Ravel Law | Daniel Lewis

About Daniel Lewis

Co-founder and CEO Daniel Lewis has a JD from Stanford Law (’12) and a BA from Johns Hopkins. Prior to law school, he worked as a national energy and transportation policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. Daniel also worked for Senator Barbara Boxer and was a leader of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at Stanford Law School. Daniel started Ravel to deliver better technology to lawyers, and help them spend more time doing what he loved most about the law, writing winning arguments on behalf of clients. Daniel comes from a family of lawyers and is passionate about delivering ground-breaking new products to the industry.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Daniel Lewis. He’s the co founder of Ravel law. Daniel, welcome to today’s show.

Daniel
Thanks for having me.

Alan
So, you graduated from Stanford in 2012. Yeah, bring me through your background and how this idea of travelogue came about.

Daniel
Yeah. So I grew up in Marin and ended up going out to school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Majored in International Studies. And after that, I worked in Washington, DC at a bipartisan think tank for a couple of years, as a policy analyst focused on energy, transportation, and sort of climate work. And then I made the choice to come out and become a lawyer came out to Stanford wanted to be a little bit closer to the action on climate issues, actually. And when I got into law school, I realized that the technology we were using looked a lot as it had when I’d seen it years and years earlier at my father’s firm. And I come from a family of attorney. So both my parents are lawyers, my older brother’s a lawyer now my younger brothers at Stanford Law as well. So it was a surprise to see that the technology had been left so far behind, when every other part of the internet had changed dramatically, you know, with with travela, when you started this, was it with another classmate? Or how did this really come about? Yeah, so I started investigating the idea by myself and looking at the businesses that were already in the space, having conversations with professors in the computer science department who were studying data visualization, and machine learning and search technologies. But I knew that I didn’t have a business background, or strengthen that area. So I was able to team up with a classmate, Nic Reid, who had a finance and consulting background. And together, we then fleshed out the business model much more completely, started laying the foundation for the business plan of how we would put things together. And we found that we had really complementary skills. And it’s been, it’s been a really great partnership. Now, this is really looked at as disruptive technology, taking the, you know, the would you call this in the big data realm or for the research for attorneys, or, yeah, it’s big data in the legal space, which is not big data in the Google and Walmart sense of the world. But big data in the legal space, there’s a ton of information, and it’s actually become much more digital over the last 15 years. And lawyers are grappling with much more information and information challenges that they didn’t confront 510 15 years ago. And so the technology hadn’t really kept up. And it hadn’t taken advantage of some of the innovations that have happened in the software world. So what we’re doing is bringing a lot of new technology into the space taking advantage of things like data visualization and machine learning. And saying, by using technology more deeply, we can help lawyers make better decisions based on data and be more strategic about how they approach their work and their their clients business.

Alan
Now, after, since 2012, you you’ve grown, and, you know, right now, are you are you on target? Are you little ahead or behind a Where do you where do you see yourself right now and then going in five years from now?

Daniel
Hopefully, we’re right on target. You know, when we started in 2012, we operated as a team of about five for the first year, the seed investment that we’d raised from NEA and northbridge, our big investors was there to help us prototype and figure out if the idea had any legs to it. And so as we prototyped and started building testing relationships with firms and attorneys and students, we started to get really good feedback. And people said, this is working for me. And it’s a good idea. And so our investors said, Well, you guys seem to be on to something. And they gave us a new round of funding, we raised a Series A. And from there, we were able to start expanding again. So today, we’re about 30 people. We have customers at some of the biggest firms around the country in New York and San Francisco in LA. And it’s been really exciting to grow not just the team, but also the business and to transition from a prototype into something that some of the most serious law firms in the country are bringing on board.

Alan
Let’s talk about Judge analytics. How did you incorporate that into parabola?

Daniel
Yeah, so one of the one of the things that we started hearing when we were testing some of our first prototypes was people saying, look, what you’re doing is really interesting. And we have this extra challenge of how do we make decisions based on an understanding of the individual judge that we’re dealing with? We know that they have patterns they’ve been serving as a judge for 10 or 20 years, but we just don’t know much about them. We know that they like red wine or that they go jogging, but we can’t and actually figure out how they’ve made decisions in cases like ours before. And I had friends who had graduated from Stanford who were now out clerking for those judges serving as their, you know, their writing arm for a year. And those clerks were often handed when they started on the job, a binder that was an agglomeration of rules in cases that the judge liked to use. And they were given very specific guidance about, you know, when you’re dealing with this type of issue, I want you to rely on these types of cases, or look to the work of these other judges. And so that kind of inside knowledge was hugely valuable. And those clerks go on and get hired by firms. But even their experience is only one year within a 20 year career of a judge. And so we said, how can we take that sort of inside knowledge, reconstruct it from the data, and provide it to affirms that you have, what a clerk might know, with what a very experienced partner might know? And merge that gap so that you have the ability to spot patterns and trends about how these judges make decisions? Absolutely fascinating.

