See how video and animation make practicing law more efficient, productive, and fun with Helm360
Welcome to the latest episode of The Legal Helm. Today Bim is talking with Adam Stofsky, an accomplished lawyer and CEO of Briefly, an innovative legal information startup that uses video and animation to make complex legal concepts accessible to all. It’s easy to overlook the power video brings to the legal landscape. This conversation explores how video can not only impact cases, but also make client interactions more efficient and productive. Tune in to learn how cartoons, gaming, and video contribute to a new legal tech application that makes practicing law more engaging, interesting, and fun.
Your host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 15+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.
Today’s guest
Adam Stofsky is an accomplished legal professional and entrepreneur currently serving as the CEO of Briefly, an innovative legal information startup. Adam has held numerous legal roles before founding his first organization, New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map), an organization that uses the power of video and other media to help human rights lawyers win their cases. He then launched Briefly, a startup designed to revolutionize the way legal information is disseminated and understood.
Transcript
Bim: Hello, Legal Helm listeners! Today on our show I’m excited to be talking with Adam Stofsky, founder and CEO at Briefly, a company that creates highly engaging animated legal videos and other content for non-lawyers to simplify what can often be complex legal topics in an innovative and appealing way.
Adam is a lawyer and a serial entrepreneur after many years producing high quality content and playing various roles around content creation. Adam and his team have developed the superpower of being able to explain and simplify complex legal issues. It is this superpower that led Adam to starting Briefly, allowing him to take that superpower to scale.
Today we’re going to be talking about the use of animated videos to explain complex legal topics and how that can be a game-changer. Adam, welcome to the show and thank you for taking time out to talk to me today.
Adam: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Bim: So, Adam, before we dig into the solution, share a little insight in terms of your journey from being a lawyer and then eventually starting Briefly. Walk our audience through that journey.
Adam: It has been a very interesting one, I have to say. I started experimenting with using video in when I was at Harvard Law School in 2002. When I started, I, I loved law school, but I needed a creative outlet. I experimented with a video camera and back then (this is how old I am) Final Cut Pro had just come out so you could edit video on your laptop for the first time. It was very exciting.
I went to Nigeria my first-year summer to do a human rights fellowship with a really interesting organization where I worked on housing rights. My job at that organization was to prepare a human rights report on these massive forced eviction cases. There have been a lot of human rights reports written about these cases without a huge amount of impact. So I decided to pull out that camera. I brought it with me to document my own experience in Legos, which seems pretty narcissistic in retrospect, and it was not very interesting, but I turned the camera around to my amazing clients.
These survivors of these forced evictions were incredible. They were very charismatic. Long story short, we ended up making a bunch of videos to pressure the Legos government. It set all these cases apart instead of becoming another human rights report that no one was going to read. It worked really well.
It took me a year, my entire second year, to edit the video as I taught myself how to do it on Final Cut. We scared the pants off the government of Legos and we essentially won. I took that victory with me into my legal practice for the next five years. I clerked, I did a fellowship at the Lawyers Community for Civil Rights where we experimented using video in cases to pressure opponents to settle. We did a lot of public education, particularly around Katrina, hurricane Katrina, which happened while I was there. The need to provide legal information to tens of thousands of people, was really present. Using really simple videos, that was in many ways the DNA of the work I’m doing now because instead of having 10,000 conversations, make some videos and f get the conversation started with all those potential clients.
Then I went to a big law firm for a couple years. Realized I was never going to be a great litigator but having all these really cool ideas about video. I left during the financial crisis to found my first enterprise, which is a nonprofit called The New Media Advocacy Project, or NMAP. That’s been a dream of mine for a long time. To do human rights and public interest law work and NMAP helps human rights and public interest lawyers integrated video and multimedia storytelling into their actual advocacy.
So we’re making videos for litigation, for evidence presentations, for public advocacy, policy advocacy, for public education, but really to win cases. I did that for eight years. It was a really a dream. I got to work in something like 40 countries: Haiti, South Africa, Nigeria, DRC, all over Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. Working with really amazing human rights defenders, highlighting their stories.
