thebillablehour

- blockchain is the future - blockchain is not the future - here’s a funny picture of something with a comment over it about life as a lawyer - billable hours bla bla Missed anything?

Here’s legal tech Twitter - complaints about calling people “non lawyers” - user centric design stuff that’s so high level it’s not helpful - it’s not about lawyers it’s about clients bla bla - I’ve been doing this longer than you and it’s harder than you think

@heyitsalexsu They don’t like the attention you get but I guess also it’s okay not to agree with everything everyone says

@thebillablehou I dabble in it occasionally until the usual suspects show up to rain on my parade

Me waiting to see what drama unfolds on law twitter this week so I can start making memes

@heyitsalexsu Oh yeah I misread your tweet. You don’t do legal tech anymore right

@thebillablehou Sounds more like legal tech twitter to me lol

@ZachAbramowitz The decentralised user experience is so bad that it needs to be centralised. This is my main problem with decentralisation. Who does the UX? Who does the marketing and all the non tech stuff?

One funny quirk of #BTC is that the user experience is so unfriendly that following is entirely possible: many people that might ordinarily sell in a crash have not sold because they just don’t know how to.

How do I mute all the following kinds of content from linkedin: - "Somebody told me I couldn't do something 10 years ago and now I've done it" - "I came from an unprivileged background and now I've got a job I didn't think I'd get" - "I just graduated"

@heyitsalexsu Hi Alex - I have followed you for a while but I haven’t picked up on the legal tech negativity. Where is this coming from?

4/ I moved away from posting about legal tech during the middle of the year. Didn’t like the negativity & anti-tech sentiment I felt from some in the legal tech twitter community. So I left to engage w the broader law twitter community, where I’ve received a much warmer welcome.

One year ago, I kicked my journey on Twitter by sharing learnings from my legal tech career. Though I’ve since moved away from that niche, lurkers recently told me they enjoyed those posts. So I thought I’d end the year by sharing some of my fav legal tech threads of 2021:

@alexgsmith I always wondered what these blockchain lawyers actually do. Surely there really isn’t that much work going around other than the inevitable bankruptcies from failed solutionising

I don’t see the point in crypto/blockchain. People tell me I’m going to be behind the times, one of these people who refused to embrace the internet, refused to use electricity The difference is I think life will be just fine without crypto/blockchain. Probably, better without.

@heyitsalexsu For what it’s worth there are also a few instances I’ve seen where law firm partners have seen associates who go off and do something different as positively exciting, and use them as talking points to clients around the diverse range of skill sets they have as a firm

@thebillablehou Thank you for being so reasonable too. By the way we can still do the flame war thing if you want. I'm home alone with my toddler bc day care is closed ...

Next thread: 5th year associate pitches a local entrepreneur she knows from the gym to hire her as his startup’s first in-house lawyer. Twenty years later, she becomes a C-level executive at another place. Which happens to be one of the world’s most well-known companies.

@heyitsalexsu I get you. Thank you for responding so gracefully. Others would have turned this into a Twitter flame

@thebillablehou Fair point. I think people generally like these stories bc they show what's possible. Many of us in the legal profession have been repeatedly told that unless you follow some prescribed credential-laden path you are doomed to failure. Which couldn't be farther from the truth.

@heyitsalexsu Also yes it would be helpful to hear some of those stories where people tried and failed, so that people have a balanced view. Too many people are doing startups thinking they will be the next unicorn, when not only the odds are stacked against them but they lack the skill

@heyitsalexsu It was more that Twitter has lots of threads like this that oversimplify these kinds of thing or make it seem more common than it is. Personally I would prefer to hear more tangible learnings, whether they ended up in stardom or not but I guess your engagement says it all!

@heyitsalexsu Have a talented and clever friend who tried to start their own thing and got obsessed with this niche problem nobody cared about as much as they did. They lost money on it big time and never got out the blocks. They’re back in big law now for more secure income

@thebillablehou One thousand percent true. At some point, I'll share my own experience joining my first tech startup. It ended up being a lot more similar to your tweet than the original thread.

A Biglaw associate decided to quit his prestigious, high paying job to go in-house, and then left that to join a startup with no revenue or website. Today, that associate is a billionaire who owns the Brooklyn Nets. This is his story:

@heyitsalexsu That’s fair enough. My advice for people is also to be realistic. Yes it might be a dream scenario but also it is likely it won’t be. You will learn huge amount either way. Go for it esp if you have savings to fall back on

@thebillablehou I'll let someone else tell that story. Bc the balance you're describing is already covered by all of the advice that younger lawyers get from partners, from their parents, etc. My audience is smart enough to know that taking a risk doesn't always work out.

@TheTimeBlawg @heyitsalexsu From my limited knowledge of legal startups, here are some common pitfalls I see: (1) thinking you can do it “because your a lawyer” (2) looking at too narrow a problem (3) approaching from view of law firm only (4) oversimplifying product development (e.g. “just get it coded”)

@thebillablehou @heyitsalexsu The fail rate of start-ups is very high - so yes this is overglamourising the journey which for most is more likely to, unfortunately, end in failure than success. investopedia.com/articles/perso…

Also the same with stories you hear about Slack “pivoting” to their messaging app. This was above all a journey of LUCK. Are you telling me the best way to become a successful startup is to randomly guess at shit?

Btw it’s the same with the crypto peeps who just bought $$$$$houses because they made a decision to buy bitcoin at a low price 10 years ago and sold it. Hardly happened to anyone but jeez do you hear about it a lot...which is why so many get rich quick crypto fanatics exist

@heyitsalexsu Nice examples. In general I do think we overglamorise these journeys. Often instead of jumping into a startup you’d be better off working for an established company, learning the ropes and doing the risky stuff when you are a more experienced. Rather than going into it blind.

@heyitsalexsu Can you do another story on the big law associate that left their jobs to join a startup and was a complete failure so they went back to big law? Just to be balanced. Sometimes I am worried this kind of rare event makes people make stupid decisions