UniCourt Influencer Q&A with Paul Giedraitis of Orgaimi

As an electrical and quantitative engineer, who became a “startup guy” and co-founded companies in FinTech, RegTech, and now LegalTech, Paul Giedraitis has seen exactly how game-changing technologies have disrupted the financial and regulatory space, and he’s excited for how the proliferation of AI and predictive analytics will disrupt the legal industry.

We were fortunate enough to sit down with Paul and learn more about his career path from the defense industry all the way into legal tech as the Founder and President of Orgaimi. Paul has some great advice for startups on how to play the long-game and not give in to new waves of hype, some important insights for law firms on why they need to take advantage of client intelligence in the current economic climate, and some helpful tips on where to start with data analytics to secure a beachhead for future expansion.

We hope you enjoy learning from Paul’s perspective as much as we did!

UniCourt: Tell us your story. What is your background, and what led you to what you are doing now?

Paul Giedraitis: Once upon a time, I was an electrical engineer in the defense industry. I went to Johns Hopkins University and spent the better part of a decade working at Northrop Grumman corporation on classified government projects in radar, imaging, and electronic warfare. I also did graduate research in quantum semiconductor imaging technology at Northwestern University.

In the early 2010s, algorithmic trading companies in downtown Chicago began hiring various kinds of engineers – at big salaries – to build electronic trading systems that were extremely fast and powerful. A lot of people were being recruited from the defense industry (“As fast and powerful as possible” was what we did for a living!) and so I was determined to get into the trading industry. While I was looking, a friend who was working in options trading pitched me on a FinTech startup idea – to use trading technology to make international payments (and foreign exchange currency risk) easier and less risky for small businesses. I agreed to join him as a co-founder, and I’ve been a “startup guy” ever since. 

My last startup before Orgaimi (acquired in 2017) was the first company in the world that used machine learning to identify “market cheats.” These were traders that used knowledge of how trading algorithms work to manipulate prices for their own benefit. It was hard for regulatory agencies to catch these folks, but our AI-based systems were quite good at recognizing trading patterns that were likely to be illegal or in violation of trading regulations. We worked with a lot of legal professionals to evolve the product – including attorneys, compliance officers, and regulatory analysts – which is how I got my foot in the door of the LegalTech space.

Orgaimi emerged from AI and data analytics work within a management consulting firm based in Chicago called Lotis Blue Consulting (formerly known as Axiom Consulting Partners). I was hired in 2018 to help bootstrap a product development initiative within the firm, and right away I was drawn in to consulting work we had done in the legal industry around predictive analytics applied to client outcomes. Fast forward to 2023, and we’ve spun off a new company, raised funding, and launched our product with some incredible customers.

UC: What is Orgaimi? Can you explain what it does and how it helps law firms with client intelligence?

PG: We describe Orgaimi as an AI-Powered Client Intelligence platform designed specifically for law firms and professional services firms. It uses predictive analytics and AI applied to firm datasets, to help firms accelerate revenue growth of their existing client portfolio. We do this in three key ways. 

The first is Orgaimi identifies WHERE the biggest growth opportunities are in the firm. Large firms have tens of thousands of client accounts each year and figuring out where to focus limited resources can be a big struggle! We use machine learning and predictive intelligence to forecast which clients have the biggest opportunity for growth, what those potential revenues are, and the statistical likelihood of success.

Second is that Orgaimi clearly points out WHAT are the next best opportunities for growth in terms of new matters or services a client is likely to need. This also includes WHO are the best candidates for collaboration in terms of cross-selling within the firm. Partners are often unaware of certain services the firms offers or don’t personally know other professionals that are experts in relevant areas. Orgaimi makes it easy for users to connect with each other using the platform, generate new sales opportunities, and track them using their own CRM. We sometimes make an analogy to “online shopping for client business development” where a recommendation engine uses historical data to quickly show that “clients like this also bought XYZ additional services.”

The third way is to reveal WHICH clients are at risk of potential churn (i.e., leaving the firm to take their business elsewhere) and the reasons WHY. We’ve found there are many statistical drivers and warning signals of client churn – including factors related to service delivery, cross-collaboration, business administration, team dynamics, client demographics, and external market conditions. We’ve shown with some of the world’s top firms that it’s possible to predict which clients will churn across the entire portfolio year-over-year with nearly 90% accuracy. All this information is aggregated into a “client health score” (like a credit score) that refreshes each month and alerts users to risk factors so they can take action to strengthen client relationships, and ultimately retain more revenue.

