Building Solutions from Legal Experience, with Katya Fisher

Zack Glaser: 

Hi, I’m Zack. 

Sara Muender: 

And I’m Sara. And this is episode 566 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Zack talks with lawyer and entrepreneur, Katya Fisher about going from idea to full fledged legal tech product. 

Zack Glaser: 

So Sara, we’ve got for our labsters in Lab and Lawyers Lab, our coaching program, we’ve got what’s called a quarterly planning retreat coming up, and I know what those words mean, but I don’t know exactly what happens or why one does the quarterly plan. Well, I guess I do because I’ve read traction, but what happens at a quarterly plan and go into that for me if you’ll, 

Sara Muender: 

Well, Zack, I’m glad that you asked because this is exactly what I wanted to talk about in this intro today. In the lawyers community, we have a coaching program called Lab, which y’all hear us talk about all the time. And within lab, we offer one day every quarter virtually to come in to a Zoom room, and me and my fellow coaches will guide all of our lab stirs through doing some quarterly planning. So it’s a virtual retreat, and whether or not you’re in lab, you need to be doing this in your business. And if you’re not doing this well, quarter three is right around the corner. In fact, I don’t know when this podcast is supposed to air, but quarter three has either started or it’s about to start 

Zack Glaser: 

Right on the cusp, right on the cusp, 

Sara Muender: 

Right on the cusp, so it’s not too late. So if you’re feeling a little bit of fomo, either come in a lab and come to our quarterly planning retreat, try it out or do your own quarterly planning retreat. And so it’s almost a full working day of first we do a retrospective of the previous quarter. So we’re going to go through and look at quarter two numbers. We’re going to assess what we worked on in quarter two, what we spent our time on, how it went, kind of take inventory of the basic healthy firm areas of business that we teach about. And then we take that information and then we use it to help us make a plan for the next quarter. So we make a list, we prioritize that list based on what are the most impactful things that we could be doing in quarter three that’s going to get us closer to our end of year goals, make the biggest difference. 

And then we help you not just prioritize that, but identify what that project might look like. Maybe I need to design a new marketing strategy, or I need to hire someone in quarter three, or I need to create and design a new intake system. And we’ll help you scope it out, project manage it, create tasks from it, plug it into your calendar, like A to Z. So like I said, it’s almost a full working day, and most people skip this step in their business and they’re like, yeah, I’ll get to it. I’ll figure out what I’m working on. But it’s so important to take that time back from working in the business and get into leadership mode and get intentional 

Zack Glaser: 

Put on that leadership hat. So I feel like a lot of people probably have a lot of these ideas in their head of, what do I want to accomplish in Q3? And it just sits in their head. And then they’ve never done a quarterly retrospective or a quarterly retreat before. What would you say to somebody who just needs to get started with this? They just need to do some sort of get their foot in the door quarterly retreat and get going. 

Sara Muender: 

Well recognize that we’re halfway through the year already. This marks the halfway point and understand you. And most people listening are probably going, oh my God, holy shit. It’s already halfway through the year. Where are my 2025 goals? I haven’t even touched them. Or maybe you have and you need to take inventory of where things are. It’s a good time to check in. So I would recommend that if they don’t come to the Lawyer’s Lab quarterly 

Zack Glaser: 

First, yeah, first thing we recommend join Lab and go to the quarterly planning retreat. I mean, 

Sara Muender: 

And we’ll just guide you all through it. We’ll hold your hand, walk you through it, give you all the worksheets and everything you need. Otherwise, just go to your calendar, find a day to do this. 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s step. Do I need a full day? 

Sara Muender: 

Find a day, block the time. I would say at least a half a day, 

Depending on the size of your team. You want to do this with a leadership team. If you have a leadership team or people on your team who help you make decisions that’s in the best interest of the business. So if it’s just you, great. We have our lobsters bringing their key team members, their leadership team members, their decision makers to the quarterly planning retreat with them. And it’s really cool to kind of meet the team members of the firms that we work with and have them be involved block the time, then go through and just look back at quarter two. What were the basic numbers? What did you spend your time on? What did you work on? And then do a brain dump list of all the things you could possibly do in quarter three. I’m not talking client work, I’m talking things that would make the business better. 

