Bim: Hello Legal Helm listeners. Today on our show I’m talking to Andy Wilson. Andy is the CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, the leading e-Discovery cloud service used by over 1500 organizations around the world. Andy, along with his co-founder, Sheng Yang, founded Logikcull around 10 years ago in Andy’s Washington DC dining room.

Today I’m going to be talking to Andy about how e-Discovery solutions can be leveraged by law firms and legal departments to deliver a significant return on investment.

Andy, welcome to the show and thank you for taking time out to talk to me today.

Andy: Thank you, man.

Bim: It would be really good to help our audience and myself learn a little bit about you. So tell us about your journey that led you to Logikcull.

Andy: Yeah, sure. Quick point of clarification. We started in my dining room in DC in 2004. This is all pre-cloud. So, imagine a 500 square foot condo and the dining room was not a dining room, but a data center.

Bim: Wow.

Andy: Server racks and wires everywhere. We built our own cloud somewhat haphazardly and apparently illegally. Apparently, it’s not okay to have a data center in a condo building. We eventually got out of there, but that’s where we started 2004 in DC. but that wasn’t Logikcull. That was a large-scale data processing service for mega litigation. Big banks and big law firms would hire us. Then we got the idea for Logikcull, which, is the complete opposite of that. It’s like anybody can do it. It’s self-service. It’s available to anyone during the Great Recession in ?08 and ?09. We launched Logikcull the service in 2013.

Bim: Fantastic. When you were describing the servers on the dining room, it reminded me of a time early on in my career. I used to look after IT for Elite back in the day and then got to taken over by Thompson Reuters.

it was funny because we were basically expanding in Europe at that time, and we had two offices next door to each other. One was on the other side of the road, but it was only literally like a hundred or so yards away. We spoke to the building owners and said look, we’re expanding, we need another office. The lady said, ?yeah, no problem. We’ve got a spare office on the other side.? We were on the second floor. The other place was on the second floor.

Moved bunch servers over to the other office, plugged everything in and tried to fire up our machines and nothing was connected to the internet. We’re like, ?oh, this is, this is odd.? Go back downstairs and the lady says to me, ?Um, you do realize that the two offices are not actually physically connected to each other.? I was like, ?what?? In those days, WIFI was a new thing.

So, we spent about 2000 pounds on these wireless access points that could kind of do point-to-point WIFI. We were hanging out the building drilling them into the wall so we could get the two buildings connected. We operated like that for probably three years until we figured out how to connect the buildings together. But it’s a free cloud, right?

Andy: Yes, exactly. We eventually moved out of the condo. We, we had a big office in Washington, DC right behind the White House. And to connect it to your story, there was one point where we spent an entire month digging up K Street to lay fiber line to our data center in Ashburn, Virginia.

Bim: Wow. Fun times.

Andy: It was nuts. Now we’re all living in the cloud.

Bim: Yes. Fun, times for sure. So, tell us a little bit about how is Logikcull is changing the way e-discovery is done for firms and, legal departments.

Andy: Oh, wow. It’s pretty dramatic. The insight that we had in 2008 – 2009 was there, there were two things that would eventually come to a head and it would affect pretty much everybody. That was the data volumes for discovery are going to continue to grow. We’re on this exponential growth curve, right? And The digital age and the deadlines that legal and IT teams are under aren’t going to move.

So, you have this movable object and this tsunami of data. That’s going to create a nightmare for the legal system. It’s going to create a lot of backlog, which is already happening. We’re seeing that all over the place. It’s going to create, a big pile of digital mess. And even in a small case, you have to go through maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails and Slack messages and video files. If you’re doing that in a very manual way, there’s no way you’re going to meet your deadline. It presents an access to justice problem. That?s where we get the idea for Logikcull..

We’re like, okay, this is going to be a big deal. This is the one thing that’s not going to change 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Data’s going to continue to get bigger and more complex. Therefore, we need to build a service that anybody can use to do these modern discovery challenges. It won’t break the bank or your brain. it can’t be complicated.

That’s where we got our mission of democratizing discovery. Logikcull is now used all over the world. Over 70 countries, over 50,000 users, thousands of organizations have used it and it’s been pretty profound.

One of the things that we hear often is it’s leveled the playing field. Small firms now have big firm technology. We have customers ranging in size from individuals, like pro se litigants, up to the world’s largest companies and governments, then everybody in between. They’re all paying a different price, but they’re fundamentally using the same technology.

If you think about it, the small firm in many cases are actually better armed than the bigger firms because the bigger firms are in a sun cost fallacy mindset where they bought this antiquated software 10, 20 years ago. The smaller firm is using a very modern, flexible, scalable, affordable architecture, and they’re oftentimes able to run circles around these big firms and get justice much faster. It’s pretty impactful.

Bim: You touched on something at the forefront of a lot of technology companies? minds around the implementation of new products. I love what you just described. How those smaller firms can be a bit more agile because the decision-making is a little quicker. And like you say, they haven’t invested as much in customizing the old system that they have ingrained within the ecosystem of the firm they can’t change it easily. I’m just interested to dig into that a little bit more in terms of what your approach is to helping customers implement a product like Logikcull. How do you take them on the journey to manage that change and make a big impact from a software delivery perspective?

Andy: There’s a lot nuance to that. First, I think you should know that Logikcull is online, on-demand. So, if people come to us, it’s a very inbound driven. Almost all of our customers have come directly to Logikcull and signed up for the service. That’s number one.

Number two is the product is designed to be incredibly intuitive. It’s modeled off of consumer products that people use every day, intentionally, because they use those types of products more than they do big hairy, enterprise software. So, Amazon, LinkedIn, we did a lot of pattern matching from, those types of products.

And you can just sign up. Put a credit card in and start using it without talking to a single person. Now no product is going to be perfect. We provide world class, in-app chat support by e-discovery experts, so people that used to work as paralegals in big law firms or technical roles, and they’re at your side at any time to help answer any questions. They often respond in under two minutes. This is for all users all around the world. You can ask them anything, jump on a Zoom call, et cetera.

Because sometimes discovery can be quite complicated, even if you’re experienced with it. If you’re new to it, if you’re coming from the old world of PDFs and paper, you’re probably going to have a few questions to get going, but it is pretty easy to use. You can just do it yourself. It’s very good.

Bim: That’s great to hear. It sounds like the fact that it’s cloud-based makes it super simple for people to spin it up and give it a go. Right.

Andy: Yes.