Welcome to this episode of The Legal Helm! This month, Bim talks with Andy Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, an innovative eDiscovery platform that is revolutionizing discovery. Bim and Andy discuss why democratizing discovery is a must-do in today’s legal environment, why team building is critical to business success, and why Logikcull includes disruption in its company mission. It’s an engaging conversation chockful of useful business-building insights. Enjoy!
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
Andy Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Logikcull, the leading eDiscovery cloud service used by over 1,500 organizations around the world. Andy, along with his co-founder Sheng Yang, founded Logikcull 20 years ago in Andy’s Washington, DC dining room. They’ve since grown exponentially and are headquartered in San Francisco. Committed to democratizing discovery and disrupting the legal status quo, Andy and the Logikcull team continue using innovative technical solutions and an indefatigable wellspring of puns to revolutionize the discovery process.
Transcript
Bim: Hello Legal Helm listeners. Today on our show I’m talking to Andy Wilson. Andy is the CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, the leading e-Discovery cloud service used by over 1500 organizations around the world. Andy, along with his co-founder, Sheng Yang, founded Logikcull around 10 years ago in Andy’s Washington DC dining room.
Today I’m going to be talking to Andy about how e-Discovery solutions can be leveraged by law firms and legal departments to deliver a significant return on investment.
Andy, welcome to the show and thank you for taking time out to talk to me today.
Andy: Thank you, man.
Bim: It would be really good to help our audience and myself learn a little bit about you. So tell us about your journey that led you to Logikcull.
Andy: Yeah, sure. Quick point of clarification. We started in my dining room in DC in 2004. This is all pre-cloud. So, imagine a 500 square foot condo and the dining room was not a dining room, but a data center.
Bim: Wow.
Andy: Server racks and wires everywhere. We built our own cloud somewhat haphazardly and apparently illegally. Apparently, it’s not okay to have a data center in a condo building. We eventually got out of there, but that’s where we started 2004 in DC. but that wasn’t Logikcull. That was a large-scale data processing service for mega litigation. Big banks and big law firms would hire us. Then we got the idea for Logikcull, which, is the complete opposite of that. It’s like anybody can do it. It’s self-service. It’s available to anyone during the Great Recession in ‘08 and ’09. We launched Logikcull the service in 2013.
Bim: Fantastic. When you were describing the servers on the dining room, it reminded me of a time early on in my career. I used to look after IT for Elite back in the day and then got to taken over by Thompson Reuters.
It was funny because we were basically expanding in Europe at that time, and we had two offices next door to each other. One was on the other side of the road, but it was only literally like a hundred or so yards away. We spoke to the building owners and said look, we’re expanding, we need another office. The lady said, “yeah, no problem. We’ve got a spare office on the other side.” We were on the second floor. The other place was on the second floor.
Moved bunch servers over to the other office, plugged everything in and tried to fire up our machines and nothing was connected to the internet. We’re like, “oh, this is, this is odd.” Go back downstairs and the lady says to me, “Um, you do realize that the two offices are not actually physically connected to each other.” I was like, “what?” In those days, WIFI was a new thing.
So, we spent about 2000 pounds on these wireless access points that could kind of do point-to-point WIFI. We were hanging out the building drilling them into the wall so we could get the two buildings connected. We operated like that for probably three years until we figured out how to connect the buildings together. But it’s a free cloud, right?
Andy: Yes, exactly. We eventually moved out of the condo. We, we had a big office in Washington, DC right behind the White House. And to connect it to your story, there was one point where we spent an entire month digging up K Street to lay fiber line to our data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
Bim: Wow. Fun times.
Andy: It was nuts. Now we’re all living in the cloud.
Bim: Yes. Fun, times for sure. So, tell us a little bit about how is Logikcull is changing the way e-discovery is done for firms and, legal departments.