And then from there sort of prioritize. That’s how we have our lobster do it. We have a worksheet and everything, but prioritize from there and choose maybe two to three things tops. If it’s just you, if you have other team members, they might have a project assigned to them, two or three tops of those big rocks as we call them, those big projects that are going to move their business forward. And then from there, sort of just scope it out. When I say scope it out, break that down into action steps, identify what done looks like, create those milestones of that project, and then plan out the quarter, month by month, week by week. I like to take the work backwards approach. So if start with what does this look like at the end of quarter three? So we got July, August, so at the end of September, I still have 

Zack Glaser: 

Count, I do two. I use my knuckles to figure out which one has 31 days 

Sara Muender: 

And then work backwards and week by week. Okay, what am I going to accomplish by when to get this done? Because before you know what the end of the year is going to be here, and then you’re going to be like, I did nothing that I intended to do. So this is what’s required to get it done. Okay. Well, 

Zack Glaser: 

And if people have kind of questions of, well, what do I need to be focusing on? We’ve got the small firm scorecard, we’ve got the small firm roadmap, we’ve got the book, go to the website. We’ve got plenty, plenty of free information on the website and then plenty of information in the book and the podcast. So awesome. Well, sure. Sara, let’s get into my conversation with Katia Fisher now. 

Katya Fisher: 

Hi, I am Katya Fisher. I am the CEO and founder of aor. I am an attorney. I’ve been practicing for over 15 years, working mostly in mergers and acquisitions, private equity, venture capital, and corporate transactions with a focus on technology. I built Acore coming out of my experiences doing that both as a partner in a big law firm, founder of my own law practice and in-house counsel. And here I am today, and thank you for having me, 

Zack Glaser: 

Katya. Thanks for being with us. I really appreciate it. This is our first time actually meeting, but I saw you at the Women in AI Summit, and I saw you talking about, it was actually a small little introduction into what you do and what you’ve done and your journey, and I thought we need to talk to her more. So I really appreciate you being here. 

Katya Fisher: 

Thank you so much. 

Zack Glaser: 

So let’s kind of start off a little bit. You began, like you said, you started practicing law about 15 years ago. You began where a lot of our listeners are right now, small, medium, on your own solo. Tell me a little bit about your kind of Preor attorney experience here. 

Katya Fisher: 

So I graduated law school during the great recession. 

I went to law school. I came out, I thought my life is going to be set right. I’m going to go work in a big law firm, and that’s it. I’m going to be on Wall Street and life is good. And I went to law school and everything’s taken care of for me, and I got a big wake up call. I came out of law school on those opportunities. They just weren’t there. And I did have job offers, but they weren’t my dream job. They weren’t my dream salary. And I decided to do something pretty crazy. I decided to hang out my own shingle, which at age 27 as a female in New York, this is pre WeWork, this is before everyone had a smartphone. I mean, it’s crazy if you think about it. This is really a time, technology has changed so fast and the way that we see entrepreneurship and solo lawyers and all of that. It was a very, very, very different time. And so I opened up my law practice. I started out just advising friends and family and whoever I 

Zack Glaser: 

Could get my hands on. Been there, yeah, yeah, 

Katya Fisher: 

Been there, exactly. And not really having a specialty also because whatever people needed, if I thought that I could do it, if I felt that I could learn it, be competent enough to get it done, talk to lawyers in my network who could maybe help or advise me, I did it. And that’s how I started my practice. And I grew it into becoming an outside general counsel For A lot of entrepreneurs. And so the way that I realized that I could do something that was very kind of unique and special was that I would go to entrepreneurs and I would say, listen, you’re going to need a big law firm at some point, but you might not need them just yet. And those big law firms, they’re going to charge you a lot of money 

