CANLIF Legal Innovators Series: Why I quit my job as a corporate lawyer to found a legal tech startup
By Amir Reshef, Co-Founder + CEO, dealcloser
Whether you’re a lawyer, a paralegal or a legal assistant, your career working at a law firm is destined to be long and rewarding. Don’t get me wrong, my time as a corporate lawyer was great—and like most lawyers, the most fulfilling part of my job was finding solutions to my clients issues and challenges. However, I’d be lying if I said that the transaction process didn’t irritate me (I may have used the words soul-crushing a few times to describe all the logistical work)—which is why I quit my job to start my own legal tech startup, dealcloser, which is now serving law firms of all sizes across North America.
I started as an articling student in 2014 at a large law firm in Edmonton, AB. On my first few M&A deals, I remember considering how much of what I was doing could be done by anyone, regardless of having a legal education. Tasks such as preparing signature pages, ensuring the right version of a document was in the correct folder, preparing a closing book, sticking markers on lines… you name it, we did it. These tasks all had to get done but they were redundant, tedious and didn’t require a law degree to complete. It felt a little dejecting to spend so much of my time moving paper around until the early hours of the next day, and I also knew that clients found it a pain to have to deal with signing all their documents. On a particularly complex deal, we had a client spend six days during their week-long vacation stuck in the business centre of the resort, printing, signing and scanning documents. And of course, clients were always pushing for lower fees, better value and timely delivery.
As time went on, I thankfully did less logistical administrative work and much more substantive legal work. But the same question remained—is this really the best way to manage and complete deals? Do we really have to push all this paper around and be at the office till 5 AM night after night to deal with the mountain of non-value-add administrative work required to keep a deal moving forward? That’s when the idea hit me: to build a transaction management solution that eliminates most of the redundant, administrative tasks that those working at a law firm face daily. After shelving the dealcloser project for a few years, I was ready to pursue it full-time in 2017. At which point, I quit my job at a prestigious law firm and dove head first into dealcloser.
Though I was intimately familiar with the problem I wanted to solve, I didn’t know the first thing about software development. Luckily, the stars aligned and I met my co-founder, Mike O’Connor, during this time. As a software developer, he had the technical expertise that I was missing. Although we brought complementary skills to the company, our experience in building dealcloser wasn’t easy.
Everything took longer than we hoped it would, and we heard ‘no’ a lot more than we expected. But as time went on, things started to take off.
Flash forward four years, those noes turned to yeses and Mike and I now run one of the fastest growing legal transaction management companies in North America. Our cloud-based solution is delivering market-leading functionality and our team has grown significantly. We also recently received a seed investment of $1.75M. dealcloser now addresses all of the pain points I experienced myself and provides various solutions to well-known inefficiencies.
Some of the platforms features include:
eSigning
One-click closing books
Version management and control
Document management and in-app document editing
Seamless real-time collaboration with colleague, clients and contributors
Full usage audit trails
And dealcloser works—we’ve proven that. We have thousands of active deals on the platform and it’s estimated that law firms using dealcloser close around 40% more deals per year!
I often look back at the days when I was working as a corporate lawyer and think of how much easier my life would have been in many ways had I just continued with it. But then I take a look at all of dealcloser’s clients—the ones who rely on our software and use it every day—and I recognize that it was all worth it. And best of all, I still continue doing what I enjoy most: providing solutions to clients.
Innovation is often born out of the most simple tasks and inefficient processes—and the legal technology landscape is reflecting that. There are many existing and emerging legal technology companies that are all providing solutions to the many kinds of repetitive, non-value-added tasks that lawyers face daily, across many practice areas. I’m proud that dealcloser is among those companies that are all acting as catalysts in transforming how work gets done in the legal profession, making life better for lawyers, staff and clients.