Andy: Oh, wow. It’s pretty dramatic. The insight that we had in 2008 – 2009 was there, there were two things that would eventually come to a head and it would affect pretty much everybody. That was the data volumes for discovery are going to continue to grow. We’re on this exponential growth curve, right? And The digital age and the deadlines that legal and IT teams are under aren’t going to move.
So, you have this movable object and this tsunami of data. That’s going to create a nightmare for the legal system. It’s going to create a lot of backlog, which is already happening. We’re seeing that all over the place. It’s going to create, a big pile of digital mess. And even in a small case, you have to go through maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails and Slack messages and video files. If you’re doing that in a very manual way, there’s no way you’re going to meet your deadline. It presents an access to justice problem. That’s where we get the idea for Logikcull..
We’re like, okay, this is going to be a big deal. This is the one thing that’s not going to change 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Data’s going to continue to get bigger and more complex. Therefore, we need to build a service that anybody can use to do these modern discovery challenges. It won’t break the bank or your brain. it can’t be complicated.
That’s where we got our mission of democratizing discovery. Logikcull is now used all over the world. Over 70 countries, over 50,000 users, thousands of organizations have used it and it’s been pretty profound.
One of the things that we hear often is it’s leveled the playing field. Small firms now have big firm technology. We have customers ranging in size from individuals, like pro se litigants, up to the world’s largest companies and governments, then everybody in between. They’re all paying a different price, but they’re fundamentally using the same technology.
If you think about it, the small firm in many cases are actually better armed than the bigger firms because the bigger firms are in a sun cost fallacy mindset where they bought this antiquated software 10, 20 years ago. The smaller firm is using a very modern, flexible, scalable, affordable architecture, and they’re oftentimes able to run circles around these big firms and get justice much faster. It’s pretty impactful.
Bim: You touched on something at the forefront of a lot of technology companies’ minds around the implementation of new products. I love what you just described. How those smaller firms can be a bit more agile because the decision-making is a little quicker. And like you say, they haven’t invested as much in customizing the old system that they have ingrained within the ecosystem of the firm they can’t change it easily. I’m just interested to dig into that a little bit more in terms of what your approach is to helping customers implement a product like Logikcull. How do you take them on the journey to manage that change and make a big impact from a software delivery perspective?
Andy: There’s a lot nuance to that. First, I think you should know that Logikcull is online, on-demand. So, if people come to us, it’s a very inbound driven. Almost all of our customers have come directly to Logikcull and signed up for the service. That’s number one.
Number two is the product is designed to be incredibly intuitive. It’s modeled off of consumer products that people use every day, intentionally, because they use those types of products more than they do big hairy, enterprise software. So, Amazon, LinkedIn, we did a lot of pattern matching from, those types of products.
And you can just sign up. Put a credit card in and start using it without talking to a single person. Now no product is going to be perfect. We provide world class, in-app chat support by e-discovery experts, so people that used to work as paralegals in big law firms or technical roles, and they’re at your side at any time to help answer any questions. They often respond in under two minutes. This is for all users all around the world. You can ask them anything, jump on a Zoom call, et cetera.
Because sometimes discovery can be quite complicated, even if you’re experienced with it. If you’re new to it, if you’re coming from the old world of PDFs and paper, you’re probably going to have a few questions to get going, but it is pretty easy to use. You can just do it yourself. It’s very good.
Bim: That’s great to hear. It sounds like the fact that it’s cloud-based makes it super simple for people to spin it up and give it a go. Right.
Andy: Yes. Five minutes. Done.
Bim: Fantastic. That’s really good to hear. When people are thinking about e-discovery, say I’m a firm who’s got a manual process around e-discovery so I’ve got a little bit of tech involved, but a lot of people-heavy approach to discovery. What would you say to firms like that to get them thinking about return on investment? You’re going to sign up to a product like Logikcull, how do they take that to their business decision-makers to make sure that they are quantifying what that ROI is so it becomes an easy sell internally?