And they’re going to tell you that you need X, but they’re not going to look at the whole picture because those lawyers are highly specialized. So they might say to you, okay, you’re starting, I don’t know a venture fund. You’re going to need to have a master feeder fund structure, and we’re going to set it up for you in Cayman and Delaware and blah, blah, blah. But they’re going to forget conveniently to tell you, oh yeah, you have a New York office with employees. You need to register as a foreign entity authorized to do business in New York. They’re going to skip over those parts because it’s not where they make a lot of money. And again, because they’re very focused and specialized. And so that’s how I built my practice. I would say, listen, I will hire those lawyers. I’m not going to compete against them. I’ll hire them and where I can do things myself, I will do it where I can get things done and where I need the bigger firms, I will take care of it, but I’m going to keep the costs down for you, and I’m going to bring up the quality because you’re going to get better service. Things are going to be done better. I’m going to know how to manage them. And that’s how I started off my practice. And then within a few years, I had grown it into a six figure, very nice small law firm. 

And I was doing great, and I was actually really happy, and I really enjoyed it. I loved the autonomy. I loved being able to do whatever I felt like doing and doing things differently every single day. It was very stressful at the same time, because obviously I had no one to fall back on or to blame if something goes wrong, if I make a mistake, I don’t have a boss to be like, go talk to that. Right? I didn’t have anybody. It was all on me. It Was all on me. And I will say that there were definitely sleepless nights. There was a lot of time spent in the New York Law library in midtown learning and studying things. We did not have access to information the way that we do now in legal. I mean, the landscape has changed completely. 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s not that long ago. That’s not really that long ago in the grand scheme of things. 

Katya Fisher: 

It’s not that long ago at all. But people don’t realize how fast things changed back in the day. You can get access to anything on the internet now in terms of information. And now obviously with generative AI and blah blah. At the time, it was hard. I went to the library to go ahead and get copies of form agreements and things like that. There was a lot of gatekeeping at the time. And so the good news, I would say is it made me very resilient and it made me extremely scrappy. So When I went and I started, I then became a partner in a big law firm. I moved into big law, and then after big law, I moved in-house. And my experience running my own law practice gave me such a competitive advantage over everything that I’ve ever done since then. 

Zack Glaser: 

Explain that a little bit more, dig into that a little bit more. Why did that give you the competitive advantage, do you think? 

Katya Fisher: 

Sure. Well, I’ll tell you for the most part, especially when I went. So I went in-house about six years ago. I became the general counsel to the construction group. Constructor Is, it’s headquartered in Switzerland, but we have a venture fund. We have a technology company. We have even the majority stake of a university in Germany, which is nonprofit, fully accredited institution. We have a family office behind it. And I was put in charge of managing legal for all of these things. And on day one, I was absolutely terrified. So the guy, guy who manages whose family office is, he’s a very, very, very prolific, very active technology investor and entrepreneur named Serge Bell. And Serge hired me to be his legal advisor. I wasn’t actually given a title. I wasn’t given general counsel or CLO. I was just told I’m legal advisor to search. Everyone is a little unsure. 

Zack Glaser: 

Do the things, do the things I need you to do. Yeah. 

Katya Fisher: 

Well, the funniest thing is, the first thing he said to me on my first day is he said, I don’t really know what to do with you, so make yourself useful. What did I get myself into again? Why do I always say yes to crazy things? Why do I always have to push my, why did I do this? And so I went to Switzerland on my first business trip, and I’m so scared, and I’m so nervous. I don’t have an office there. And I bring my little laptop and I go into the coffee break room, a table there to go get access to wifi and things like that. And then I started to meet people and talk to people, and I started to see all of the inefficiencies, all of the problems, all of the challenges. I started putting the puzzle pieces together. The thing is that everybody inside of a big organization, what I realized is that, again, people come from these big companies. They’re trained in this very specific way to do what they know how to do. They’re not trained to look at the big picture and to just see, Hey, there’s a mess. Let’s go clean it up. 

And so I started going in any department where I saw a problem. I was like, all right, let’s fix this. Or I could just take different things that I had learned, all this disparate stuff from taking on all of these different projects and apply it to anything you want to acquire a nonprofit university. Fine, I know about nonprofit regulations. Let’s figure this out. Tax issues, hr, employment visas, immigration, corporate, whatever. Because I know how to figure things out. I know how to look for what I don’t know, and I know how to get things done. So very quickly after that, I became Vice Chairman of Construction Group, not very quickly, a year and a half later, 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s pretty quick. I think you can say that’s pretty quickly. 

