Melia (Robinson) Russell
11.6K posts
Melia (Robinson) Russell
@meliarobin
muh-LEE-ah is a @businessinsider reporter covering tech and law
New York City Katılım Eylül 2009
3.4K Takip Edilen15.5K Takipçiler
The legal industry is about to see a whole lot more Kirkland & Ellis-type bombshells
Gabe Pereyra@gabepereyra
Model strategy for @harvey: We are working on the first model in our legal foundation model series, inspired by @cursor_ai's Composer. Two goals: 1. Allow us to serve frontier intelligence across our product surface areas at an affordable price and a strong security posture. 2. Create the foundations for law firms to build their own specialized models and own their own intelligence. The model series will focus on complex client matters that span months and take dozens of associates. The agentic system will learn to control legal tech tools, sub agents and ask for help from frontier models or human partners, much like a senior associate. We’ve open sourced benchmarks for evaluating our initial post training work that represents work done by associates and in-house lawyers. We are scaling these significantly using synthetic and human pipelines as well as building private evals for firms. Open sourcing this data has allowed us to quickly validate the feasibility of post training open weight models for legal work. With our research partners we’ve already shown promising results post training open source models to approach frontier performance: 1. @baseten - novel compaction strategies for analyzing large data rooms. 2. @FireworksAI_HQ - matching frontier performance by using frontier as an advisor. 3. @appliedcompute - improving performance and reducing cost of large scale review tables. 4. @trajectorylabs & @nvidia - sovereign continual learning over client matters. We plan to continue to invest heavily in working with research partners and open sourcing our data, models and research as much as possible. We believe open research in legal will be important to building trust in the frontier ecosystem. We are also scaling our research team. Harvey Labs is our internal research group, responsible for pushing the frontier of legal intelligence and working closely with labs, research partners, and academia to bring the frontier of agent research into Harvey. Labs is run by @nikogrupen and @ItsJulioPereyra - Niko worked on multi-agent RL at Google Brain and Julio clerked and worked in BigLaw. We believe this pairing is crucial for building frontier legal AI systems. Together they have already made significant progress in scaling our data and training efforts. The long term goal of Harvey Labs is to contribute to the research and infrastructure required for the legal industry to create a frontier ecosystem. We believe that the best version of legal super intelligence is one where each law firm, enterprise and government owns their own specialized version. We are hiring for Harvey Labs across the post training, agent and data stack and open to acquiring talented teams / neolabs in this space. If interested please DM me.
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
fast-growing legal ai startups face a new threat: their customers :)
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*!*!*HAPPENING NOW*!*!* The @harvey founders are answering your questions live on r/legaltech. Join us.
Harvey@harvey
Reddit AMA with our cofounders @gabepereyra and @winstonweinberg tomorrow, Wednesday May 27th, 1pm PT / 4pm ET. Join us on r/legaltech, hosted by @alexjdenne and @meliarobin. We're excited for your questions!
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
@scottastevenson of @SpellbookLegal,
@PrestonJClark of @smpldocs,
@mkjung_ at @heyivoai,
and @rossmcnairn at @WrdsmithAI
What do you think people are going to ask?
Melia (Robinson) Russell@meliarobin
Time to try something new ✨ This week, r/legaltech is hosting a joint AMA with four founders who often compete for the same customers. All sell contract review software for lawyers. I promised mod @alexjdenne I’d bring the tough questions. What do you want to know?
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Time to try something new ✨
This week, r/legaltech is hosting a joint AMA with four founders who often compete for the same customers.
All sell contract review software for lawyers.
I promised mod @alexjdenne I’d bring the tough questions. What do you want to know?
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
I am thrilled to share that @WeAreLegora has acquired Qura.
Legora is the operating system for legal work, and legal research is a core pillar of our platform.
When others have chased the next shiny object, the team at Qura has obsessed over legal data structures, hierarchies, and completeness of coverage. This is clear in the undeniable customer love, the accuracy and the scalability of their approach.
The Qura team is already busy shipping the next big thing at Legora and will be focused on scaling our legal research product globally.
We can’t wait to show you what’s next.
Press release:
legora.com/newsroom/legor…
@BusinessInsider story by @meliarobin:
businessinsider.com/legora-acquire…
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
Firms need to stop thinking in terms of "How are we using AI?" and reframe as "What must we do because AI exists?"
I somehow missed this story last month but this talent leak is something I've warned firms about for the last 3 years
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
If you are a talented and ambitious tech comms leader and you're open to new roles, let me know! There are some amazing (but not public) opportunities right now and I am fully off the market - I'll send them your way!
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
We are likely past the point of no return unfortunately around “ARR-embellishment”, if you put it nicely…
This version @scottastevenson talks about is egregious IMO. I haven’t see too many cases of this.
One thing I do believe is that “ARR-dishonesty” will always come back to bite you. For the very few founders who want to play the most aggressive version of this game, it’s just not worth it… trust me.
