Helm360: Alan Rich: Why your clients are also your business partners

The Legal Helm podcast: Episode #10

Reading time: 25 minutes

We’re delighted to welcome legal software pioneer, Alan Rich, to the show. Alan has made – and is making – significant contributions to the legal tech landscape. From co-founding Elite Information to creating Chrome River and now revolutionising the ticketing landscape with Y Meadows, Alan is truly shaping how law firms use their technology. Listen in to hear more about his journey, his plans for the future, and his views on business management.

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.

OUR GUEST

Alan Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Y Meadows, a startup focused on robotic ticket automation for customer service teams. Previously, Alan co-founded Chrome River Technologies. He took the company from concept to global software leader with more than 2 million users at over 750 organisations (including some of the largest companies in the world). Alan also co-founded Elite Information Group, the global standard in financial and practice management applications for law firms and professional services organisations. After Elite became part of Thomson Reuters, Alan held the position of Chief Strategist at Thomson Elite.

TRANSCRIPT

Bim: Hello everyone. Today I’m delighted to be talking with Alan Rich, CEO at Y Meadows.

For those of you that don’t know, Alan has made some extremely significant contributions to the legal technology landscape over the last few years. Most notably navigating Elite Information Systems, as it was then known, to become a market leader in the legal space with its Elite Enterprise product. He went on to create Chrome River, an expense management solution, which has been huge success with over a thousand customers globally.

Today he’s here to talk to us about his new venture, Y Meadows, and to give us a bit of history about himself. So, Alan, firstly, thank you very much for joining us today on the Legal Helm podcast. It’s really good to have you here.

Alan: My pleasure to join you.

Bim: I’d like to start at the beginning of the journey from the Elite information systems days, when you were CEO. Talk to me a little bit about your experience. You came in at Elite information systems and you took it from being a product that was focused on the North America region and took it global over a number of years. I’m interested to learn what your experience was like back then and how you took it to such a successful product.

Alan:  Thank you very much. Beginning of our journey to Elite was the vision to apply some of the latest open architecture technologies. Those days it was Unix and relational databases to the legal industry. I had two key partners. One was my father who had been the original founder of Elite many, many years ago before we got into the software space.

The second was Enrico Lombardino, who led the technical side of the business. That was the beginning of the architecture of the product. We had a lot of success in the United States, as you pointed out. Two of the early adopters in the UK were Allen and Overy led by Ian Dinwiddie and Clyde and Co who had the vision to take what was a heavily American product and bring it to the UK.

Add a lot of the features to handle multiple currencies and value added taxes and things that became necessary for an international product. And then from there, bringing it to other parts of the world.

Bim Fantastic. Thank you so much. What’s really interesting about the journey that you started on there was the focus on the customer, right? Because it sounds like you are partnering quite closely with some initial early adopters to really gain the vision for the product. Would you say that that’s the case?.

Alan: That’s absolutely the case. And that’s really my whole philosophy. Don’t build software in the hope that somebody is going to use it. Build software that somebody’s committed to helping with the design requirements. Give us early feedback. I think the whole software industry is focused around this sort of agile technology and in a formulation of that philosophy.

Maybe we didn’t call it that in those days, but I really was a big believer in short cycles, rapid deliverables, and getting the customer’s feedback once they see the feature set. That really helped us a lot. And certainly I was very grateful to both of those organisations for the help they gave us.

Bim: If you could cast your mind back to that period of your career, what would you say would be the standout moment for you, in terms of the Elite years in particular?

Alan: Gosh, there were so many fantastic moments along that path, but I always look back at the customers who took a chance on us. That shared our vision and were willing to bet the finances of their entire organisation on our team. The gratitude I have for those people who did it.

I’ll go back all the way to one of our very first customers: Cozen and O’Connor. On an international scale or on a large US scale. The chances they took going with us. I think most of those firms are still using Elite software many decades later. So, it really paid out for both parties.

That sort of partnership, with the leadership in the organisations who are willing to share a vision. That always stands out to me as transcendental moments in the business.

Bim: Yeah, totally agree. For those listening, that don’t know, I was part of that Elite journey in a small way as a support guy, joining the Elite European support team back in the early days of my career.