Katya Fisher: 

So I was given a title that went way beyond general counsel because of the fact that I had done things with such breadth. So yeah, I was really intimidated and very, very insecure coming from my background only to realize that it was, it’s such a supercar when I managed outside law firms. When I manage lawyers, I know things that they don’t know. I am not deep necessarily in everything. So I have to rely on other attorneys. And that’s what a good general counsel does, obviously. But I know how to ask the right questions. 

Zack Glaser: 

And that’s you. I mean, that’s kind what you were doing with your first job. You were kind of niching into not having that niche. You’re kind of bringing those people together and filling the spaces. And it sounds like that’s what you were doing in the corporate. So how did you decide, and how did you manage which one of those things to focus on? I imagine that you were in there and you probably saw 15 to 20 different places where you’re like, Ooh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. And how did you decide which of those things to focus on? 

Katya Fisher: 

That’s a great question. I would say, first of all, I am diagnosed A DHD since I was little. 

Zack Glaser: 

I was kind of guessing that with what your superpower is, and I think that’s, but it’s a superpower. It really is provided, 

Katya Fisher: 

Are you kidding? I brag about it. I’m like, I’m adhd. The thing about being a DH ADHD is this, yeah, it means that it is really hard to focus on things that bore you. At least that’s what it means for me. Don’t, I’m not the poster child for the whole community. But the point is that for me, things that are not interesting for me are very difficult to focus on when I’m interested, my ability to hyperfocus. I can sit in a chair and sit on a screen and hyperfocus on documents, language, emails, whatever for hours. I can work for 14 to 16 hours a day, no problem. And for me, it’s fun. And so when I came into this ecosystem, for me, it’s always just been a lot of fun. I just enjoy it thoroughly. So I would say that that’s the first part in terms of learning what to focus on. I’m very, very good at hyper-focusing And Being able to do a lot of things. So that was, I would say that B was also just kind of understanding structure and how you build things. And I think one of the most important things, and when we get into talking about aquore, you’ll see how all these things actually, they all lead to error. One of the biggest things that I think that I really learned having my own business was the ability to see into the future and to prepare for the problems that my future self is going to encounter. And so because I built this law practice over years, I knew that in the very beginning, when you have your own law practice and you have a couple of clients, you can afford to be a little bit disorganized. You don’t have to spend days organizing your emails and organizing your files. You don’t have that much documentation to go through. So once you need it, you’ll find it and you’ll get it. But it compounds every day and years go by. And all of a sudden, when you have hundreds of clients and hundreds of projects, and a lot of those clients continuously ask you questions 

About those cases, about those projects, those deals from a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, they’ll reach out. It’ll be people you haven’t heard from in years, et cetera, and they expect you to be totally on top of it. If you are not super, super, super well organized, you are in a lot of trouble. And so for me, the way that I build anything is trying to think about that. How do you build the infrastructure to prepare for what’s going to happen next and compound on that. So that’s sort of how I choose what to focus on, is that you have to think about it in that way. I think that’s one. I think number two is that one thing that I think has made me successful as an attorney, not just a business person, but as a lawyer, is I think about risk and cost. So whenever I see something, the first thing I think of is like, okay, what’s it going to cost me not to pay attention to this? What’s it going to cost me if we sign this contract and then we have to break it later? 

Lawyers don’t normally think that way. So for example, if I have lawyers, it’s very common. They’ll come to me and they’ll say, Kai, you don’t understand. We didn’t fill out this form for this thing. There’s going to be a fine. We’re going to get fined. Why aren’t you paying attention? Why aren’t we filling it out? And I’ll say, because we have a hundred other things going on, but we’re going to get a fine. How much is the fine? $45? But that’s the way that I think. So I try to just kind of think in my mind, what’s going to have the most impact, the most value, and cause the least amount of damage, obviously, and protect the company’s interests. And that’s how I’ll focus. 