Andy: Law firms have a great thing going with how they’re leveraging Logikcull’s E-discovery because the software is basically free The way we build the billing structure, it’s like Westlaw, you get usage and you can bill the usage to a client matter. That’s how law firms work. It makes sense. Almost one hundred percent of our law firms bill the usage back from Logikcull to their client matters so they get full reimbursement. You’re basically getting world-class software and support and you’re not really paying for it. There’s a little float there because they pay us directly. They put their credit card down and we charge a credit card, but then they get reimbursed. So that’s number one.
Number two is, and this is truer with smaller law firms, they realize that in addition to the fact that the software is often free to them, they can now use this software as another feather in their cap to get more business because they can take on more work. So, these larger cases that would’ve gone to a much larger firm can now be done by a much smaller firm at a faster and more affordable cost in a more sophisticated way. They take it as a, “Hey, listen, we can handle more of your discovery work.” And discovery work can be quite lucrative as you know, even if it’s hourly fee or contingency base.
We just had a customer that won a multi-hundred-million-dollar award using Logikcull and there was no way they could have done this case without Logikcull. This is a 15-person firm. That’s huge. So there’s seven figure, potentially eight figure, outcomes that can happen by leveraging the right technology.
The last thing is if a law firm was doing e-discovery by manual means, they were probably also outsourcing complicated discovery to third-party vendors. When you do that you are also outsourcing the security of that data and all the time it takes to run that data. So, you’re outsourcing billable time that your paralegals could do. When you cut that off and you bring it in-house, now the paralegals are the one doing the “third-party vendor work. They’re creating the projects, they’re uploading the data, they’re running the searches, they’re adding the users, they’re building the reports, they’re making the document productions. That’s all very much credible billable time that adds to the firm’s top line.
So yeah, it’s a triple win for law firms. It’s one of the reasons why we have so many of them. Because why would you not want to use that free. Be more competitive, make more billable time. That’s a win, win, win.
Bim: Definitely. You talked about the user experience. Making it super simple to use, very intuitive, to pick up a product like Logikcull and run with it. Dive into that a little bit more because I’m very keen to understand some of the approaches you are taking with the customer audience or those other consumer products that you’re referencing to build a product that is so easy to use.
Andy: It all starts with the data because discovery without data is not discovery. Data can come in all shapes and sizes. It’s really quite shocking. I’ll share some statistics on that in a minute. If you are not very technical, e-discovery use to be a very technical task you wouldn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. You outsourced it to e-discovery experts because it was so incredibly complicated. If you go back in time, this is the way all technology starts. It’s super complicated and then it becomes commoditized. People used to have an entire person’s job to run the electricity at a home, like turning on light switches, you know, an electrical engineer in your house back when electricity was very complicated.
E-discovery is no different. But now, anybody can do it. You can turn on light switch. That starts with the data. We wanted to make it so drop dead simple and our idea was it had to be drag-and-drop easy. So, if you have data of any size, any type, anywhere, you can drag it into the internet and Logikcull magically does all the e-discovery stuff that a vendor would do for you. That’s it.
That took four years of hardcore software engineering because we had to automate the entire supply chain of what an e-discovery vendor would do. We know that because that’s what we used to do. We disrupted our own supply chain with this drag-and-drop model and had to make it so that it could scale. I mean, when’s the last time you dragged and dropped a terabyte zip file inside of internet? That’s not something you do, but that’s something that people in e-Discovery do all the time. Logikcull can handle that. We see this every day. We had a customer yesterday upload a 750 gigabyte zip file, and inside of that zip file are other terabytes of data because it’s compressed.
So, emails and spreadsheets and video files, Logikcull makes it all searchable for you. Like highly, highly searchable. You ever see a PowerPoint document where it’s got a screenshot on the page or a video file? Those are pretty common in business communication. That screenshot you can read it, but if it’s not made searchable, how are you going to find it? Same thing with the video file. You can play it, but if the words haven’t been extracted, how are you going to find it? The search box doesn’t know it exists. Logikcull does.