One of the things I picked up on in my time working on the support desk was a big emphasis on customer satisfaction. Making sure that we were doing what we needed to do to make sure the customer had a product that worked for them. You mentioned the likes of Enrico and company. I still remember this day where we would be working with customer go-lives and we would be handing the phone to Enrico who would be more than happy to jump on and solve customer problems there in the moment to make sure that they had a really good, positive experience.

I think that’s what led to the stickiness. You look at the market today and you look at some of those customers, like you say, that have been using these products for so many years successfully and the reason is because of that focus and commitment to what the customer needed and to build a robust product from that perspective.

Alan: I think some of those practices, like you say, rapidly putting out bug releases and things like that that has become the software industry standard. The regular in some companies. Daily, continuous delivery of software, instead of just the annual release. You know, live with these bugs for another year. We didn’t believe in that. We really believed in getting software to the customers that solved their problems as fast as we could. I think that philosophy is also now a standard in the software industry.

Bim: You then went on to Chrome River as your next stage, from what I understand, which of course was and is a huge success.

Alan: I’ll even go back to one more thing at Elite, because I think it was also a transformational moment that was really the decision to develop 3E. If I go back to the history of Elite, that took a lot of courage from the top management from investors from everything else to say, “Hey, we had a fantastic working product with a very strong market position. Let’s completely build from the ground up a new architecture, a new product that’s going to take our customers forward for the next few decades.”

They had the courage to do that and build up proper international platform. I’m proud of the fact that Elite’s still using that and our customers are still using that a long time after I left. But the architectural work that I was part of there and the software work is, I think, another transformational decision.

Bim: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned that because I think when you look at even the kind of legacy platforms that were built by you and the team back in the old days, they seem to be built on the premise of extendability. Being not necessarily a barrier, but an enablement feature. Every platform, whether it was Elite Character or Elite Enterprise had the ability to be extended.

I think that’s what made it right for customers. They were able to adapt it to their needs. I think that vision that you guys had from a Elite 3E perspective was super because when you look at the technology as it stands today, I mean, in fact, if you look at the market today, 3E still stands out as one of the most robust products in the market, simply because of that extendability and the fact that it was rearchitected from the ground up to be future-proof.

Think about some of the challenges that had to have been overcome as part of the Enterprise experience, but translating that into something that would be there for the future and not just limited to just the legal space, but also allow it to be extended to other areas as well, which I thought was really fantastic.

Alan: If I look back and say our practice that we believed in then has become the standard, that is to say that other companies are not necessarily competitors, they’re an ecosystem. I think your career’s a good example of that.

The work you do with Elite software isn’t competing with Elite, it’s enabling Elite. The view that a major product can become a platform and the basis for a whole ecosystem and that the people who are providing services and add-ons are helping each other, I think today seems obvious, but at the time I’d like to think it was forward-thinking,

Bim: Yeah, totally agree. And you’re absolutely right. That ecosystem is so vast, right? It goes across different continents and there is following that love the fact that they can extend the experience for their customers and extend the message of “here’s a great product,” but let’s not limit it to the box that it was built in. Let’s take it to new boundaries. Push those boundaries beyond what was originally envisioned. It’s really amazing to see that.

Moving on from the Elite world and going to the next stage of the journey with Chrome River, which of course was a huge success and continues to be. When I think about that Chrome River experience, I remember when you had left Elite or Thompson Elite at that time. What were thinking about the next step in your journey?

Because we were fascinated with where you are going to go next. Then obviously Chrome River popped up, and from my perspective, it was a very innovative and bold decision to take product like that and bring it into a market. But also take it to different verticals as well, which I thought was really interesting.

I’d love to hear a little bit about the process you went through to a be so innovative at that time. How did you go through that validation process that this was a good product for this market and how you then take that to the kind of future scenario actually selling to outside of legal and doing fantastically well with that?

Alan: I think the start of the concept was I was familiar with a number of law firms that had tried to implement commercial expense reporting systems. In those days, there were a few of them out there. I knew at least three or four of them that gave up after six months.