Zack Glaser: 

I really appreciate that description because it’s easy a lot of times to say, well, I focus on the thing that’s most important, which is really what you’re saying there, but you just kind of went through how you determine what the most important thing is. And I really appreciate that because when somebody says, well, I focus on what’s important, I’m like, yeah, but how do you figure out what that is? So yeah, that organized part though, doesn’t always flow with the A DHD Mind. I, I know I need to be organized here, which I think is incredible to say for me, because I can sit here and focus on something specific, but the organization is the part that’s the boring part. And so I’m like, that’s, or it feels indulgent to organize everything because sometimes it does get fun. So I think there are probably a lot of attorneys out there right now who feel that of, I started, I had four clients, I could afford to not have everything, and now I’m swamped and sunk. Let’s get into your journey into eor. And before we go into that part, if you’ll kind of enlighten us as to what it is that AOR is and does. 

Katya Fisher: 

So with respect to aor, what AOR is and does is AOR is a platform for deal makers. It is a platform for having foresight into your deals, and in terms of the ability to actually go and really analyze and understand what’s there. And so what do I mean by that? I’ll start with the problem and I’ll move to the solution. 

Zack Glaser: 

Love it. 

Katya Fisher: 

So the problem is this, throughout my career, I’ve always seen the same thing, which is that we’re constantly spending so much time trying to get answers to questions on our legal documents and corporate documents and data. And as I was mentioning before, in terms of organization looking for things, people always asking questions over and over and over again on the same docs and nobody remembering anything. Think about it. Now, if you work particularly inside of a company that does any m and a investment deals, venture capital, private equity, you are constantly dealing with mountains and mountains and mountains of legal documents. And those legal documents tell the story of your deal. 

They tell the story of the business that you have acquired or invested in, and they tell the story of what’s the corporate governance, what are your rights, what are the calculations on a waterfall, if you sell your interest or anything like that. And then in order to be able to get that information every single time, let’s just start even first with the acquisition or the investment. Let’s start with the due diligence phase. You have this funny gap. There’s a transparency gap. And the gap starts with first there’s the deal maker. The deal maker could be the in-house lawyer, 

Zack Glaser: 

Absolutely, 

Katya Fisher: 

But it might also be the CEO, it might be the managing partner of a fund. It might be the CFO. And those people will go ahead and they will negotiate the term sheet. And so the term sheet will get negotiated, let’s say like a series A investment into a startup, a managing partner, partner, and a fund will negotiate those terms, and that sheet will be one page to five pages long, and it’s a non-binding term sheet, but basically the person who negotiated it, they know the deal. They’re like, this is what I want. This is what I am approving. This is how much money we’re going to go ahead and invest. This is how the rights that we expect to have, et cetera, et cetera. And then what happens is that then as the deal is being negotiated, they go ahead and they send this term sheet over to counsel, and you go to an outside law firm, and the outside law firm comes back with about 300 pages worth of deal documents, right? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. And 

Katya Fisher: 

So now comes a question. They come back and they say, okay, cool. Sign it. 

Zack Glaser: 

What am I signing? 

Katya Fisher: 

Exactly. So now suddenly you’ve spent tons of money, or someone has spent tons of money. There’s a lot of time spent, there’s the best lawyers in the what have you. Well, you have one of several choices. Number one is you can just trust them. Just say, all right, you just sign. Okay. Number two is you have to read everything yourself and spend a whole night going through everything and managing those lawyers and talking to those lawyers or somebody in your company. The in-house counsel, think about it. The outside lawyer is incentivized to spend as much time as possible on this deal. They charge by the hour. The in-house lawyer is incentivized to get things done. The CFO wants to close, the managing partner wants to close. The deal is going to, we have until tomorrow to make an offer. And so here we have this challenge and people just, that’s just the way it’s, that’s life. That’s how we do things. AOR solves that problem. So starting with that, what AOR looks at is the ability to upload the entire deal, all the deal documents and everything, and get all of the answers, all of the information almost instantly, but with the understanding of context and accuracy. 