We invented a technology called Deep Tech Recognition that will mine every single file and find these little image fragments and say, oh, that’s a screenshot on a PowerPoint document. Let’s run that through optical character recognition, which is a form of artificial intelligence, to try and find out what the text is, and that could be handwriting… It’ll find it and it’ll make it searchable. Same thing with an audio and video file. If you have a voice message attached to an email, Logikcull will detect that and it’ll run a transcription through it and get the text out of that. It puts it in this beautiful interface where you can see what’s inside the data. Similar to, you ever use LinkedIn people filters, like where you can say like, show me all the people that went to this school at this time. You just click buttons. It’s the same thing in Logikcull. You can say, show me all the emails from Bim to Andy that mentioned podcast. That’s click, click done. Easy peezy.
Bim: Very cool. And when you’re considering, the future, some of the enhancements that you may want to do from a product perspective, tell us a little bit about that. How do you balance the effort that’s required to evolve the product with what customers demand in terms of features and new bells and whistles?
Andy: The way we look at this is simply jobs to be done. What are our customers trying to do inside of our product and how can we make those jobs either irrelevant, where software will do them better or less tedious? If you think about like the world of discovery, it starts with the data. You’ve got to get the data in. We’ve made that simple.
Now there’s other things that need to be built on top of that, like more integration. And we have a bunch of integrations in Google, Slack, Enterprise Grid, Microsoft 365, etc. But there needs to be a lot more. We’re building integrations to the point where our customers can plug in anything they want, like a robot, which will be discoverable in the not too distant future.
We’re going to have robots take care of grandma. That’s going to happen. Occasionally those robots are going to mess up and somebody’s going to sue the robot or the robot manufacturer. You’re going to need to do discovery on what that robot saw, how is it handling the medication and the emails back and forth… Logikcull is going to have to help with those things because if you zoom out, and I tell my kids I’m like, listen, kids, everything is discoverable now. Everything you do is now discoverable. Always keep that in mind. You don’t want that discoverable content to be on the cover of a billboard one day for all the wrong reasons. So, there’s lots of integrations that need to happen.
We have a ton of AI inside of Logikcull. It can do all sorts of things. It can find privileged communication automatically. It surfaces it up. It can find, things like hidden files within other files, and surface those things up that you would never see. That’s how that judgment I shared, the multi-hundred-million-dollar judgment, that’s how they won the case. There was a hidden document that was literally the smoking gun. Logikcull surfaces those things up. But because the data growth keeps going up and to the right, well, it’s creating this noise to signal problem where the noise is so noisy that you have to use more and more AI to cull the noise. It’s not enough to force people to run searches and click around. We’re building some really interesting technology to automate the review of that data so that you can automatically pull it, move it aside, and then you just have the essence left over. That’s coming soon.
Bim: Very, very cool. There’s so much talk and buzz about the AI tech that’s out there now and it’s more accessible. It sounds like you guys have been at the forefront of putting some of that stuff in play early on before it became a thing. Some of the firms that we speak to have concerns around security. We all know the headlines. Law firms have hit the headlines in terms of security. AI is available to us the good people, but also to the bad people to promote hacking. What’s your approach to security? We’re pushing this stuff into the cloud. How do we ensure that it’s secure? What are the implications of the AI roadmap that you guys have in play for the future? Where do you see this going in terms of the big picture for E-discovery in particular?
Andy: That’s a really good question. I think every industry and technology is going to have to take a different path. There is no cookie cutter way. Some people are plugging into OpenAI and they’re fine with that. We’re not fine with that. Security for a cloud company is really their top feature because if you think about like what a cloud business does, you’re offloading the server and the storage, the compute, and the storage of somebody else. You’re trusting them with your information and therefore security and trust are linked together.