UC: Last year, you presented at ILTACON 2022 on a panel titled “Building a Legal Metrics Program to Measure Business Outcomes and Demonstrate Value.” What are some of the best practices you can share for designing a legal metrics program?

PG: Thanks for mentioning! I had great fun at this panel and was fortunate to have some incredible co-presenters, including David Hobbie, Director of Knowledge Management for Litigation at Goodwin Procter LLP, and Rico Burnett, Global Director of Client Innovation at Exigent. We were lucky enough to have our session covered in Law360 which was very exciting.

Some of the best practices I would highlight are the following.

The first is for firms to realize that legal metrics programs are worth doing in the first place, from a financial standpoint. We’ve shown that data analytics projects can generate tens of millions of dollars for a firm’s bottom line, which is great ROI versus the cost of investment.

The second is that you must start with a business problem. It is all too easy for firms to jump into analyzing data without a clear path around what the business case is, what questions you are trying to answer, and what pain points you are trying to alleviate for end users. Of course, data exploration is part of the process, but without clear near-term objectives, these initiatives can fizzle quickly and fail to generate the necessary momentum to create meaningful value.

Third is that law firms should start small and start quickly. Firms are often concerned about data quality, maturity of their capabilities, or user adoption challenges. This allows them to convince themselves they must wait to get started until they have their “data house in order” so to speak. However, we find the opposite is true – the best way to improve data quality, build capability, and drive early user adoption is often through starting limited-scope (but well-defined) analytics projects, proving ROI on a small scale with a handful of users, and then scaling up from there. This creates a low friction path to demonstrating success and builds early stakeholder momentum to ultimately grow and sustain enduring value for firms.

UC: In addition to your work in legal tech, you also have a great deal of experience working in FinTech and computational finance within the banking and capital markets industries. How has your experience in FinTech and computational finance impacted the way you see the legal tech market, and are there any lessons you think legal tech companies can learn from the growth of FinTech in recent years?

Seeing what’s happened in FinTech the past decade has given me hope and excitement for the disruption that is coming to LegalTech in the coming years. Ten or twenty years ago, many people thought of banking and finance as “industries living in the past” in the same way some think of law today. Since then, we’ve seen game-changing technologies in the financial world including the rise of AI-powered algorithmic trading, democratization of payments technology, social media-based investing, the ups and downs of cryptocurrency and NFTs, alternative lending applications, digital banking, regulatory compliance automation, and many other areas.

What we see knocking on the door of LegalTech is fascinating. Right now, ChatGPT seems to be the biggest buzz of the day and is accelerating huge interest in generative AI and large language models. From a knowledge management perspective, there’s this potential for the daily jobs and workflows of attorneys to be completely reimagined in the coming years. AI is going to revolutionize contextual enterprise search, document generation, prioritization, and summarization. This will free up time for lawyers of the future to focus on other more human-centric problems such as business development, group advocacy, ethical responsibility, and practice innovation. Ultimately, as cool as this technology is, “practice of law” applications related to document processing benefit firms primarily for the value of automation to improve efficiency and reduce matter delivery costs. 

But what about the revenue side? I believe that “business of law” applications have massive potential from a financial standpoint, as firms are still learning how to grow faster and run themselves as companies versus federated partnerships. Improving client satisfaction, loyalty, and stickiness, as well as accelerating growth will always be the final frontier – which is why sales and revenue operations technology like client intelligence and CRM enrichment tools continue to garner significant interest from firm decision makers. This is where Orgaimi sits and why we are excited about the future.

Advice I would give legal tech startups is to not get too swept up in the big technological hype of the day. Focus on finding a problem that a lot of users have, and a way to quickly improve the way they work that solves clear and specific pain points. Demonstrate this works across a core group of customers and get lots of users trying the technology. Learning from user feedback early will show you the path to success. 

I also find that lawyers and firms are very relationship-oriented in how they buy, so “get out of the building” and meet people at conferences, events, and gatherings! People in Knowledge Management and Marketing and Business Development are always willing to learn about new tech and have a great pulse on the challenges that their practices are facing. Other advice is to play the long game. Lining up with annual budget cycles and trust building across stakeholder teams takes time, so plan to invest many months in building relationships with your initial customers. Once you have good success stories, people will say good things about you and scaling becomes a lot easier.

UC: Why is client intelligence a critical asset for law firms to develop, and how is artificial intelligence helping law firms make better use of data for client intelligence?

PG: We believe client intelligence is extremely important right now, due to the economic recession we find ourselves in. 