And you know, we just got really good at making these very short videos that highlight legal issues. We had to learn how to shorten things because I often had to get in front of some senior government official or a judge, and I had maybe 90 seconds with them. I had to be short. We also worked with a lot of folks who just didn’t know much about law, so we had to simplify things. Not dumb down, because these people were intelligent. They just didn’t have a legal education. So, we had to simplify. Shortening and simplifying and hiring people who could do that. So my superpowers became shortening and simplifying legal issues and hiring amazing creative teams and learning how to manage them. And then I took that skillset and map to found Briefly. To really take that superpower as you said, to scale. It’s worth noting moving from a non-profit to a for-profit. It’s been a pretty interesting move. It’s much easier to run a for-profit I think, but that might be worth talking about as well.
Bim: I would love to dig into that a little bit more. That journey so far has been amazing by the way. So, thank you for sharing that and really, interesting in terms of all of the different countries you visited and how you are solving that problem through some form of media.
I’m very interested to dig a little bit more into that in terms of the process that you go through. I think you touched a little bit on that in terms of you’ve got a lot of content and information that needs to be shortened, I think as you described it, and turn that into something that’s meaningful to the other side. How do you break that down? How do you get to a point where you can actually shorten that content to a point where you don’t lose the focus and the key points that you want to get across? That you’re not sending a message that’s so oversimplified that you’re missing the point of it? Very intrigued to learn a little bit more about the the artistic process, but also the content process that you typically go through to get to that destination. If you’re able to share a little more on that.
Adam: Oh, definitely. Let me tell you a bit about what Briefly actually does first to help contextualize that conversation.
We make really great legal content that explains law, particularly to non-lawyers. I think in many ways the problem we’re trying to solve is the fact that lawyers were not trained in communications at all. I mean we’re trained to communicate in these very narrow, legalistic ways, but we’re not trained in how to present things in a nice, engaging way. At business school, they’re making PowerPoints in every one of their classes and learning the skillset. We don’t. We’re starting at a bit of a communications deficit with lawyers. And often, we have this jargon that we use for good reason, right? We have to be precise with each other and how we communicate.
What Briefly does is we work with legal teams to do three different things. We produce custom legal videos and other content for legal teams and organizations. We work with a lot of legal aid organizations in courts that do public education. A lot of companies to do a mix of compliance training, better compliance training, compliance education, contract education IP, et cetera. In many ways what we’re trying to do is take all of this important information that lawyers have and focus on our audience and understand what they actually need to know.
We do a lot of training for lawyers as well. This is our, second service. We train lawyers on content creation, trying to overcome that communications deficit. And there’s just one slide I use, it’s just an image of pi the number. What I love about this is trying to distinguish between accuracy and precision and how we present legal information. Lawyers, maybe because of our ethical obligations or just the way we to represent our clients, we feel the need to say everything. But you don’t need to say everything, right? You only need to say the things that your audience needs to know. So lawyers, I don’t know if it’s because we’re afraid of not giving our clients all the information or we’re worried about missing some detail, but lawyers tend to focus on precision when they should be focusing on accuracy.
We try to help lawyers understand who their audience is. Is this a low-income legal aid client who is just getting started preparing for their divorce and needs to understand what documents they need to find or, are they talking to a new junior salesperson who needs to know about basic legal terms in their contract? We try to get folks to first think about accuracy versus precision. If you’re explaining, what pi is, if I’m explaining it to my eight-year-old son, it’s probably enough to say like, “Hey, the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, it’s about three.” (Isn’t that crazy? Every circle in the universe, it’s like three to one.) He doesn’t need to know like the 30,000 digits of pi, but if you’re building some incredible piece of technology that requires amazing precision, you need all that detail. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
We try to encourage our lawyer clients to engage in a bit of strategic negligence. Just say what’s important and then find ways to make it relevant. In many ways, when we write scripts or we develop PowerPoints or whatever we’re doing for our clients, it’s a process of subtraction. We start with a huge amount of writing, like a client update or like a massive, you’ve all seen those slide decks at conferences that are just like tons of bullet points with text. We start there and we subtract and we focus on what’s relevant and what that audience needs to know.
Bim: I love that. Thank you. That’s, really good to understand the process. Tell us a little bit more about, Briefly. So, Briefly is a platform and you mentioned that you are also doing some custom delivery in terms of the content side of things. Can you explain a bit more about the platform itself and talk us through some of the use cases that you are seeing for the product, as to what you’re seeing both for the law firm use case and maybe some of the other ones that you’ve seen in your travels.