And that’s it. If you lose that, you’re toast. You’re not going to have customers. We’ve seen that and law firms unfortunately are sitting ducks. Law firms went from asking, information, like, “I need” to, now they become a legal database, and those legal databases are being hacked left and right. I think it’s like 25% of all law firms have been hacked, and it’s only going to increase because they weren’t ready for this. They didn’t put in a lot of the security controls, because sometimes those are very expensive and complicated to do. So it’s no wonder that hackers are saying, “instead of hacking this client of theirs who’s invested hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in cybersecurity, I’ll just go hack the law firm, which is easy to find.” Go to Lex Machina or any tool online, do a reverse lookup, and you can see who all these people are. Not only do you get client A, but you get client A, B, C, et cetera. This happened with the Panama papers.
But as it relates to AI safety, the way we’re treating this for e-discovery is you cannot for e-discovery because of the sensitivity of the data. These are like oftentimes front-page news, right? Things going on in elections and major scandals. You don’t want to leak that information to OpenAI. That doesn’t make any sense, but the fundamental technology behind these new AI models are open source now. So LLMs (large language models).
The way Logikcull works is we build an LM per customer. It’s like their brain, their AI brain, and it’s theirs. Eventually, there will be some form of LLM portability. Because if you were to use a service that is getting better and better and better over time because of all the data that you’re putting into it, your data and your decisions, it’s going to be hard for you to leave that service because you basically need to do a digital lobotomy. There would probably be some sort of law or rule or some innovation where it’s easy for companies or customers to move from vendor A to vendor B without, losing all that AI intelligence. I don’t think we’re there yet, but for us, due to the sensitivity of what our customers do, we have to control tightly what happens within the account. We can’t leverage a lot of these third-party products. We have to build it ourselves.
Bim: Yeah, makes sense. With this vast array of data, I think you touched on a few different, integration points that are becoming more and more common like Teams, like Slack and all the other places that data is held. How do you keep up with that?
Andy: It’s a whack-a-mole problem.
Bim: Is that one of the biggest challenges in terms of making sure that we have the ability to integrate with systems that could hold data for discovery?
Andy: Yes and no. Yes, there’s different sources of data, but if you look at the categories of data, there aren’t that many. As an example, let’s look at email. There’s essentially two: Gmail and Microsoft. In the business world, that’s what people use. But the underlying technology behind email is RFC and this is an open model. So, if you build another email client, you’re going to use that. You have to use that.
Look at documents. There’re only certain types of documents. The concept of a document is changing because it used to be I create a document and then I share it maybe with one other person. Now it’s a very collaborative. You might have components plugging into it. That is actually pretty interesting as it relates to discovery. Then you have chat. So chat is things like Slack and Teams, and there’s dozens of others, but it’s just chat. That’s the category. So, the bigger challenge is not necessarily handling that data, it’s building the integration so that people can get access to it very easily.
The way we’re approaching this is there’s no way we’re going to be able to build infinite number of integrations ourselves. It doesn’t make any sense. So, we’re flipping it around where our customers or partners can build their own integrations using our tools. You know, our APIs that we’ve built, because Logikcull is a processing beast.
Just today, Logikcull will probably process a couple hundred million pages of content. When I say process, I mean deduplication, optical character recognition, metadata extraction, text extraction, hidden file extraction, and dozens of other things that we’re doing to this data. It’s a very large compute problem. Those are all APIs that in the not too distant future customers and partners can build on so they’re going to be the ones building those integrations and not us. I think that’s how you ultimately have to solve this problem, because it will be an infinite whack-a-mole, challenge.
Bim: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the company. Obviously, you’ve co-founded the company and built what looks like a really interesting brand around what you do. There’s definitely a fun element to it. When I was reading up about Logikcull and the stuff that you do, I saw a video of you dressed as Neo from Matrix flying around. That published in a release note… I actually laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a release note and actually wanted to read the rest of it to see what else was going on in there. Tell us about that. Where did that come from and how does it impact the company culture?