Alan
Daniel, I need to take a quick break. I’m visiting here today with Daniel Lewis, he’s the co founder parabola, we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back, I’m here today with Daniel Lewis. We’ve been visiting about Ravel law, the company that he co founded and, and before the break, we’re talking about analytics of judges. And I find it fascinating. Being able to research and profiling individual judges looking at the human side of how a person puts their thought patterns together. Now Ravel has that they go across the board with with the US. They go throughout the states, but they’re focused on federal judges, is that correct?

Daniel
That’s right, we started by testing out whether the algorithms and analytics we’re creating would work on the Supreme Court, because there’s a lot of observers of the Supreme Court, the justices are very well understood. And their patterns are easy to spot. Once we were able to validate that what we were doing work for them, then we were able to start expanding it down to the circuit judges and the federal district court judges, where there’s very few observers and much less as known. And so over time, we’re excited about being able to expand it into state judges as well. But what we’ve been able to reveal the circuit and District Court level in the federal courts is itself really exciting, because it’s giving attorneys new tools to understand how these judges think, reason and right, and the ways in which they’re influenced by other judges, by other courts, and even the cases and rules and language that they like to cite again, and again.

Alan
How do you factor in new jets coming in, then? I mean, basically, person was up for nomination or appointment? Would you? How do you go about this?

Daniel
So a new judge, when they come into our system, there’s there’s not a whole lot of background data, right, they haven’t made decisions before. So as they start to accumulate a history, then patterns from their decision making become apparent. But one of the things that we’ll be able to do is start looking backwards in time before they became a judge, too, because oftentimes, these folks served as attorneys or they worked at firms, or they worked in a lower court system as a state judge. And so we’ll be able to start putting the pieces together from their work experience before they became a judge, where hopefully, we can again, identified patterns and trends that can inform a practitioner as they think about well, this is a new judge, but I can understand how they might think about this issue based on an understanding of their work experience from the past.

Alan
How do you see Ravels precedent analysis of debt as being a real game changer?

Daniel
Well, we’ve had tremendous excitement from firms, and they’re saying, Look, we have a ton of information sources out there. But we have very few tools that are helping us make insightful decisions from all this stuff. Instead, research is taking up more and more of our attorneys time, our clients are less and less willing to actually pay for it. They expect us to know the answers rather than to have to search for them. And so the excitement that we’ve seen from firms that are seeking better ways to serve their clients more efficiently and with deeper answers, has been really validating that we’re headed in the right direction.

Alan
You know, it’s fascinating that this whole business model, you know, taking profiling judges trying to understand what makes them think the way that they do has to be invaluable in terms of the success rate of certain cases.

Daniel
Yeah, I mean, lawyers have been trying to make these types of decisions forever. It’s obviously not a new concept that you’re going to make better choices. If you have information about how the judge has ruled in the past, what’s changed is that there’s been so much information out there now that it’s really difficult to sift through it and identify the patterns and trends. So today, what affirm might do is put two or three associates on reading everything that that judge has done, and it’ll take them two or three days. And that will cost 10s of 1000s of dollars. So when you can do that with a one stop dashboard like we’re providing, the time savings are massive, and the insights that you can get take, go beyond what you might spot anecdotally or just with human observation. So lawyers know the value of this stuff. It’s just become incredibly hard for them to do it by themselves without technology.

Alan
I’m visiting here with Daniel Lewis. He’s the co founder of Ravel law. Daniel, I need to take another break, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Daniel Lewis. He’s the co founder of Ravel law. It’s a analytics program software program used to help attorneys understand judges and the way that they make decisions. So I understand now that Ravel law is now used by many law schools. And can you tell me about how that all started?

Daniel
Yeah, one of the ways in which it got started is that my co founder and I were students at Stanford Law at that time. And so our experiences were deeply rooted in the student experience. And we were able to get a lot of help from the professors and advisors at the law school, one of our advisors has been Larry Kramer, who was the Dean of Stanford Law School at the time, and is now the president of the Hewlett Foundation. And we went to him with this idea and said, Hey, we’re thinking about starting a company, we have some investors lined up. And this is the concept, he said, guys, this is a great idea, you’d be crazy to not pursue it, and you should go for it. And so from that very first experiences of being sort of fostered from the school, we’ve tried to return the favor and make gravel available to students around the country. And we actually have had a lot of students come forward to us and say, hey, well, I heard about what you were doing, and I want to be involved. Can I be your ambassador on my school’s campus? Since we don’t have anybody talking about raffle yet? And we have professors coming to us and saying, I heard about what you’re doing, and I want to teach it in my classroom, do you have any resources to help me do that? So it’s been really exciting to give it away for free to students and academics so that they can learn about it and provide it to their students and take advantage of some of the latest technology?