Adam: Most of our work still is custom. We’re a bootstrapping startup, so we’re funding our entire business on revenues from our custom work, and the platform is relatively new. I can talk to you about the use cases we’re seeing in our custom works. We then kind of translate over to what we are hoping will happen with our platform.
In terms of use cases, the market we started working was with was public education access to justice market. This is your courts and your legal aid organizations. For them, the first use case was a natural, “Hey, we need to educate the public.” That’s what we did at first, like just public education, making this information clear and engaging for people who don’t know anything about law. This quickly evolved into realizing you’re creating short, engaging legal content, you can replicate. We’re having the same conversation over and over and over again.
That was a huge insight. This started in this legal aid market where you have particularly like housing lawyers. They’re doing thousands of eviction cases a year sometimes, and they spend, you know, five, six, seven, 20 minutes explaining the basic eviction process one-on-one to their clients. We could offload that into content and give the client information they can watch as many times as they want. If they have more questions, they can come to that meeting and start speaking right away about the particular situation vastly improving the quality of that meeting with a lawyer and save the lawyer’s time.
Then it evolved from there. We realized that content can really hold its own in a legal practice and make everything more efficient and more effective, and frankly more pleasant for the clients. So that evolved even further into creating very small bits of content that are very focused on where a client is in their case or what they’re going through or what language they speak, even their level of sophistication about law. We started building little online surveys or triage systems that would deliver content in little bits and pieces, which are themselves a form of content, right? So that every, every sentence you write in that survey is a piece of communication you have to think of as content. You know, use cases around basic education, scaling and replicating, conversations, repeat conversations, and in particularly around triaging and getting people information that they need.
Then moving into the for-profit world, we’re seeing a similar set of techniques around a variety of use cases, some of which are really, really interesting, particularly the use cases on contracts, actually. The first is compliance. We’re focused on making compliance videos that are, I’m going to say shorter, more engaging, more relevant, and particularly available when they’re needed. Traditional compliance education tends to be hour-long training or 40-minute training once a year. We’re breaking that up into a little, little two, three, four, or maybe five-minute chunks that answer a specific question and are relevant. This can be delivered in one long training or just sent to people in emails or delivered when it’s needed.
A simple example could be giving a junior manager, who’s learning to do interviews in a retail store, a little video on like five silly questions not to ask in your interview, ways not to screw up your early job interviews. Or maybe an executive is going on a trip. You can send a cyber awareness video before they go on their trip.
The compliance stuff is interesting, but I think what we’re seeing on the contract education side of things is even more interesting. We’re working with a few companies on general trying to speed along the B2B sales process. This is for in-house lawyers. Primarily speeding along the B2B sales process and avoid things that create friction in sales and contracting by providing sales teams and other non-legal audiences with better education on contract.
I’ll go through these quickly. You have your first educating customers or counterparties on why a contract says what it says and why we’re starting at a certain point to avoid a battle of the forms. Unnecessary negotiation around contract terms. I love this use. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to say it. Our clients that we’re working on this with are more optimistic than I am about this. I have some skepticism. We’re just learning. We have these videos out there now, but people are really excited about setting a tone of negotiation and starting on a foot that has a bit of humor and a bit of fun.
Counterparties. Probably more business folks within their customers companies. Give them some talking points to negotiate with their own legal teams around certain legal terms. Then you educate the sales teams to avoid various pitfalls. I’m working with a client now on some videos to try to get their sales teams to answer questions that they’re otherwise sending to lawyers. So, save time. Lawyers are getting, especially on data privacy, they’re getting tons of referrals to customers, “Hey, this customer has some questions about our privacy policies. Can you answer them?” And the privacy lawyers are really bogged down. We can get sales teams to be the first line of defense.
The other use case is getting sales folks to be more upfront about what’s negotiable and what’s not. Kind of a contract red list education so you don’t have sales folks promising or saying, “Hey, yeah, you know that liability cap, maybe we can talk to the lawyers. Let’s see if we can negotiate that later.” That just slows the process down. If we can stop that stuff from happening through simple education, these are one minute, 90-second videos, often really funny, even just fact sheets that Salesforce can read, we can speed along the B2B sales process just through some basic contract education. So that’s a nice range of use cases that we’re working on mostly through our custom content.
