How to build a modern legal practice in 37 easy steps
A few days ago, I had a video chat with Tomoyuki Hachigo, co-founder of Sprintlaw (https://sprintlaw.com.au/), about how they built Sprintlaw by focusing on the needs of their target client groups – and created a firm that provides faster, simpler and more affordable legal services.
I have known Tomo and his co-founder, Alex Solo, for some years. We met the first time in a pub in Chippendale in Sydney. I believe 74% of all business used to happen in pubs and 86% of friendships started in pubs, or so I might have claimed without needing evidence before COVID. I remember thinking that they were far braver than I am, having the courage to leave the career certainty of BigLaw in order to run a law firm that helped “the little guys” who might not otherwise have adequate legal service. Most recently, I saw Tomo in person at the Russian Tearoom on 57th Street in New York, where we shared stories over a lunch of borscht and steak.
Since starting this blog, I had not had the opportunity to ask someone about the skills that help lawyers become better lawyers. With Tomo, I was able to ask him many questions related to essential skills for lawyers, and Tomo was kind enough to share his secrets.
In the video, we covered topics including:
what Sprintlaw does for small businesses by providing fast, simple and affordable legal services
how Sprintlaw uses empathy to understand their target client’s problem, and use their website to “speak” to their target clients directly
how a law firm can structure their pricing and services to address the needs of their clients
how to design a program to capture and make legal knowledge accessible to a team of lawyers
how people skills contribute to someone becoming an amazing lawyer
why there is a fraction of businesses who ignore legal risks, and why that might be a problem for those businesses
what marketing methods and techniques work to reach businesses that need legal services
the growth plans and ambitions for Sprintlaw over the next few years
One of our favorite tidbits of unusual information that Tomo shared was:
“… [we have] a normal funnel marketing strategy where at the bottom of your funnel, you are targeting people who are on Google intentionally searching for a problem you currently have. That market has been the most underserved in terms of marketing, because there was some stat that said, there was 70 or 80% of those people who thought about seeing a lawyer, who went on Google and did a search, they ended up going with a recommendation from someone they know.”
You can watch the full video of our unscripted conversation below:
Transcript of conversation
(Note: transcript is automatically generated, and may contain misspellings and typographical errors)
00:00
hello everyone welcome to another
00:01
conversation and today we're having a
00:03
conversation
00:04
with tomoyuki hachigo who is the
00:07
co-founder of sprint law tomo
00:11
thank you very much for making time to
00:12
join us today
00:14
thanks for having me horace how would
00:16
you describe
00:17
what sprint law does in a 30-second
00:21
pitch in an elevator pitch
00:23
sure um i said we we are a new kind of
00:27
legal provider
00:28
and we're sort of our mission is to
00:31
reinvent the way small businesses
00:33
get legal services um and so
00:37
uh we've got a suite of what we call
00:39
legal products
00:40
um and they're sort of they're packaged
00:42
legal services
00:43
that people can buy for fixed fee and
00:46
get things done
00:48
um and yeah i suppose in a
00:51
um it is just like
00:54
any sort of lawyer you get a legal
00:55
services done but um for us it's
00:58
it's um affordable quick
01:01
and easy that that's that will be the
01:04
the
01:06
the summary of what we do yeah what is
01:08
your secret to getting out there
01:10
and engaging with people who need legal
01:13
help
01:14
when we started sprint law we focused on
01:17
um
01:18
what you know what's missing what's
01:20
what's the gap in the market
01:21
what's the problem that we're trying to
01:22
solve and
01:24
the simple problem is that um our
01:28
target clients small businesses startups
01:30
um
01:31
they don't have access to quality legal
01:34
services
01:35
um business legal services in the same
01:38
way that big companies do
01:40
so you know we looked into why is it
01:43
that
01:44
you know so many small businesses find
01:46
legal services hard to find
01:48
or find it a bad experience and
01:52
it really comes down to a few things
01:54
like um lawyers
01:56
are expensive or appear to be expensive
01:58
confusing time consuming
02:01
um you know not online all those things
02:03
combined together
02:04
make it a poor experience so
02:07
we sort of start from that proposition
02:09
and we've created sprint law which is
02:11
a purely online um fast
02:14
legal service provider it's it's a
02:17