Andy: Thank you for reading our release notes. They can be really funny. I read them with a chuckle every time. I don’t write them. The reason why our brand and our marketing is that way is, if you look at the legal industry, it’s known as serious business, right? As it should be. And if you look at the competitive landscape like we did, we’re like, okay, how do we stick out? I think Seth Godin talks about the purple cap. How do you become the purple cap? Well, for us it was pretty obvious. We need to be disruptive with humor, and creative. And so that’s what we do.
You know, we have our own wine. We’ve been making wine for over a decade. nobody else does that. It’s called Redaction and Whiteout. There’s a lot of puns in our marketing. We have an entire t-shirt store of really great t-shirts for legal people. You should check that out.
Our advertisements are designed to disrupt your patterns. Recently we were in New York for Legal Week, a big conference. We had trucks going around the hotel where the conference was and there was a big ad on it and it said “e-discovery”, and then the middle section was redacted and the bottom said, “sucks” so people are thinking the redacted version is some sort of profanity. If you went to e-discovery hyphen sucks.com, you can click on that redaction to see what’s actually behind it.
We have to make people stop and think because the legal industry is such that they’re just on rails. It’s the status quo. You’ve got to shake ’em out of it because we know if they stay on this status quo line, it’s not a straight line. It’s straight to hell. It is going to be a digital hell for them if they do not change their ways. Law firms could go out of business. if they make these mistakes and they continue to do things manually or outsource it to third parties. That’s one of the reasons why we have to do it. So our mission is to disrupt and democratize is because we don’t think we can democratize this space without] disrupting. That’s why all that stuff is there.
Bim: I love it. Honestly. It’s refreshing. I remember going to an e discovery conference, this is a few years ago, walking into that space and literally every booth was exactly the same. Like, it was all like blue, and white branding. It was a blend. It could have been the same company. I think this is the first time in a very long time where I see a brand in our space in legal tech that stands out because of some of the fun stuff you’re doing. You’re doing a great job there. You definitely got my attention.
Andy: Thanks! More to come. We got a lot of fun stuff cooking.
Bim: It’s working. Sticking with the theme of your growth as a company since its founding, talk us through that journey in terms of the people because behind every company there’s a bunch of great people who are making things happen. What was your approach to building that talent pool and executing on the strategy and the vision that you had in the beginning?
Andy: That is a great question. I don’t think enough people think about that. A company, as you’ve said, is just a group of people. The way we think about it is the team you build is the company you build. I say this a lot. You have to work backwards on that. You need to define what kind of company do you want to build and that will inform the type of people and the culture that you need to create that company.
We look at that and we say, okay, we want Logikcull to be a world-class company. We want people to love working here. We want our customers to love using the service and tell other people, because at the end of the great products, how do they grow? They grow by word of mouth. I mean, think about a great product you recently used. You probably told multiple people about it.
When we started thinking about our team, you have to craft values, right? Okay, well what, what are the values that we need inside of people that they share or can enhance? You have to filter through values first. That is critical. Too many people look at skill and not enough values alignment. You have to do both. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely have to do both. You can’t have somebody who’s aligned with your values but can’t do the job. That’s not going to be helpful. But it is a values first decision-making structure. We have five values in Logikcull. They’re very easy. They’re designed to help everybody make decisions on everything from hiring to firing, to building products, to how you treat customers. That’s how you should do it. in my opinion.
When we look at building the team, we have a very strict funnel. We don’t hire a lot of people intentionally. We’re in the golden era of technology companies where there’s so much leverage through other technology that you don’t need to hire a lot of people to do these tasks anymore because AI and automation is everywhere. It’s an abundance to some extent. Intelligence in general, like the cost of that is going to zero. If you look at some of these recent developments in AI, like auto GPT as an example, imagine what that can do just in a few short years. There’s a lot of back office functions that historically would’ve been done by people. That’s how we think about it. It starts with, the company you want to build, the mission you’re trying to achieve, the values, and then you pattern match to the right people on the recruiting prep.