Bim: When you were talking about the B2B scenario in particular, I was smiling. Because as a vendor that sells to law firms, we’re in the space of dealing with that particular challenge. Because a lot of the time, the things that we think are the, typical pain points that start the negotiation process on a little bit of a bad footing, right? Because there’s that back and forth that needs to happen.
If we could kind of eliminate that or at least eliminate 50% of it at the beginning and just set the tone of what that discussion needs to be, would probably make the whole sales service lifecycle a lot easier for us and for our customers at the end of the day. So, I do love and can definitely relate to the problem that you’re trying to solve.
You mentioned an example. It would be great if you were able to share one of those examples on the podcast so that we can see what that translates to in the real world.
Adam: Yeah let me just quickly show you what a bit of this Sprinklr video looks like. This one is already on their legal site, so it’s available to the public. All right. Let’s see if you can hear this:
We’re Sprinklr. We’ve developed a simple contract that captures our many services in a short set of straightforward contract terms designed to protect us and our customers. Our sprinkler template is for our platform and the unique value that we bring to our customers. Sometimes our potential customers will ask to use their standard vendor agreements. of these don’t capture the terms applicable to sprinkler’s platform. Most general-purpose vendor contracts, disclaim all liability on one side while asking customers to take on full liability. We don’t. We keep it fair and balanced. We promise that the platform works and complies with applicable law, and we represent that the platform is built with our own IP and that we appropriately protect your data.
All right, you get the flavor of it, right?
Bim: Yeah, absolutely.
Adam: These videos that we created with Sprinklr are cartoons, right? They’re full of humor, they’re very much on brand. We develop these characters, their hair that’s animated, it’s all their brand colors, it’s their logo. We’re creating a bit of a fun brand for the legal department as well. It’s not a use case, but it’s another interesting value that our work brings. What that example demonstrates is an innovative use case and also the way we use humor in the context of contract negotiation. It’s pretty out there.
And I think it’s surprising and fun to see a cartoon. I don’t think this is right for every company culture. Obviously, we can do far more sober or serious, but often still beautiful and well- designed content, but I’ve been surprised at how many companies and how many organizations are interested in this cartoony and humorous content. It’s caught me by surprise, which has been exciting.
We can also bring to the table beauty to a universe that’s really focused on text, right? So, like bringing some really nice design into law is interesting.
I want to show you this example of how our process works for a custom project. Like any kind of branding company, we do a style exploration and present style boards to our clients, usually based on their existing brand guidelines. But we’ll develop a new style, kind of evolving it. Developing characters or new infographic elements or icons or text elements. And our team, just now we’re doing this really neat project with Legal Aid Micronesia. Micronesia has a legal aid organization. I didn’t know this until recently. It’s pretty fascinating. And they have a lot of challenges educating their base on like hundreds of islands with different languages.
So, they have a lot of needs around disaster law. We do a lot of work on disaster law in our non-profit work because obviously people need information quickly. Make a long story short, our team developed these three design styles after researching Micronesian culture or cultures, and I just think they’re beautiful. So I want to share them, to give you an example of how we can bring something that’s visually pleasant and make a huge difference. Make the practice of law and engaging with law a little nicer, which I think has a lot of value.
So, these are just the three style boards that we presented, and this is done by two of our artists. I’ll go through these. They’re completely, brand new styles based on our research and what our clients said they wanted. These will then evolve into the different kinds of video we’re making for them, which are a mix of animations and screencasts, which are just presentations.
And you know, this really blew our client away. The way they were so well researched and presented so beautifully. It’s just so far beyond what people are doing in the legal world, but for us, it’s a matter of bringing great designers to the challenge of explaining information that’s complicated and arcane and scary. And that’s something that designers love. It’s really a natural fit on our team.
Bim: They are beautiful designs. And you’re right. I have to say like I’ve never seen anything like that in the 20 plus years that I’ve been in the legal industry. That does bring a bit of color and personality to a brand in this space. So excited to see, see where this goes. That’s really good.
Adam: Thank you.
Bim: It leads us on nicely a question I have, which is, you mentioned the artists. It sounds like you’ve got quite a diverse team of talent that contributes to the outcome of creating this beautiful content knowing the mindset of a lawyer and the way that they operate. I’m guessing there’re animators, artists. I think there was a mention of game developers to create this innovative way of presenting this complex information. How do you handle the collaboration aspect of working with such a multidisciplinary team to really get to great solutions? You’ve given us some good examples.