really interesting way of thinking about
02:19
this problem and and i've
02:20
i've never heard a lawyer frame it in
02:22
that way you you don't hear lawyers say
02:25
i recognize my clients have a problem
02:28
and i want to go and solve that problem
02:30
instead what you usually hear from
02:32
lawyers is kind of like well this is
02:34
what i practice
02:36
and i'm gonna go and look for clients
02:38
who need
02:39
my specialty my expertise
02:42
you guys have turned it around and and
02:45
it's almost
02:47
like design thinking for lawyers
02:50
when we first started i think um and one
02:53
of the problems with
02:53
law um it's getting better now but back
02:56
then especially
02:57
is that people especially young people
03:00
um
03:00
and even even most people these days
03:03
when you're looking for anything you go
03:04
on google
03:05
and you search uh you know get a
03:08
shareholders agreement or something
03:11
and uh typically well back then
03:13
especially you you go on
03:15
to a law firm's website um and
03:18
it doesn't tells you what they do like
03:20
you mentioned um
03:22
areas of law like corporate law
03:24
intelligence law and then
03:25
about us it's just all these heads of
03:27
people
03:29
um and that's not very intuitive for
03:31
just a
03:32
normal you know it might be good if
03:34
you're another lawyer and
03:36
if you're a general counsel of some big
03:37
company and you want to see the
03:39
expertise maybe that makes sense but
03:41
for your average business owner that's
03:43
that's not a very intuitive way of
03:46
looking at um
03:48
looking at what a law firm does or what
03:49
what what even legal services is
03:51
so um if you go to our website um
03:54
it's very very much about what
03:58
the from a customer's perspective um
04:00
what's their user journey
04:02
so typically our customers would search
04:04
on google or
04:05
see us on social media or whatever and
04:08
they'll get to our website and
04:09
it's very clear that you click this
04:11
button and you'll get a quote you know
04:12
that sort of um yeah i think it is a
04:15
form of design thinking but um
04:17
yeah really it's about um having a bit
04:20
of empathy thinking about
04:22
what the customer wants what what is
04:25
useful for them
04:26
yeah so
04:29
in in your world which is i suppose
04:33
one where you have to optimize
04:36
the work you deliver optimize the way
04:38
you perform
04:40
to service this customer group which is
04:42
much more cost sensitive
04:45
how do you go about um making sure
04:49
that what you're delivering is top-notch
04:52
legal advice
04:54
so we do fix fee only when
04:59
yeah and but that's sort of by design we
05:01
can only do
05:03
we we focus on the kinds of legal
05:05
services that are packageable
05:07
and so there's a sort of repeatable
05:10
element to the things that we do
05:12
and i think a lot of the a lot of the
05:15
problems around traditional legal
05:16
practice is that
05:18
these lawyers pretend like
05:21
every new matter they have is bespoke
05:24
and novel
05:25
when probably 90 of it is the same
05:28
and really the client shouldn't be
05:31
paying for that 90
05:33
on a time basis they should be paying
05:34
for the 10 human touch
05:37
and the remainder raining 90 is really
05:39
just kind of
05:40
firm ip which i suppose there's a value
05:43
to it but it is not time based
05:46
and so um we
05:49
by by doing that it streamlines the
05:52
process and so it brings the cost down
05:53
it brings cost certainty and it it also
05:56
standardizes the quality
06:01
every time we do a job we kind of feed
06:04
that
06:05
the process the knowledge from that into
06:07
our knowledge base
06:08
and uh we actually get better at doing
06:11
that same thing
06:12
um but we also can do it faster but with
06:15
um
06:17
with better quality and that's been
06:20
um we kind of always knew that that
06:22
would be the case
06:23
um yeah that's it's quite obvious when
06:25
you think about it but
06:27
having done it the that that is like
06:30
probably the
06:30
um one one thing that sort of just
06:33
getting better and better every
06:34
time and it's quite exciting yeah that
06:36
is a really neat way of putting it
06:40
lawyers work on experience right the
06:43
more experienced
06:44
lawyers have the better they're able to
06:46
work
06:47
and over time you kind of distill this
06:50
experience into
06:51
knowledge that's reusable i've seen this
06:53
before
06:54
i will act in this way because i know
06:56
it's going to lead to a better outcome
06:59
and one of the things that's not done
07:01
very well in most
07:02
law firms and most organizations of any
07:04
sort
07:05
is capturing of that knowledge in such a
07:09
way
07:10
that allows everyone else in the team to
07:12
use it
07:13
so how have you guys captured that
07:16
knowledge
07:17
for i think now you've got a team of 30.