It’s the first time the legal industry has been in this situation for a long time. Did you know that according to a recent study by Georgetown and Thomson Reuters, law firms saw a record decline in productivity through 2022 to reach record lows of 119 billable hours per month on average? This means that the average lawyer in 2022 billed nearly $100,000 less in total fees than a comparable lawyer in 2007! Just a year ago, firms had all time record profits and couldn’t find enough people to do all the work they were selling. Today, large law firms are seeing decline across all practice areas on average as clients are bringing their work to smaller firms. This shift makes it critical for firms to focus on client growth and retention of existing accounts. As the old saying goes, it’s 5-10 times more costly to win new business than grow existing business.

Orgaimi’s mission is to help firms grow and protect existing client revenues. Artificial intelligence helps by making use of the massive amounts of data firms already have about their clients and creating visibility into opportunities they can’t easily see. We believe we can help firms realize 50% more client growth potential with half the effort, just based on leveraging their own data. Since large firms lose 10-30% of revenues each year, even small improvements (say 1 in 20 partners doing 5% better) can mean tens of millions of dollars to the bottom line! Given we can predict client churn with nearly 90% accuracy, we believe this is a massive opportunity for the industry in terms of ROI.

UC: What are some of your favorite sayings? What are some real-world examples of how you’ve seen those sayings come to life?

PG: I recently saw a quote that said: “AI will not replace your job. A human using AI will.” 

I love this one because many seem to think data technology innovation will take humans out of the equation – but it never turns out this way. Even in trading where algorithms “replaced” people trading in pits a decade ago, we still have human traders working alongside quants, and the droves of traders that were on the exchange floor moved to other jobs in FinTech startups, wealth management, industry marketing, and media companies. 

In B2B legal, the same concept holds. The way the law works, lawyers are necessary in the business world to do basically anything. This is unlikely to change. AI will become an asset that lawyers use to create competitive advantage so they can focus on providing great service, experiences, and value to their customers. I do think we’ll see the continued evolution of new roles at law firms, around revenue operations, legal tech, and innovation – to support adoption and use of new technologies.

Another saying I saw recently (on a poster at my five-year old’s Kung Fu class) was, “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.” I like this because I think it applies well to the startup and innovation space. People get so excited about the novelty of technological disruption, they forget that the true winners need to have a lot of patience and discipline to be successful. Knowing how to stick with your core mission and focus on incremental value creation, versus riding a wave of hype, is the way to build a successful company long term.

UC: What are your goals for the rest of 2023? What projects are you working on? Are there any events in the legal tech, FinTech, or legal innovation space we should know about?

PG: This is an exciting year for us.

We’re focused heavily on new customer acquisition and have some great engagements expected to launch in the coming months. If you’re a firm looking to leverage AI to grow client revenues, you should absolutely reach out to us!

Also, we continue to evolve Orgaimi’s product features. One of our recent releases incorporates collection of user feedback about client and matter recommendations, which is creating a rich new source of user data to improve our predictive models. We’ve also built direct integrations into Salesforce, which makes it easy for users to immediately generate opportunities in the CRM, as well as track the dollar benefits of Orgaimi recommendations directly. This helps us substantiate ROI meticulously for customers as well as encourage users to further engage with the platform. Longer term, we are evolving our analytics to include more people-level analysis, as well as greater use of external data sources.

Regarding upcoming legal tech events, we are excited about the SKILLS Conference put on by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in March. We are also looking forward to conferences we attended last year, including ILTACON, ARK, LVNx, and the LMA Mid-Atlantic Conference. One incredible event I attended in December, was the inaugural TLTF Summit in Miami, which I’m looking forward to again this year. I’ve been recently told about LSSO RainDance Conference in Chicago in June, so we have our eyes on that as well.

UC: Where can we learn more about you and your work?

PG: Interested readers can check us out at www.orgaimi.com. I specifically recommend our INSIGHTS page which has some great content about our work and exciting things going on in our space.

The best way to get updates is to follow Orgaimi on LinkedIn at:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/orgaimi/

Also, can also reach out and connect with me personally at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgiedraitis/

For the firms out there, I would love to hear more about your analytics journey and how we can help. If you’re a startup or vendor, I’m always open to talking shop about innovation and LegalTech.

Thanks so much for having me!

Client Intelligence as a Key Differentiator for Successful Law Firms

As law firms and the legal industry writ large are still feeling the impacts of an economic slowdown, the ability to leverage client intelligence to reduce churn and improve profitability will be a key differentiator of successful law firms in 2023.

We loved hearing Paul’s insights on the potential for legal tech and AI to become even greater assets for lawyers to use in the coming years, and are eager to see what he does next with Orgaimi in the client intelligence space!

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