So for example, you could upload your term sheet with those hundreds of pages of deal docs, and we have a tool called Deal Verifier where you press a button, there is no prompting. You Go make yourself a cup of coffee. It’s like a deep research tool. You come back, you will get a full report showing you where the terms in the term sheet are now reflected in the deal documents, exactly where to look. It’ll show you references. You can look right there on the page. You can verify everything yourself, and it will tell you where the anomalies are. So if there have been any deviations or changes, you can see them and you might see those deviations and say, oh, yeah, I know about this. I approved it, it’s fine. Or maybe you’ll see something and be like, wait a second. What is this? Right? 

So it’s able to do that. It’s then able to take you throughout the entire life cycle, because deals don’t end when you make the investment deals end when you make the exit. So what happens is that you end up with all of these documents, and again, the larger the company is, the larger the investment is. If we’re going from venture into P with time, the information and materials compound. So what happens is that, think about it like this. Once you get to a company that you invested in years ago, and now it’s like a series D company worth billions of dollars. If you start having questions on the docs, let’s say you’re a major shareholder and you’re like, okay, I don’t know. I have a friend and I really want him to sit on the board of directors of this company. Can I, what do I do? 

What are my rights? Do I have enough votes? Do I have enough shares? What classes of shares do I need to have to appoint board seat? Who else’s approval do I need? How do I call a board meeting? How do I call a shareholder meeting? What are the timelines of notice? All of these questions. Normally you would take those questions, and once you get to a big company, you would go to a big law firm and they have to take a look at the shareholder agreement, the bylaws, every single side letter that’s ever been signed or executed, every single amendment. So you might have a massive zip folder. They’re going to charge you $20,000, they’re going to take a week. Aport will do it for you in a few minutes. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. And I imagine not charge you $20,000 to do it. Yeah. Okay. So that makes sense into what you’re saying when you were saying this is kind of going to give you a little bit of idea of what eCore is when you’re talking about having the organization of everything, but it also makes sense with your kind of putting all the little things together. This is 

The left hand doesn’t ever talk to the right hand. We don’t get all the, I’m putting air quotes here, the parties in a room, which would be all the documents in the same room to be able to ask them questions. Then let’s take a little bit of a step back and say, because I think there are a lot of people that would be listening to this going, man, I would love to take the ideas that I have, that I see the issues that I see in my law practice, the places that I think that I could create efficiencies, and I’d love to turn that into a company or a product or something like that. What was kind of the moment? What made you say, I want to build something to do this, instead of I’m just going to make SharePoint work for us or something like that. I’m going to hack together another product. Obviously very tech savvy, and you probably could have kind of duct taped something together. What’s that moment? 

Katya Fisher: 

So there’s several things. So first of all, I’ve been an attorney in tech for 15 years. I was a chief privacy officer of a big law firm as well. I brought a firm through ISO certification, GDPR, et cetera. So just through my role and through my experience, I know tech very well, and I would say that I know it significantly better than most attorneys, 

And I understand all of those details and everything else. What basically happened was that I always wanted to build a business. I wanted to do more. This going in house was, it was like a left turn that I made, but I had always started out, I had my law practice, as I mentioned. It was very happy. I loved it. I really, really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of things actually in building a law practice that if I could go back in time, I would’ve done and to really scale it for me, when generative AI came out and really peaked, I looked at it and I thought, oh, well, this is so cool. I started using it all the time and thinking, well, maybe it can solve these problems. And then I realized that it can’t, and so it can’t in the format that it’s in, There’s No product out there that did what I wanted done. Because yes, every product out there, everything in AI does summaries, DocuSign, Adobe. You don’t need a legal tech products anymore. Everything they go use free Chay, gt, whatever. If you’re a lawyer and you’ve tried those products perfectly well that they’re not that good And That they’re not very useful to you or to your practice, and then there are additional challenges. There’s the quality, there’s the accuracy, there’s the ability to verify. There’s specialized knowledge, right? Because chat boutique, even the higher versions that you pay for, it can look unbelievably smart because it has a lot of words, but then when you really look at it, you’re like, this is garbage. 

Zack Glaser: 

And it’s also really nice. To me. It’s like, great idea, Zack. And then it tells me just total trash. 