07:20
so i suppose again this is thinking
07:21
about
07:22
the customer or the problem but in this
07:24
case
07:25
the user who's the lawyer why why why
07:27
are they behaving in this way
07:29
and it's because at the end of every job
07:33
um you know you sort of spend all these
07:35
hours on a job and
07:37
you you finally get to the end there's
07:40
no simple way where you can kind of
07:43
put that thing into the brains of the
07:45
organization
07:47
yep so it's just easier um
07:50
i think that's you know it's very simple
07:52
that you don't really
07:53
um do anything with that and so what
07:56
ends up happening is that you have your
07:58
own sort of local
07:59
set of files and um so that's an issue
08:02
because
08:03
the the most useful stuff is not really
08:07
accessible to everyone and um
08:10
uh yeah it's sort of hidden in in
08:12
people's brains
08:14
and so what we do is we have um a
08:16
knowledge system which we
08:18
uh we call the sprint yard i like the
08:21
name
08:22
[Laughter]
08:24
spring out is basically uh just a
08:26
collection of um
08:27
uh it's kind of like metadata of
08:31
um what we've done in every job so at
08:34
the end of every
08:34
job a lawyer would feel in a very simple
08:37
form
08:39
saying um you know that you tick some
08:41
boxes about whether it's got useful
08:43
causes
08:44
um whether um yeah you know
08:47
there are any uh uh whether it can be
08:50
turned into a precedent or
08:52
um who reacted for all that kind of
08:54
stuff as in like do we
08:56
act for the buyer or the seller that
08:57
kind of information um
08:59
and then based on that we have a process
09:02
of
09:03
you know pulling that document out
09:05
de-identifying it
09:07
putting it into a clause bank or
09:10
whatever and then
09:11
then you can next time someone another
09:14
one of your colleagues
09:15
have something similar they'll search on
09:16
the system and then
09:18
keywords will pick up certain clauses
09:20
and certain
09:21
information and that um
09:25
we kind of took a more bottom-up
09:27
approach where we knew
09:28
our lawyers behave we knew that if you
09:31
made lawyers
09:32
create gold standard templates and
09:35
update
09:36
things it'll just take ages and people
09:38
won't do it so
09:39
the most simple kind of um it's not
09:42
it's not like a it's not the most
09:44
polished way because
09:46
but it also doesn't have to be because
09:47
lawyers they don't really
09:50
they're going to read the thing anyway
09:52
so it's more about
09:53
finding certain phrases and clauses that
09:56
work and then a lawyer would then take
09:58
that and think well
10:00
does this work in my scenario that's
10:02
sort of how we design system
10:05
it's interesting you're talking about
10:07
sort of cost-benefit analysis
10:09
um of well do you really need the
10:12
rolls-royce or the lamborghini of
10:14
of a knowledge base or um can you
10:17
observe how
10:18
lawyers work and just give them
10:20
something that would drive them from
10:21
point a to point b
10:24
and it's interesting how and you would
10:26
know this being in legal tech how
10:29
a lot of lawyers when they think about
10:31
innovation
10:32
they go straight to technology and and
10:35
they
10:36
they think that if you if you buy this
10:37
software and implement it then suddenly
10:39
you're gonna
10:40
be very efficient and uh that's probably
10:43
that's not even the problem like with
10:44
the problem with legals is that
10:46
um it's it's a process issue and and
10:48
then once you
10:49
have a new process then you can apply
10:51
the technology um
10:53
you can't really give people tools to to
10:56
to you know be more efficient in the way
10:59
that
11:00
they've been inefficient in the past
11:02
yeah
11:03
it's it's that old saying of people
11:05
process technology or people process
11:07
product who do you look for when you
11:10
have lawyers join your team what what
11:12
are the qualities that you think
11:14
make a lawyer amazing sure
11:18
i suppose because we are a service
11:22
services customer-facing industry um
11:25
what makes the lawyer you know amazing
11:27
is what clients think
11:29
is um you know crucial for a good lawyer
11:34
and what i've learned over the years is
11:35
that um
11:37
good technical legal skills is just a
11:40
given
11:42
even uh um you you don't even get points
11:45
for that because
11:48
no one no one wants a four out of five
11:49
star lawyer right yep
11:52
uh so um so which is actually
11:56
you know all lawyers know that that's a
11:57
very high bar but that is the
11:59
expectation
12:00
i find right so um i suppose that's sort
12:03
of a given but that is
12:05
obviously very important for us um
12:08
then probably the more specific things