That was the light bulb. That law firms had requirements around expense reporting that was different than your normal commercial provider. I don’t think any of us in hindsight are surprised by that, but at the time it wasn’t the obvious So we took advantage of our understanding that we had built up during all the Elite years to understand how client matters work, how routing works and the infrastructure of firms.

One example sticks out in my mind, It was expense reporting systems. All of them have an approval process and there might be multiple steps in the approval process. Let’s say it an associate has a expense report. It goes to the partner. The partner approves it, it goes to accounting. Accounting sees there’s a problem with the receipt and sends it back to the associate to fix. In commercial systems that would reset the routing and the routing would go back to the partner again for approval and then go back to accounting.

But in the law firm culture, partners say, “Hey, I’ve already approved this thing. I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want to be approving the same things because you happen to fix a receipt.” That little annoyance of people approving the same things over and over was enough to get people to just say, “Hey, this isn’t usable in our environment.” That’s one of many little things that made us understand we could build something unique that would meet the requirements of law firms.

The second thing is I’m a big believer that you really need to have some better technology than the incumbents. We had the ability to use new technologies that made the browser experience as great as the desktop experience. You could give it to every admin, every lawyer, and they could have this really wonderful fluid user experience. This notion that financial applications aren’t necessarily just data entry applications that are going to be used in the back office and nobody cares how they look. That UX should be beautiful, fun to use, delight the user. That the user is really every single person in the organisation.

That philosophy which today with our focus on design throughout the industry has changed. At that time it was a big, big differentiator for us.

Bim: When you first had the vision for that kind of product for this market, sticking to what, you know, in terms of the legal space and capturing that market, but then you took it to different verticals. Did sell outside of legal?

I’m interested to know at what point you made the decision to take the product elsewhere. Were there any barriers that you had to jump through or jump across to be able to be successful in a different space?.

Alan: Yes, there were barriers. We had been really successful in the legal market. And again, I mentioned for the historical record that we did that same thing where some big law firms took a chance on us at the time. It was Jones Day, Paul Hastings and Weil & Gotshal,. Each built the product with us and those leaders of those organisations that had the vision to take a chance made a huge difference to us.

But eventually the legal market is, at least in the large law firm market, a relatively constrained market. We had had a lot of success there. We were anxious to see if we could take that success to other markets. So I think we faced two core challenges.

One is that big law firms, while they’re really known in our industry, aren’t known by the general public. So brand name recognition of some of our really great customers didn’t carry a lot of weight as we went to the cruel cold outside world and had to re-established a new set of credentials.

The second thing is, of course, when you hit new markets you come across new requirements, new software engineering things. But we persisted. We had outside investors who were patient and gave us financial resources. The result was that at Chrome River, we were able to get great brand names, you know, Toyota and Liberty Mutual, eventually Exxon, all kinds of companies that did have great brand recognition and helped propel us forward

Bim: Awesome. What a great journey and story that must’ve been. So, you’re now at Y Meadows. The first question I have to ask is why Y Meadows and what does the name mean?

Alan: This venture I had the pleasure of working with my son. I have two sons who are both software engineers. Both of them joined the business and we were thinking about what we might want to build. We were on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains and ended up near a place called Y Meadows reservoir, where a lot of the inspiration for our business ideas came from. So, we named it after that.

Bim: Fantastic! What’s that. dynamic like? Because I have a brother who’s also in the technology space. We often talk about similar kinds of things like, you know, we should build this and we have these great ideas and stuff. What is the reality of that? How does that dynamic work?

Alan: So far for us, it’s been a great. Both of them had great careers in software before joining. They’re both kind of technical, so we all complement each other. Adam is an expert in, you might call it enterprise software architecture. Jacob’s an expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence.  I’m on the finance and management side. Each of us has our space. It’s been a real pleasure. We’ve built a really wonderful team of colleagues. Almost all of them people we’ve worked with between the three of us at different points in our careers. As a result, it’s a lot of fun.

Bim: Excellent. Can you talk a little bit about the problem that Y Meadows is solving for your customers?

Alan: Yes. We are an application we like to call robotic ticketing automation. Companies or organisations have incoming tickets – ticket in our term is a case or a message. It could come from a customer, it could be from the HR side, it could be an internal request, but it’s a written communication and email a message of some sort.

