Drew Miller, founder of Tritium Legal, sat down with one of our Marketing Executives, Alexandria Cordova, to share more about his innovative desktop platform.
With a background blending software development and legal expertise, Drew understood how instrumental a desktop solution would be for transactional lawyers. In this interview, he shares the story of Tritium’s inception, how it’s revolutionising lawyers' desktop experience, and the exciting role technology is playing in reshaping legal workflows.
Tritium and Drew will also be featured in our inaugural Start-Up Gallery at Legal Innovators UK. Don’t miss his rapid-fire pitch session on both days of the event, where you can discover how Tritium is transforming this sector of the industry.
What inspired the creation of Tritium Legal? Could you share the story behind its inception and what drove you to enter the legal tech industry, pioneering innovation in this space?
I saw the opportunity to improve the lives of lawyers with a desktop software upgrade.
I started at Schulte Roth & Zabel in New York as a summer associate back in 2010. I've also been developing software since middle school. It struck me how static my desktop experience at Schulte remained over those years compared to software development.
Here's a few examples. Is it weird that in 2024 you have to open up a separate application to run a redline? Why do you have to search for defined terms or page back and forth between cross references? Why can't you search across all of your live documents in real time? Why do you need a separate application for PDFs and docx files? Why is it impossible to merge someone else's changes into your document?
Mostly it's because Microsoft has captured the industry. These features are all baked into the software engineer's primary desktop tool. Microsoft's solution for us is to allow extensions, but these are mostly unusable garbage with all of the onboarding headaches of standalone solutions. Meanwhile, out of the box you get "WordArt".
You're all using desktop software designed, literally, to be used by your grandparents. That's ready to change.
Peering into the future, in what ways do you envision technology reshaping the legal landscape?
I'm from the funds world. In my corner of the industry, you're going to see an explosion in complexity. Deal terms and regulation will become increasingly narrow, specific and targeted while increasing in number ten or a hundred fold. This will be driven by tools on both side of the negotiations leveraging language models.
Humans aren't going anywhere—in fact you'll grow as an industry due to this complexity expansion.
How do you see the role of AI and automation evolving in the legal tech industry?
Language models will start centralized and become personal to the lawyer. You're going to see a transition from cloud solutions to models on laptops. The language model owned by that startup today will be a set of weights owned by the lawyer that is portable between firms tomorrow. Experience is the lawyer's asset, and that asset will be manifest in these weights. Firms and institutions will try to retain and centralize as much as possible, but lawyers will see the writing on the wall and decentralization will prevail.
What challenges do you believe innovative leaders face when implementing new solutions and processes in their teams, especially within the legal tech domain? Furthermore, what strategies or solutions do you envision might effectively address these challenges and drive successful adoption and integration?
Incentive alignment is the number one issue.
It's hard for big law partnerships to innovate. The incentives just point in the wrong directions. These partnerships are old, stable, income-generating businesses run by committees of people who are mostly retiring in a few years. It's nothing nefarious, but the benefits of learning new tools are just so low for these leaders. That's doubly true when the tools decrease short-term profitability. There's no equity to cash out and no point investing in the partnership's future cash flows. In a lot of these organizations a single powerful individual can simply kill an idea.
That all combines for stasis.
Max Planck had this notion that science progresses one funeral at a time. New ideas are accepted only after folks who have invested their careers in the old ideas are no longer around. In big law, you have to look for contexts where Planck's "funerals" occur most frequently. Target the departments where there is high client and personnel velocity, and the more junior the better. That's a place where innovation can take hold. The second strategy is to mimic the existing workflow as much as possible. Mimicking the present obviously runs counter to innovation.
In-house is clearer. Build something that gets the job done faster and better. Make sure errors are surfaced and not obscured or glossed over as "hallucinations". This gets the user home and lets her sleep at night.
What aspects of the event are you most excited about this year?
I'm super excited to show off Tritium and meet the folks in the UK who are working to move our industry forward.
Secure your spot at Legal Innovators UK today and see firsthand how legal tech startups, like Tritium Legal, are changing the industry as we know it!
Blog Credits:
Editor and Content Curator: Alexandria Cordova, Marketing Executive
Graphics: Charles Kabunga, Graphic Design Executive
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