Adam: That’s a really good question. My co-founder, Scott Moore, is a former animator game developer, UI X UI UX designer and I’m a lawyer. We each have some knowledge of the other side of the work, but I think what makes it work is having a very deep collaboration.
I talk to these designers every day, multiple times. We’re fully remote and distributed, but we talk constantly. There’s a tremendous amount of for each other’s professions on either kind of side of the organization. I, get probably a little too involved with the design side of things, but I really respect their decisions and they really respect mine. I think that mix of deep collaboration with huge amount of respect just makes it work. I love the work that the designers do and they really admire the work that me and my team do on the writing and scripting side of things. And not to get too in the weeds of our business, but one of our challenges is how do we scale.
This is why we’re trying to scale through a platform instead of trying to grow our agency like a business because it’s not easy to find lawyers who can write this way and it takes a lot of work to get these two radically different disciplines, writing and design, to work together. It’s a lot of trust and a lot of respect that makes it work really well. We view ourselves as co-equal, which is a bit of a problem. I think you often have professionals who hire designers and don’t really don’t really see it as a co-equal profession. But it really is.
Bim: You actually the words right out of my mouth because the next question I was going to ask was around scaling Briefly. To me, that’s one of the biggest challenges because you are creating. I have a little experience with this working with our marketing team. To create good content takes time. It takes thought. You have to go through a process. It’s not something that can be structured in the way that that a computer program can be or a contract can be written. It’s very different. It’s a different mindset. With that transition from being in start-up mode and that entrepreneurial instinct that you’re bringing to the table, bring some of the elements together to produce a platform. I’m interested hear more about those challenges and what your approach is. What your thoughts are in terms of how you’re going to approach them and what do you see as the impact that you can make on the legal industry with your solution? What’s the future vision for this? Where do you see it going?
Adam: Let me start with the basic question of scale. The way we are endeavoring to scale is by building a platform. That’s what people do these days, right? They build a platform. But it’s certainly not, it’s, I don’t know, is it a platform? It’s a library of really good videos essentially.
We had the insight a couple of years ago—and we were still very focused on our legal aid work—is that of everyone had the same questions needing answers with minor differences. In the legal aid world, it was habitability and housing, right? You know, basic questions. I realized we don’t need to make a very expensive custom video from scratch every time. 80% of this content’s the same or even 90%.
So we started building skeletons of videos that we could start from, and then we began to work with more companies and realized even in the corporate world, maybe especially in the corporate world, people have the same questions. What is the GDPR? What is data minimization? What’s a liability cap? How does that work? Or l hear all the time is about people wanting to like trademark large, sections of text or copyright their logo. What is copyright versus trademark? We realized we can provide a ton of value by making a library of videos that can be white labeled. Hundreds and thousands of legal questions are answered by lawyers all the time. Can we do what we did with all those legal aid organizations and give lawyers a tool to communicate all the basics in a very engaging, relevant way at scale in their companies? That’s what our platform, Briefly On Demand, is about. It’s essentially a streaming library of very short, highly engaging videos that we make with some top legal talent.
We partner with some of the world’s best experts in these legal issues. We’re partnering with Orrick, the big law firm, on our privacy library, which we’re calling season one. We’re doing this in season, so season one is privacy data protection. They’re working with us to make really great content on both the basics, like what is data privacy law, and some really cutting-edge stuff.
We’re doing some videos on AI or expected AI regulation right now which is pretty slick. It’s more IP related, but we’re sticking it in the privacy library for now. Season two is going to be on contract law. We’re working on that now with an organization called The Tech Contracts Academy, which is a cutting-edge and leading contract education platform. Then we’re going to work with other big law firms and other organizations.
So, Briefly On demand is also designed to have a low entry point in terms of cost or customer work. It’s expensive making good design and custom videos so this is a nice alternative to that. We’re scaling through this library concept and I should note we’re getting it out there to customers now and we’re seeing a lot of exciting use cases pop up. I’m hoping we see more. The platform is designed to be relatively inexpensive at the sort of basic entry level and extremely easy to use. We’re giving logins so that anyone in the company can log in and access all the videos as an on-demand resource. We also provide the embed code so you can embed it anywhere. It can be put in your LMS and your contract lifecycle management software and you can send emails. The idea is I want these used all the time. The videos are like 90 seconds to two minutes long. We also have a PDF with each one. They’re voiced but they also have music. We’re trying to make everything as accessible, easy and flexible and fun as possible. So that’s how we’re scaling.