We’re using the new artificial intelligence tools that have changed dramatically over the last couple of years. We’re in a branch of artificial intelligence called natural language processing. We have specialised software that reads these incoming messages, understands what they’re about, and then the robotic part is we try to answer the message, or at least help the agent looking at it answer the message.

Take an accounting example. You might have a customer saying, “could you send me a copy of my bill?” We should be able to read that message, understand it, go into the accounting system, get the.pdf, create the message and either respond or put it into a queue so somebody could easily respond to it. In organisations that are literally getting thousands, sometimes tens and tens of thousands of messages every month, we can make the user/agent experience much more pleasant.

Bim: It sounds like a very current solution to an existing problem. Also a very exacerbated problem with what’s happened over the last couple of years with lots of people embracing the hybrid working model and being able to support the workforce for a lot of companies has become more difficult.

I can see how that solution really helps in that case because there’s been a lot of pressure on IT departments. Any kind of support function within a firm. To go and capture and respond to the demands of growing workforces that are distributed, which can have its challenges.

Alan: I think the cost of handling a message by picking up the phone or talking to somebody is so high that if you can get people to put it in writing, send the message and have it rapidly responded to it’s a better experience for both sides.

Bim: Totally. Obviously, some of the technologies that you’re using at the moment are pretty interesting and again, very current. There’s some NLP processing, AI, and the robotic element of it. When we look at the market as it stands today, there’s lots of firms out there considering planning around new technology that can improve their efficiency within the fund. Many introduce cost savings, et cetera. But there’s also some hesitancy in terms of not really understanding how those solutions solve a problem.

For those firms who are sitting on the fence and thinking AI is a buzzword, NLP is a buzzword. What would you say to those customers to help them be armed with what they need to be able to see the value proposition products like yours and others in the market that can really help to solve these problems?.

Alan: I think that AI, that whole category of machine learning and natural language processing, can deliver fantastic results. But it’s different than the kind of software that people are familiar. I like to call it probabilistic software in the sense that the machine is not always going to be right 100% of the time.

Let’s say from my prior world of accounting, we had to be right a hundred percent of the time. The debits and credits couldn’t be off by a penny. That class of software that did that is well understood by people. They think of software that way. Machine learning software is different. It tries to understand the message, it tries to read a document, it tries to make a recommendation. It’s good and it’s fast and it’s accurate, but it’s not a hundred percent accurate. For many of those categories, human beings also aren’t a hundred percent accurate.

I think it’s a big mental shift to look at a software solution and say, “Hey, this is going to be kind of like a person; it’s good, but it’s not perfect.” Once you start looking at the software like that and being willing to accept that you can use it in all kinds of tremendous ways. But if you’re fighting the software and saying, “Hey, if it’s not a hundred percent, right, I’m just throwing it out,” then you’re endlessly going to be doing proof of concepts and never actually implementing anything.

Bim: Yep. Absolutely. Is there any kind of best practice recommendations that you would recommend in terms of implementing such technologies? Like the Y Meadows solution. Is there an approach that you think firms can benefit from in terms of implementing software like this? What’s the quickest route to success in implementing a solution like yours?

Alan: Don’t do the proof of concept. It’s demotivating for your team, it’s demoralising for the vendor because nobody’s really committed. You could do it on a limited scale. You could do it on a thing, but it’s real, it’s production. It’s not a test. Then if for some reason it doesn’t work, everybody can back away and cancel and say, ”forget it.”

I think there’s a huge, psychological difference for everybody involved when something’s for real. As we say, we’re going to try your product and build it and use it and roll it out to real live users and get away from “kind of.” I think the fear factor that causes people to endlessly do proof of concepts. After a while, teams lose the energy in those kinds of projects. So to me, that’s clearly a best practice.

Bim: That’s a great point. I think sometimes you’ve got to bite the bullet and just jump in and make and make it happen.  I agree.

With your Y Meadows product, is there a particular market that you are focused on to begin with or a particular niche that you’re looking at? Or is it basically available to anyone?