Katya Fisher: 

And it’s total trash. And so the thing is that these AI tools, they’re very amazing. They’re amazing. They’re amazing. They use ’em all the time, but they’re limited in terms of those abilities. And so that was one reason why I wanted to build. That was one reason why I understood that it’s a lot more than frankensteining like, oh, I’m going to use a GPT agents and do whatever. I wanted to do something incredibly sophisticated. And there’s also security and privacy, which I think about a lot, and I think about a lot in terms of the future of generative AI and the future of legal practice. And so I wanted to build a product where I could bring in all my knowledge, My Knowledge of tech, my knowledge of building software, my knowledge of legal. I wanted to be able to do something that, by the way, when I say it’s for deal makers, so deal makers are also, they’re lawyers in law firms. They’re solo lawyers, they’re small law firms, they’re midsize law firms. They’re doing those things as well. And I wanted to create a product that could really speak to these various audiences. Another Thing that I think about a lot is people always ask, well, is this for lawyers? Is it for non-lawyers? Is it for this? Is it for that? And I said, well, look at Intuit. Look at QuickBooks. Before Intuit was a thing, you didn’t have software for accountants, and now you have software that’s used by accountants and by their clients, right? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. 

Katya Fisher: 

So that was another thing that I thought about a lot. What does the future of legal practice look like? How can you really empower lawyers? How can you empower our various people and just create something that’s useful for all? I’m also very fortunate, I remember I represent a tech entrepreneur who has built multiple tech unicorns. They founded Parallels, which was a software where you could use Mac on Windows and Windows on Mac. It used to be on every little computer in America, if you remember Parallels 

Zack Glaser: 

Used to have to have it in mind. 

Katya Fisher: 

Okay. So yeah, I represent the founder of Parallels, ais, which is a global cyber protection and data backup firm, which in qt, which is one of the main PE firms in tech in the world, just acquired a majority stake this past year. It was all in the media, many other companies, many other funds. So part of this is that it’s not just me sitting by myself with an idea. It’s that I work really with the right people and the right experts. 

Zack Glaser: 

We’ve got the idea, you know, want something solved. You’ve got the capacity to solve it. You’ve got the people around you that can help you do this. You’ve got the experience to design this, the knowledge to do it, but how do you go from blank sheet of paper to I am now expressing what I want. I’m able to take this to somebody or some other people and get them on board with me. 

Katya Fisher: 

That was a very, very, very hard thing to do. 

And it took me a long time. I could see everything in my head. I could see the whole vision, what I want to do, what do I want to solve, how I want this to work, how I want that to work, what are the other products that I’m going to bring into this software? How is it going to do this? How is it going to function? Right? I could see everything. And I had a big challenge because I had multiple challenges along the way. Number one is that many people when you’re a founder and you want to explain something, and then they’re like sentence or less, 

Zack Glaser: 

Oh God. I mean, I see that. But yeah, like, oh God, 

Katya Fisher: 

Okay, this is going to be hard to explain to you this whole, once you see it, then you’ll understand. But it’s difficult with engineers and software developers, they’re not attorneys. They have zero clue what it is that you need. They don’t see what you see. So for example, even with the engineers that I would hire when we first started working on prototypes and different things like that, and they would do an AI summary, the AI summary would come out just as bad as all the other stuff 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s 

Katya Fisher: 

Out there. And they’re like, it’s a summary. What’s the problem? 

Zack Glaser: 

And they don’t know that it is just as bad or that it is bad, because that’s not their job. Right? 

Katya Fisher: 

Exactly. And so that was really hard. What I actually learned, and maybe for some people, this is intuitive or maybe they have the experience, but for me, I had to learn It was, rather than trying to explain it, letting somebody live it, meaning I would have to sit and show someone, my process, guys, this is what happens. A request comes in from one of my companies. This is a deal. This is the deal that we’re negotiating. These are the questions that come up. This is how I take a look at it. This is the product that I use. This is how I open it in my email. This is where I save it. And just going through and doing that over and over and over and over again was really, really critical. And again, it’s super complex because part of it is understanding my workflow, and the other is understanding my thought process. What am I looking for? What do I value? How do I value certain things over others? What do I consider to be a good response and so forth. So that was a lot of work. Yeah, 

Zack Glaser: 

That sounds tedious, but 

Katya Fisher: 

It was a lot. 