I think the custom side of the work… I’m not going to say we’ve given up on making it scalable, but I think with a custom work we’re focusing on companies that treat it like an agency. Companies that see a real opportunity to create value through our content or just have a need to refresh their legal education or legal front door, a term I hear a lot that I really like, and focus on truly custom work with our custom content. We’re going to grow through our custom work and scale through our platform. I think that answered the first of your questions. What was your next question?
Bim: It was really about the future. What is the impact that you see Briefly having on the legal industry and the broader community and future?
Adam: It’s a really good question. I can answer this in several different ways. I want to see law become more popular. I want to see law become more interesting. I want to see law, maybe I shouldn’t say this, given that our customers are mostly lawyers, but I want to see law democratized a bit. I want to see more people in power to engage with law. It shouldn’t just be all lawyers, right? I mean It’s absurd how much law there is around us, especially in a regulated company. It’s everywhere. And now with all the rise of between privacy law and ESG and other financial regulation… It’s really everywhere. People should know it. Lawyers don’t get communications education, but also no one else gets legal education. We don’t get it in In middle school or high school or university or, I hate to say it, even in law school. We all learn to be great federal litigators in law school, but, you don’t get a lot of the nuts and bolts. I want to see law democratize and I want to see people less scared of lawyers and work with them more and be more excited to work with good lawyers.
That’s my big picture vision. To make a law more pleasant, less scary, and to have non-lawyers both in the public and in companies feel more aligned. That’s my big picture, wishy-washy answer nuts and bolts. I’d like to see legal teams become more efficient, focus less basics and more on doing the work that they want to do. I know you hear this with AI. AI is replacing all these basic legal functions. But we can do a lot of that through content.
We haven’t even talked about AI yet. That’s a whole different conversation about how it can help or get in the way but I think I’d like to see us do a lot of that as well. Replace some of the basics. Make them more available to people when needed. We’re talking a lot because our videos are very short. They tend to be very simple. We are talking to some potential customers about creating automations around these so that they show up when needed. This is a little bit scary because it gets into corporate monitoring. So is a balance there, but I do think it’s interesting. Can we deliver content to people in an automated way when they need it?
I gave the examples of the executive going on a work trip and needing some cyber security information or the junior manager who doesn’t know anything about interviewing, but there’s others too. There’s a lot of privacy by design. I’m not an engineer, so I don’t really know much about the day-to-day work of how software engineers work, but you can imagine getting them content around data privacy or security when they need it, as they code or as new features are added. All kinds of interesting automation. We’re not a technology company exactly. We’re a content company, but I think working with existing technologies to deliver things in a more automated way is really interesting. It’s a way, that I see us going.
Bim: That’s good to hear. And, honestly, I’m, excited about this because if I go back to one of the examples that we’ve just lived through, which is our annual SOX compliance. Getting the education of what people need to understand is currently done through something like a PowerPoint deck and a presentation is the most depressing thing to sit through. There’s nothing exciting about it, but I can see exactly how this could transform that experience and make it much more engaging. And people wanting to sit down and listen. And being able to track and monitor as well to make sure that it’s been done from a compliance perspective would be a huge impact.
I’m very excited about where this goes in future. You did mention the magic of AL. We should touch on that as no conversation is complete these days without talking about it.
Adam: Actually Bim, before we get into that, can we go back to the idea of the SOX training. There is some really good training out there, but the trend is that it’s kind of grim and it really doesn’t need to be that way. I’m not going to say that SOX training is the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s not it’s not boring. It’s interesting. And it should be interesting to folks who need it. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.
This is why I love working with game developers. It’s a game developer’s job to keep the player engaged on a minute-to-minute basis. There are concepts from gaming that we use in our work. I think even something as dry as SOX training, we can keep things interesting. Then I think we can look to other fields of entertainment and interactive content and even other SaaS platforms that are so fun to use and bring that into this otherwise very boring and dry training.
Bim: Yeah, to Totally get that.
Adam: Now we can talk about AI.
Bim: Yes, let’s move on to AI. You briefly touched on this and I’m interested to know firstly in the creation process, when we’re talking about scaling up your business model, a lot of content creation, getting it right and all of that kind of stuff is probably where the time goes as well as the other pieces of the puzzle. Are you seeing any application of AI in that area or in any of content creation space you are excited about and looking forward to introducing to the platform or have in the platform?