Bim: Wonderful. I’m guessing that over time, there were some big challenges, hurdles that you had to overcome.
Andy: No, it was easy. Just smooth sailing van. No problems at all. It’s not. It’s just up and to the right now, the rollercoaster, right?
Bim: Tell us, is there anything you can share in terms of challenge that you faced in the building of Logikcull and how you overcame it?
Andy: You’re talking to somebody who’s been running this company for 20 years. There has been many existential challenges, many near death experiences, Bim, oh my God. I’ll tell you one that happened pre-Logikcull that is terrifying. We were running a services business, right? Working on huge litigations. We were also taking all that money and investing it right back into the company to build Logikcull, but we bootstrapped it, right? We eventually raised venture capital, but we originally bootstrapped everything. We had the seesaw business model, which if I had known then what I know now, I’m pretty sure we would not be having this conversation because it is not for the faint of heart.
So, we’re running out of cash, right? And it’s not a great market. I think this is like 2010, 2011. But we had this, opportunity with Bank of America. Bank of America had this rapid-fire problem where they needed to process all these loan documents for an intense government investigation into one of the acquisitions that they made. I believe it was Countrywide Financial. It was over a hundred million files that needed to be indexed and branded, like endorsed, in a week’s time. They contracted this law firm to try and find a vendor to do it. Nobody could do it. They called us and they said, “Hey, we know you guys are smart. You’ve got engineers. Can you solve this problem?” And I said yes without knowing anything about it because we were in such a desperate situation. They said, “Okay, great. What’s the estimate for the cost?” The number I needed to have in order to make payroll and get over the hump was $250,000. And they said, okay.
So we get the job, we spend an entire week working through the night writing software to paralyze the processing of terabytes of data to do this task. It was incredibly complicated. Lot of sleepless nights. We finished the job and they call us and say we need to make multiple copies of this data and ship it to San Francisco and the DOJ. This is Easter weekend. We have this machine that we hadn’t used in a long time. It’s a metal box and you can plug a hard drive into it and copy to multiple hard drives. You can set up like 10 hard drives to make a copy. We hadn’t used this thing in years. It was probably made in Russia 30 years ago. We didn’t have the instruction manual, the company was out of business…
So we got these hard drives, we plugged the master one in and the user interface to make the decision on whether or not to copy or delete was rabbit or turtle. That was it. There were no words. It was rabbit or turtle icons and we forgot which one it was. We were up against the gun. Businesses were closed. We couldn’t buy more hard drives. We had the exact amounts. We were idiots. and we couldn’t make a mistake.
We literally flipped a coin on what it should be to copy the drives. We chose rabbit and it copied. If it had deleted that drive bin, all of that work would’ve been destroyed. Completely destroyed. It worked. We got the hard drives cloned. One of our employees get on a red eye flight for him to San Francisco. He walked in with one of those like secure cases, you know, lock secure cases of the hard drives and delivered. Then we got paid a couple weeks later. And there we go. That was one. There’re others. But that was one.
Bim: Wow. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. That’s an amazing story. Glad you chose the rabbit.
Andy: Yeah, it was nuts. Absolutely nuts.
Bim: Excellent. If I can switch to some wrap up questions. If you could borrow Doctor Who’s time machine and go back to yourself at 18 years old, what advice would you give to yourself?
Andy: Hmm. I would probably say spend more time thinking about the people that you’ll enjoy working with and hold a high bar. We talked earlier about company building and values and team. This is not the way I’ve always looked at it. I made a lot of mistakes early on not thinking enough about that. Not thinking about how the team you build becomes the company you build. If you don’t think enough about that, you are going to build the wrong team. There were times where we did that and it’s costly when you bring on the wrong person. It can kill your company. It almost did a few times. That would be my one piece of advice.