Alan
You know, it’s interesting when you’re starting a business, you know, going from the concept of, you know, that idea to actually put it into practice. At what point did you know that you’re on your way that you had something that it was validated in it, you saw this thing growing to where you wanted to be?

Daniel
Well, there was qualitative feedback of people saying, Wow, this is a great idea, and I want to use it, and can I get my hands on it. But you also want to validate that with actual hard numbers, too. So as we built out the website, we were never in stealth mode. Part of our story is that we launched out of the Stanford D School, which is the School of Design, and the methodology they teach there is all about a design process where you’re encouraged to listen really closely to your users. come up with ideas based on their experiences, prototype them as quickly as you can put them in front of users get their feedback and make changes. So that iterative process has been at our core, and it means that we’re constantly putting things in front of our attorneys and students to use them getting their feedback, whether it’s good or bad, and quickly or as quickly as possible, making changes and improving it. So that kind of feedback has been incredibly important, not just in helping us innovate, but in making sure that we’re on the right track.

Alan
Now the time that you’ve been with Ravel, what are some of the changes in technologies that you’ve, you’ve come across to the justice that you have to make as technology has become much better?

Daniel
Well, so at the macro level in dealing with firms, just in a few short years, firms have become much more receptive to new technology. You know, three years ago, we were having conversations about what is Cloud software, what software as a service today, those those questions aren’t being asked firms understand how our platform is being delivered and how they can take advantage of it. The questions have become more sophisticated around things like digital security and privacy. But in terms of how we actually get to build the software, we’ve also seen huge changes in the technology that’s available just in three years. We’re taking advantage of visualization technologies that were created in the labs at Stanford, but also have a lots of open source technology that’s continually evolving. And so the software that we use today to do things like machine learning, and data storage and processing are different than the ones that we were using and started with even just three years ago.

Alan
You know, so what advice would you have for an entrepreneur going into the same path that you’ve, you’ve gone through right now, based on your learning curve?

Daniel
Yeah, one of the things that I found important as a non technical person running a technology company was to be very clear headed about the things that I was good at, and the things that I was not so great at. And that meant that I needed to put together a team. There were a lots of people who said, Well, you should go out and learn to code yourself and try to do it yourself. And I thought, then that seems like a really poor use of my time. Why don’t I spend that time learning something instead trying to network and, and bring people into the fold, who actually have deep expertise in that space. And so whether it was finding a co founder who had more business experience, or bringing on the first engineers who could help build the first prototypes, it’s been serving us well to put together a very interdisciplinary group that has strengths in multiple areas of software engineering, legal experience design, because no one individual can do it all themselves. And I think we’re we’re better because we’re bringing together a unique and diverse set of experiences.

Alan
When you’re looking at into the future, how big do you see Vavilov becoming?

Daniel
Well, the industry that we’re in is a multi billion dollar industry. And law firms are a very big part of the US economy. They are shifting rather quickly, right now. They’re trying to rethink how they do business. And they’re trying to rethink how they can take advantage of technology in new ways. So our niche of it of this space of research and analytics is a multi billion dollar space, that’s not going anywhere, but it’s changing quite quickly in terms of what people expect technology can do for them, and the types of analytics that we can provide. So in a sense, we’re creating on the analytic side, a new industry that hasn’t really been around before, where lawyers are able to take advantage of insights and data driven decision making tools that they didn’t have, and that weren’t around five years ago.

Alan
I understand you’re mainly working with the top 200 law firms?

Daniel
Yeah, we primarily serve. firms that are are on the larger end of the spectrum, where they have lots of associates, lots of partners, they’re taking on fairly large cases with complex issues. But we also have solo practitioners and firms of five to 10 to 15 people using Ravel as well. So we haven’t found that there’s a difference in the value that we can provide, whether you’re a solo practitioner or a big firm, but in terms of our efforts as a small team, and in coordinating and communicating, we found it to be easier to work with some of the bigger firms just because they’re known entities and they’re, they’re more concentrated.

Alan
So Daniel, if someone wanted to find out more information, Revilla where would they go?

Daniel
So they would go to our website. It’s www.ravellaw.com.

Alan
And then are you in terms of would they contact you directly for send emails? How would they sign up for your service there?

Daniel
Yeah, so they can sign up for accounts just through the website. There’s actually the ability to try it out all for free. We have people who will answer the phones or respond to emails, you could contact us through the website or by email at contact our Ravel law.com

Alan
I’m visiting here today with Daniel Lewis. He’s the co founder of Ravel law Daniel, thanks for being on today’s show. Thanks for having me. It was fun. We’ll be right backafter these messages.

 

 

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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