Adam: I should say at the outset I know very little about AI. I probably know as much as your average consumer at this point. So, if what I say sounds ignorant, then my apologies. But having played around with some of these early tools, I think that the potential is massive for making our work easier. It’s really tremendous when you look at it and this cuts across writing and research, then visuals and audio. We’re looking at it from all those directions. Can GPT four, or some of its competitors give us good first drafts of our short videos? We’re writing dozens and dozens of these videos for our platform. We’re trying to write these super tight two minute scripts. Very hard to do. We’re taking these huge documents or PowerPoints and distilling them down. We tried and the AI’s not even close yet.
I should say it’s GPT 3.5, I think is what I use. We haven’t gotten to use, ChatGPT 4 yet. I don’t even know if it’s available to the public. But anyway, the AI is not even close. In fact, we did a little experiment. The editing process for those drafts takes us longer than researching and writing from scratch.
I think it won’t be too long before we’re using that to get good first drafts of really basic legal issues at scale. We’re trying to do different videos for different audiences. We have this really cool set of rule-based privacy videos. It’s simple things, like top five things marketing professionals need to know about privacy law, top five things sales folks need to know, et cetera. I really love that and I’m excited about that too. Like drawing those lines because that’s something ChatGPT seems really good at. It’s writing in different voices or for different audiences. I think it’s a year or two years off, but I think it’s going to be huge on the visual side of things. We’ve played around with few of them and they’re also not there yet. They’re really great for creating cool stuff, but they’re not good for creating something very specific. They’re not good at taking abstractions and making them into something concrete. A lot of our visual work is using storytelling to explain a complex concept. I think it’s a long way off before we can actually use AI to do that. So I think our jobs are safe in that regard, I think.
Where AI can help is generating a ton of icons. We do tons of icon sets, small illustrations, little infographics. and it’s time consuming. We’ve had tools that generate icons for years, but it’s only going to get better and we can make them more stylized.
Where I have the most skepticism is on the audio front. We license a lot of music, we use music, we, we commission original music. Music tools seem to be pretty far behind. Same with sound effects. It’s not quite there. Music is very subjective. It’s very hard to get right. I think it’s farther off. With another five, 10 years, we can focus on strategy and a lot of the production will be taken care of by these tools.
Bim: I think future will definitely be interesting in terms of how these evolve. It’ll be exciting to see how that, especially with GPT 4, which I think is limited availability at the moment. if that makes a material impact. But I think you’re right, it needs more time to evolve for these kind of use cases.
Adam: I mean, will there be a ceiling? This is what I keep reading about. We’ve seen this exponential growth because all these tools are being revealed. We’re going from zero to 60. I think people are assuming that everything will be there in five years. I have no idea when they’re going to be there, but if the improvement continues at this blistering pace, it’ll have a huge impact in our work for the good.
Bim: Indeed. Time will tell. We’ll have to revisit this in a future episode and see where we ended up.
Adam: Exactly
Bim: Let’s switch gears for a moment. I hear you live in upstate New York on a livestock farm. tell me a little bit more about that, please.
Adam: We’ve been here like 11 years now. My wife basically kidnapped me and moved me up here. We lived in New York in this cool loft by the Flatiron. I wrote to the big law firm and then I left to start my last enterprise, End Map, the nonprofit. I thought, “hey, we should live rent-free for a little while.” My mom has a little house up in the Berkshires, a really beautiful region in western Massachusetts. The Berkshires, my wife is English, so she can’t say Berkshires without laughing. It was a crazy time. I left my job, we got married, and moved in the same week. We moved up here and I was literally working out of my mom’s basement doing, doing my first startup. I had no idea what I was doing. My wife was waiting for her green car to clear, so she started farming. Then she said, “hey, I think we should stay up here.” I said, “are you crazy? Stay up in the middle of nowhere? I can’t not live in New York or DC or Boston or San Francisco or London.” But she talked me in into it. we moved closer to the Amtrak and ended up renting a place on this farm that looked beautiful. I thought, “wow, this is pretty cool.” The owner of the farm was a private equity lawyer in Detroit in the eighties. I felt safe around him because I had a lawyer to be with.