Bim: Very cool. Good advice. Next question. We have so much data being thrown at us on a day-to-day basis, and I’m sure in running your organization, you are balancing and juggling a lot of different things. Are there any tips or productivity hacks that you use to stay on top of stuff?
Andy: Oh man, that’s like a whole other podcast episode. I’m constantly auditing my own self to see where my time is going. You’re not going to get m re time, right. You spend it and it’s gone. You have to spend it wisely. Is it a good use of time to constantly be replying to emails? No. I use a product called Superhuman, which is a great product if you’re using email because it gives you the ability to quickly go through email. it’s so easy. You’ve got to proficient with keyboard shortcuts, but it’s a great product. They just announced some incredible things around automatic email creation and replies using AI. So, there’s one thing I would recommend.
This is maybe more for teams that are distributed, because Logikcull is a highly distributed company, is to do more asynchronous information share. Let people consume the information when they want to consume it. I use a few tools for that. I do a lot of video recordings so I use Zoom. I use a product called Use Bubbles. These are like quick hits where you can just click a button, start recording, explain what it is you’re trying to convey, and then you share the link out to your team.
I use Slack messages a lot, audio messages, and Slack. Those are great and the other benefit to these things are you don’t have to listen to them anymore because they’re automatically transcribed. But if you do listen to them, you can change the speed to 1.5 or two x that takes a little getting used to.
And by the way, that becomes a really weird thing. If you do it too much and then talk to that person in a synchronous way, you’re like, why are they so slow? What’s wrong with them? You’re like, “oh, it’s because I listen to their stuff at double speed and they sound like a robot.” But you know, if you train your mind to consume that level of information very quickly, you will save an enormous amount of time, a compounded amount of time. It’s pretty incredible.
There’s a great chart from XKD. You know that one? They have all the memes and stuff, but it shows this time chart of how many times do you do this task. A day, a week, a month. And then how long it takes to do the task every time. It will show you how much time you’re going to spend doing that task. Any task that you’re doing repetitively, you should pause and think about that chart. Maybe do the math and think about ways that you can automate it. The more time you can save through these rote tasks, the more time you can spend on higher priority work.
Bim: Fantastic. Really good tips there. Thank you for sharing. If people in our audience want to contact you to learn more about the product or speak to you, what’s the best way to, to get in touch?
Andy: The company’s website is Logikcull.com, so L O G I K. Uh, it’s important. C u l l.com. and then for me, I’m, pretty active on Twitter, @iDeDupe, or at LinkedIn. You know, I post there quite a bit about not a lot of promotional things, you know, just interesting insights that I see on the front lines of AI and company building, those kinds of things.
Bim: Brilliant. Any closing thoughts or advice that would benefit our legal professionals in our audience?
Andy: Yes. AI is just a tool. The Bates stamp was just a tool before the Bates stamp people wrote the numbers of Bates stamp. They created the Bates stamp to make this tedious work less tedious. Now all that’s automated. Bates stamps don’t exist anymore as far as I know. You’ve got to think about AI as just another tool. Embrace it, learn about it, try it out. There are so many different AI tools out there. Figure out how you can incorporate it safely into the work that you’re doing.
I think the people that are, are too afraid of it will be l slow to adopt it, and they’re probably going to be the ones that are most at risk because it’s the people that adopt these tools, learn them the best that will succeed. It’s like farmers and tractors. It’s no different. This time what’s scary is that it’s knowledge work that’s being disrupted. Just imagine what farmers felt when they saw the first tractor. That’s what knowledge workers are seeing now. They’re like, “oh my God, this AI writes better than I do.” You’re going to have to adapt just like everybody else.
Bim: Yep. Very true. Don’t, don’t fear it. Embrace it.
Andy: That’s right.
Bim: Andy, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. Thank you again for taking some time out to speak to me and hope to speak to you again soon.
Andy: Thank you, man. Appreciate it.
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