12:10
for us is that
12:12
um first of all they're uh i suppose
12:16
uh tech savvy or tech open to
12:20
new ways of things by that i don't mean
12:24
that i have to be able to
12:25
write code or anything um it's more that
12:29
um they're sort of open-minded in a way
12:32
such that
12:33
um when we say we're not doing it that
12:36
way we're doing it this way
12:37
or they'll also bring up new ideas and
12:39
why don't we do things this way
12:41
that's quite important for us um
12:45
because um that that's a that's a core
12:48
part of our mission to make things
12:49
better and easier and faster and
12:52
simpler and that's what clients want um
12:56
the most um i think uh most important
12:59
one actually is
13:00
is the people skills and probably
13:03
specific to our market
13:05
um where we we service uh you know
13:08
average business
13:09
owners and they're not they're not like
13:11
uh
13:12
you're not dealing with the general
13:14
counsel or some air sexist company
13:16
um and in
13:20
in that market in the sort of in the
13:21
corporate top tier market
13:24
they might actually just want someone
13:25
who is just a legal genius
13:28
and um can back up some sort of
13:31
um weird curly legal question and um
13:35
that
13:35
if that's what they want that's fine but
13:37
for us it's actually
13:38
we're dealing with um sort of less
13:40
complex legal issues
13:42
the more more important part is the
13:44
commercial
13:46
commercial problem solving um and that
13:49
requires
13:50
you know people skills understanding
13:51
what does this client
13:53
want what are they trying to achieve
13:55
what problems do they have and
13:57
how can i apply my legal knowledge and
13:59
skills to
14:01
solve what they want and that
14:04
um often you know people are just um
14:07
they might
14:09
they might just need someone with that
14:11
legal experience to
14:13
um tell them that this is a law and um
14:16
and and sort of say well this is what
14:18
you should do in your scenario because i
14:20
know that you're this kind of person
14:22
um that's a i suppose a
14:26
human human kind of skill that i think
14:30
as more of the technical elements of
14:33
legal practice becomes
14:35
more automated and process driven i
14:38
think that's probably where the future
14:39
of
14:41
the block of what lawyers should focus
14:43
on would be
14:45
i was talking to someone about um the
14:48
sort of behavior that
14:49
small business owners sometimes take not
14:52
always but sometimes
14:54
and that is when they're faced with a
14:56
legal
14:57
problem when they're faced with a
14:58
complex contract
15:00
sometimes they just go you know what
15:03
stuff
15:03
we're going to put that down we're not
15:05
going to read it
15:06
it doesn't matter what's my risk anyway
15:10
and so rather than getting advice
15:13
they're just wearing the risk um
15:17
now what's your take on
15:20
businesses like that and and why do you
15:24
think that there is this fraction of
15:27
businesses that decide
15:28
i'm not going to solve the problem and
15:30
how do we help them
15:32
sure um that's actually probably
15:35
the the reason why we started threat law
15:39
i wouldn't say it's a fraction of
15:40
business i reckon it's the majority of
15:42
businesses
15:42
have that behavior where um
15:46
they wing it basically
15:49
i see that as our biggest competitor in
15:51
that it's not it's not some other legal
15:53
provider it's
15:54
the it's the um that instinct
15:57
of just doing what you just mentioned
16:03
and um uh yeah
16:06
that that is sort of
16:09
we saw that as a problem because
16:11
actually when i used to work at a big
16:13
firm
16:15
uh you know you often i wasn't working
16:18
in m a
16:18
and sometimes you see smaller companies
16:21
on the other side
16:22
um or you know being bought out or
16:25
whatever
16:26
and you would see the quality of the
16:29
legal services that they're getting
16:31
through through dd and them some of the
16:34
key contracts that they've signed up to
16:36
can cost millions
16:37
in in an acquisitions no exit scenario
16:41
and that was actually the lightbulb
16:42
moment when we were like well
16:44
why why didn't they spend a few thousand
16:46
dollars up front and they're going to
16:47
spend
16:48
save millions lately it just didn't make
16:50
sense
16:51
that that sort of led us to the the
16:53
problems that we
16:54
mentioned which is that lawyers for that
16:57
market is is
16:58
too much of a headache and yeah up
17:00
winging it basically
17:03
it's almost like an access to justice
17:05
problem
17:06
um and i mean how how do you
17:11
how do you reach out to businesses like
17:13
that and say hey
17:14
guys don't wait a risk let us help you
