consulting a new potential client, then find myself looking at SQL servers and fixing bugs in our back-end infrastructure, and then end up helping a lawyer in our team consider the correct interpretation of a piece of legislation. It can be a bit mind-bending!
Another challenging aspect is managing resources and time. At any given moment, there are a million different things I could be doing — and prioritising, delegating and identifying the best use of my time is an art-form I’m yet to master fully.
What are some lessons learned from a past project that you can share with us?
In the early days of the business, we probably wasted a little too much time carefully planning out all our projects and overthinking each decision. The biggest lesson we’ve learned is not to waste time planning too much. This applies to getting started with your business because there is an overload of information online about how to be a startup and how to innovate. We’ve found that you don’t need to master all the jargon to start creating. Rather, you’re likely to create more problems for yourself if you spend too much time overthinking things.
There is no motivator like a present customer to inspire you to get your operations in order or fix the bugs in your product. Their feedback will also help you to design a solution that solves real-world problems, rather than wasting time creating unnecessary functionality or being over-prepared for perceived situations. You’ll also find that once you start making sales, the boring administrative stuff will no longer become as boring — you’ll actually enjoy filling out that form to set up that business bank account so that you can collect your money!
What advice would you give to someone who is starting in your industry?
As the traditional legal industry evolves in response to changes in technology, there are many emerging gaps in the market, and I’d advise those starting in the legal industry to identify and understand these gaps and ensure they are equipped to navigate them.
In particular, I think the required skillset of lawyers is starting to move beyond the ‘expert at law’ that has been traditionally championed. Legal businesses are increasingly valuing expertise in disciplines other than law — e.g., tech literacy, sales and marketing, data analysis and the ability to operate legal software — and those with this sort of training or experience will have a tremendous advantage.
Thank you for taking our pop quiz today. You get an A+ for effort. You can learn more about our interviewee and their business by visiting them on the web:
Website: https://sprintlaw.com.au
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sprintlaw/