Alan: It’s available to anyone. We’d love to find a few niches where we can really get a lot of traction. We’re working with one law firm, helping their legal research team to automate responses to legal research requests. Quite a few of our customers are in the customer support teams of their companies. They’re dealing with messages coming from their customers and trying to respond to them rapidly and efficiently. We’re open to all kinds of organisations that see a volume of messages where they can really make a difference to improve operational efficiency.

Bim: Excellent. Thank you for that. If you could get in a time machine, go back in time and change anything about, last three experiences we just talked about with the different products that you were involved in, what would you do differently, if anything?

Alan: That’s a fantastic question. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t live by regrets. I had three, two prior to Y Meadows, fantastic companies with wonderful, dedicated employees and customers that we were totally committed to helping us and became like partners. It’s such a fantastic experience working that way. Each time I’ve taken the learnings from the previous time and apply it to the next company. So I don’t think I have any regrets about how those companies went. I hope the customers who are listening would share that viewpoint.

Bim: I’m sure they will. With the roles that you’ve played, like very high profile, probably intense at times, when you’re dealing with so many different personalities and customers and all sorts of action in the field. We hear a lot about mental health and how important it is for people in our kind of roles to be really focused on ourselves. It would be interesting to hear from you in terms of how have you dealt with the stresses of running a company, dealing with the challenges that you faced along the way. What tips do you have for our audience in terms of how to handle those scenarios so that you have that right level of balance?

Alan: I would make a few recommendations. One is the value of face-to-face relationships. If I look at my career, I never had a lawsuit with a customer or an employee. I think the reason that disputes never escalated or never became problems is because I believed in getting on an airplane and meeting with somebody if there was a problem. If the software had an issue, flying there, looking at it, bringing in the resources, and taking care of it. I think those kinds of personal relationships that get built both with customers and the members of your own team take effort, but they get you out of the adversarial context that causes the kind of stress you’re alluding to.

The second thing I do comes from my religious practices. I unplug one day a week. Don’t look at the phone. Don’t look at computers, don’t look at emails. I’m totally off the grid. One day spending time, with my family and doing other things and that ability to completely unplug a day a week and maybe other times during the year on occasion too. Backpacking for me is another way of going off grid. Those two help recharge the batteries.

That would be two of my words of advice for people that are finding leadership in an organisation to be stressful.

Bim: I think there’s a lot of people that can learn from that. I’m also guilty of being attached to my phone. I’m often told off by my wife to shut it down and put it away. We’ve recently banned technology from the dinner table. When you’re eating, there should be nothing at the table we’re just focused on food and conversation.

Alan: That’s right. So you’re good for an hour. You have 23 hours more to go.

Bim: Exactly. Alan, it’s been really wonderful talking to you today. I have learned a lot from this experience and watching what you’ve done over the years. Before I do let you go, there’s a couple of questions that I want to wrap up with which I do with all of my guests. The first question is: Who has been your most important professional mentor over the years?

Alan: For me, it was my father. He is a person I worked with in the beginning and maybe 25 years together. Even at Chrome River, he came to our management meetings. It was a fantastic experience working with him.

Bim: Excellent. The other question, is you mentioned family and obviously you’re a family man, and you’ve got your sons in business. What two pieces of advice have you given your sons to make sure they start out on the right path of their journeys?

Alan: Before they joined me in the business, they had the chance to achieve success in their careers. That gives them a lot of that self-confidence to know that they’re making the right decisions at the right times. There’s a big difference that I try to teach between being decisive and being confrontational. I believe in creating a culture where you explain to people why you’re making the decisions, that you’re open with the whole company on the direction that you’re going. At our new company, we have a weekly meeting for the whole company for half an hour to keep us all synchronised and share what’s going on in our company. I think that kind of openness really appreciated by everybody. I think that’s a core value.

Bim: I love that. Make sure everyone is connected and you have a transparent message is so important. Great tips, Alan.

Thank you once again. I really appreciate you spending time with me today. Wish you the best of luck with Y Meadows. Hopefully, when you’re a little bit further down the journey, you can come back and give us an update in terms of how things are going. I’m sure it’s going to be a huge success and we’re looking forward to seeing that become so fruitful for you.

Alan: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to join you today.

Bim: Likewise. Thank you, Alan.