We moved here and I ended up just taking the train into New York City three days a week and we became a vanguard of entrepreneurs/ We’ve been here for 12 years. I ran my first organization from here, hired a bunch of people in New York City. We started just before the pandemic and we’ve been able to grow this company fully remote. I work in my home office here on the farm. There’re chickens right outside my door. It’s pretty exciting. My co-founder Scott, lives way up on the Adirondacks now. He moved way up there during the pandemic, and now they want to move to rural Maine.
And as long as there’s broadband, we can do this anywhere. For folks who are who are thinking about starting companies or even folks who work at companies, you don’t need to live those obvious places these days. We can live anywhere. I find that really exciting.
Bim: I love the idea of it. I’m not sure I would survive on a livestock farm, but I’m sure your wife is doing a fantastic job. She’s clearly done a good job of kidnapping you and keeping you there
Adam: It’s a good talking point when you’re doing a sales call. Either you have to go help your wife work sheep or move some cattle.
Bim: Adam, it has been fantastic talking to you today. I have, a few wrap up questions, if you don’t mind to finish off the discussion. The first, which I ask all my guests, is if you could borrow Dr. Who’s time machine and could go back to Adam at 18 years old, what advice would you give him?
Adam: Don’t worry, prestige doesn’t matter. That’s what I would say. I got so sucked into chasing prestige. Doing jobs that I really didn’t like because they had prestige. Maybe it was the pressure of the culture at a place like Harvard Law School, but if I ignored that stuff and did what I was good at and what I wanted to do, I would’ve avoided a lot of frustration and pain over the years.
So, ignore prestige. No one cares. Do what you’re good at and how you can best serve your community and the world.
Bim: Fantastic advice. You’ve obviously transitioned to entrepreneur mode. As you discussed, you’re starting to scale this business. With that, there’s lots of juggling. What’s your best productivity hack or tip that you can share with the audience today?
Adam Stofsky: Hire great people. Hire people you don’t need to, to manage very much. That you can mind meld with. I’m speaking about this from the standpoint of an entrepreneur who’s doing the hiring. Also hire a smaller number of people that you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing. Learn to work really, really well with those people and become a well-oiled machine. Don’t do things that you don’t have to do. Let your colleagues do those things. My God, did I just say get other people to do the work? Is that the best productivity?
Bim: You it is. The art of delegation.
Adam: I have a lot of thoughts about the way, about the way companies grow, but I do think people tend to over hire. Getting a small team that can work incredibly well together is the best productivity hack there is
Bim: I like that. Select a good team. Excellent advice. And finally in the spirit of animation, what is your best animation movie of all time?
Adam: Best animation movie of all time? I am going to give you a game. Can I do that?
Bim: Yeah. Yeah, you could do that.
Adam: I don’t know how many gamers are in your audience, but I love the art in video games. There’s so much amazing, creative stuff going on. I would encourage everyone to Google or just go play a game called Hollow Night. Has that ever crossed your cultural radar screen
Bim: I have not played that, but I’m going to make a note of it and check it out.
Adam: Also listen to the music. It’s got the most beautiful look and feel. They’ve created this world that’s an ancient underground kingdom of almost like insects that’s decaying. It’s the most beautiful animation that I’ve seen. So that’s one.
Another one you have to see in motion is a side scrolling game called Inside. It’s much darker. but Google those and look at the art and animation. Listen to the music because it’s quite spectacular.
Bim: Fantastic. I’ll definitely check it out. Finally, what, what’s the best way for my listeners to contact you?
Adam: Go to our website and sign up for a session on Calendly. You can email me directly adam@brieflynow.com. It’s brieflynow.com. We’re also really active on LinkedIn. We post a lot of these law and a minute videos and other cool content on LinkedIn. Please engage with us.
But yeah, just reach out. Send me an email if you want to talk about a project or inquire about our platform or just want to talk about this stuff. I would love to hear from you.
Bim: Adam, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you again for coming on. I’m really excited to see where Briefly goes in the future and wish you well.
Adam: Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. I really enjoyed this also.
Bim: Thank you.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tlh-ep-22-a-conversation-with-adam-stofsky-how/id1576887875?i=1000618202782
Listen on Spotify: TLH Ep. 22 A conversation with Adam Stofsky: How video and animation make practicing law more efficient, productive, and fun. – The Legal Helm | Podcast on Spotify