17:18
um and you know for for just a few
17:21
thousand dollars or a few hundred
17:22
dollars or whatever the right cost is
17:24
let's alleviate that million dollar bill
17:27
down the track
17:28
how do you reach out to these businesses
17:31
and convince them
17:33
sure um so we've got a
17:36
fairly um sophisticated
17:40
marketing operation where
17:43
we've borrowed bits from you know tech
17:45
companies and digital agencies where
17:47
you've got a like a normal funnel
17:50
marketing strategy where
17:52
um yeah at the bottom of the funnel
17:53
you're you're targeting people who are
17:56
on google intentionally searching for
17:58
your problems
17:59
currently have um and that that market i
18:02
think has been the most underserved in
18:03
terms of marketing because
18:05
um there was some stat that said um i
18:08
forget it was probably like 70 or 80
18:10
of those people who who thought about
18:14
seeing a lawyer and went on google and
18:16
did a search
18:17
they ended up going with some
18:19
recommendation from someone they know
18:22
so what showed us was that
18:25
um yeah the website
18:29
user experience online news experience
18:31
for legal services
18:33
is not not not sort of not great like
18:34
people end up on those websites i
18:36
mentioned and it
18:37
just kind of confuses people even more
18:41
so there's that sort of that that bottom
18:43
of the funnel i think there's a lot a
18:44
lot of people you can capture
18:46
by employing fairly standard um
18:50
uh what's you know just sort of digital
18:52
marketing content marketing strategies
18:54
there
18:55
yeah but then there's sort of i think
18:58
that one's quite obvious and and um
19:02
that's sort of a quick win there's then
19:04
a lot more lots more opportunity
19:06
up the funnel where um
19:09
yeah you sort of build a brand around
19:12
who you are what you stand for what your
19:14
pro you know unique proposition is
19:17
and um yeah that's sort of a longer term
19:20
strategy which
19:21
um i suppose we've been working on since
19:23
day one and
19:25
um i've probably recently we're really
19:28
seeing
19:28
the fruits of that um the you know
19:32
the brand and the the kind of message
19:34
that we're trying to get out
19:36
yeah it's it's interesting um
19:40
what what you're describing is
19:41
definitely something that's borrowed
19:43
from
19:44
um digital marketing it's it's something
19:46
that i think other industries do
19:48
a lot better than the legal industry
19:52
and i love that it's brought you so much
19:55
success and
19:56
and and so much reward over time so
19:59
what is in the future for sprint law
20:03
where do you see yourselves going in the
20:05
next couple of years
20:08
our immediate focus is in australia
20:12
where
20:13
we want to be the go-to
20:16
provider for small business legals
20:20
and currently that's a market that's you
20:22
know quite fragmented um
20:23
you've got thousands tens of thousands
20:25
of
20:26
um solicitors across the state and
20:30
the country sort of
20:33
servicing their local geographies um and
20:37
i think that model is not
20:40
not the best for a lot of the business
20:41
legals that we do so
20:43
we want to be in a spot where when
20:45
people think of where small businesses
20:47
are
20:48
they need legals they think of you know
20:51
want a few brands and sprint laws one of
20:53
them you know that that's that's the
20:55
that's that's sort of where we're
20:56
heading to um and i think there's also
20:59
opportunity to
21:01
emulate this um
21:04
uh this model in in other jurisdictions
21:07
overseas as well
21:08
oh wow that's very exciting uh as in you
21:12
are
21:12
planning an overseas expansion yeah yeah
21:15
um
21:16
we've kind of experimented um
21:19
yeah in in the uk we sort of um we've
21:22
been looking into the market
21:23
and things like that but i think um
21:26
there are regulatory hurdles in
21:29
different jurisdictions
21:30
but i think from
21:33
from our research from all the
21:35
conversations we've had
21:36
everywhere in the world there's the same
21:38
problem that
21:40
legal services are a headache for small
21:43
businesses and
21:44
i think there's a huge opportunity
21:46
wherever i think just sort of the
21:48
conversion and the regulatory hurdles
21:50
that they're sort of specific to each
21:52
place but um
21:54
other than that i think the the
21:57
proposition is quite powerful
21:59
yeah tommo
22:02
your words today have just been
22:04
incredible
22:05
and i think you've revealed so many of
22:08
your secrets which we're now going to
22:09
spread to
22:10
everybody so i hope you're okay with
22:12
that
22:13
and thank you so much for your time
22:16
thank you thanks for having me