For me, the major issue at hand is how we as an industry should disclose and report inference-based revenue, which there are arguments for and against it being included in an aggregate “ARR number”
The hard truth is that there are varying levels of quality of inference-based revenue and it’s ultimately a judgment call that an investor needs to make regarding the REPEATABILITY and DURABILITY of the underlying atomic unit of work or behavior being monetized.
This is how most investors drive towards a judgment on revenue quality…
1. Net revenue retention (more on this one below)
2. Gross logo retention
3. Gross revenue retention
4. Engagement retention
5. Engagement intensity
Very important side note - In SaaS era, most important measure for me was net revenue retention - N$R. We used to look for companies with 120%+ N$R and some best-in-class companies had 140-160% N$R.
Some AI companies today tout 200% N$R but it’s not like-for-like with the SaaS era in some cases where there isn’t the same repeatability and durability of the underlying activity.
Where the activity is more sporadic or experimental, this N$R should be viewed closer to a payments / fintech N$R that always look high due to starting off of a small base and grows quickly but may spin down again quickly also.
In any scenario, MORE TRANSPARENCY THE BETTER for everyone.
In the long horizon of time, it all comes to light and you don’t want to be a founder that has asked investors and employees to wade into your part of the ocean, only for the tide to go out and see that your “ARR” was not what you presented it to be… my 2c
I shared some of this sentiment in a @WSJ article a few months back
Scott Stevenson@scottastevenson
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M). They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now. The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract. In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation. On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins. At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing. And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
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QME
@scottastevenson @rlj_law the issue here is that companies will not confirm if they are reporting cARR or ARR -- but would love to hear from @MaxJunestrand @winstonweinberg if they want to weigh in
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It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR
The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric
The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage.
The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M).
They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now.
The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract.
In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation.
On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins.
At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing.
And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
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@scottastevenson @jasonlk Journalist here. 🙋♀️ You better believe I'll be asking from here on out! Thanks for sharing, Scott.
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@jasonlk Yes. It’s a tough call for companies because it’s become a widespread epidemic. Do you play the game or do you call it out?
I think best option is to educate journalists on the difference so we can get back to MRR…
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
Two of the perks of working at @synthesiaIO are that you get to be around very smart people who are curious enough to try things for themselves, and that you get to see how generative AI is applied to build amazing experiences that weren't possible before.
A story in @BusinessInsider that's out today brings both to life. Our general counsel, Gabe Stern, spoke to @meliarobin about a Video Agent he created to handle the mundane parts of a commercial conversation: businessinsider.com/synthesia-gene…
This is, of course, a great proof point for how versatile our new agentic products are, and how they can be easily applied to create new enterprise apps (Gabe built the agent in just a few weeks). But it also says something much more important about the kind of company Synthesia is becoming, and what AI means for the enterprise space.
With this technology, great ideas will not be confined to just one function. Given the right tools and platforms, talented people will find new ways of applying technology to be more productive. In other words, they will work better, and do more with more.
The second thing it says is that we are living through a shift in what software can actually do. Not long ago, most teams used software to store information, move tickets, and automate workflows. Now we are starting to see AI participate in interactions that used to depend on a person being present for every step of the conversation.
That is what makes this moment so exciting for me. We are able to watch AI move into forms of work that were previously out of reach, and that is a big part of the energy at Synthesia right now.
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Palantir HQ! Zuck mansion! Crypto bros! Miami is back, baby. .. ... ?
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
Alligators may be all around in Miami, but unicorns are hard to find. Now, though, there is a Karp. businessinsider.com/miami-next-sil…
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
Just like DeepSeek last year, Tuesday's market meltdown appears to have been sparked by a RIDICULOUSLY false and misleading narrative that media outlets spread without applying ANY critical thinking, fueling sensationalism and panic.
Great job everyone. You guys are terrible and awful. Have some decency for your readers.
Read the first screenshot, then what I wrote today:
tae kim@firstadopter
Strawman say wat
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
Love this article by @meliarobin. @AnthropicAI's latest plugin has awoken the world to how tech is going to change legal.
There are three categories of legal tech:
1) selling into law firms
2) selling into in-house legal teams
3) going direct to users and provide services.
@soxton is in category 3. We directly provide legal services to startup founders and remove incorporation, employee contracting, customer contracts, and more from the plate of founders. $20 a month and $100 for most contracts.
Business Insider@BusinessInsider
If you work in legal, it was hard to open LinkedIn over the past 24 hours without running into a wall of hot takes about Anthropic's new plugin. bit.ly/4byC5TT
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Melia (Robinson) Russell retweetledi
The AI slop era has made actual writing rare enough to be *very* expensive again.
Tech companies are paying $400K+ for comms roles, because everyone can generate words now, but very few can make them stand out and matter.
Thanks to @BusinessInsider for including my perspective
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