Zack Glaser: 

Correct. It sounds like it would work, but it sounds very tedious. Yeah, 

Katya Fisher: 

It’s a lot of work. I mean, this is an enormous amount of work. I’m also, again, fortunate, I have a legal team that reports to me. So I had other people that we sit on a mountain of data, we sit on a mountain of projects and deals. We have a competitive advantage in that sense. And they were also doing a lot of the product testing and development, because I could use these attorneys to go ahead and help in terms of discussing, this is how we do it, this is how we look at this, This Is why we want this. This is the problem statement. So that was one big part of it. Then the next one was kind of messaging to the world. So another thing that I would say for anyone who’s out there is you want to start with the problem, and you start with why, and you start with what it is that you’re trying to solve. Because especially now with these new technologies, it’s so easy just to talk about the tech and to say, well, I’m developing this thing that has all this technology and these tools and this and this, that, and because it’s exciting, but you’ll lose people and they just fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. And I had that happen to me. Actually, no one fell asleep while I was talking 

Zack Glaser: 

Proverbially. Yeah, yeah. 

Katya Fisher: 

People’s eyes glaze over because they’re like, oh, okay. But the second I started sitting down with people and saying, Hey, look, have you ever had this happen to you? Do you know this exact problem? I’m talking about? How do you solve it? Then all of a sudden, I saw that people started to become much more responsive, and that’s something that’s important for our customers to make sure they really understand. Why is Acor different? Why is it not? Why can’t you just use chat GPT? Why not some other product? Why this specific product? Why is this special? Why do I need it? I think that’s critical. It’s very important to our team internally, our team, right? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. 

Katya Fisher: 

They need to really understand what is our goal, what are we building towards? What are the problems that we’re trying to solve? And so just those two things. But it’s not easy. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s a lot of hard work. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. Okay. Well, I’m actually, because before we got on, before we started recording, I was talking to you about how I think if someone were to look at Erico right now and then look at where you started, it looks like a very sexy path. I’m an attorney. I went, and then I moved into constructor group, and then I built this thing. But like you were saying, it’s a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of tedium. It’s a lot. Right. So what I’d like to ask before we kind of are done here is what would you tell somebody looking back, what would you tell Katya at the beginning of this path? And let me tell you where the beginning is. At the beginning of starting eor, what would you tell Katya there to help her out? 

Katya Fisher: 

If I could go back in time to the beginning of starting Eco, I think that the most important thing I wish I had done, which I did end up doing, but it took a little bit of time, is really find the A players who can be your partners on this journey. 

Zack Glaser: 

Okay. 

Katya Fisher: 

Really figure out what are the skills that you are lacking in, and try to find the best person that you can possibly find to help you and convince that person to join you. 

Zack Glaser: 

Man, that takes a lot of self inner looking, and yeah, you kind of have to figure out who you are in order to do that, and then be humble. That takes a lot of humility to say, I’m not great at that thing. I’m going to go get somebody that really is very good at that thing. I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, so then last question. Sure. Let’s go back to the beginning. What would you tell Katia right out of law school? So the people that are starting their startups, starting their small firms, they’re right out of law school or just coming out of something else. What would you tell her there? 

Katya Fisher: 

I mean, I’d give her a big high five. I did great. I’m happy. 

Zack Glaser: 

Love it, love 

Katya Fisher: 

It, love it. No, listen. But for other people who are just starting out, this is always kind of my thing that I tell everybody is that being fearless, it doesn’t mean that you’re not afraid. It just means that you push yourself past that fear to go and do the things that you want to do. My path has been very tough ridden with lots of, like I said before, sleepless nights, especially in the beginning, lots of anxiety, lots of moments of just wondering what did I get myself into? Lots of moments of self-doubt if you have the ability to really, this is so corny, but it’s so true, and it’s something that I really, I understand it’s truth at a later stage in my life, but the ability to really, truly believe in yourself is the most important gift that you can ever give yourself. 

Zack Glaser: 

We’re ending on that. I love that. I love that. Katya, thank you so much for being with me and sharing your knowledge, your path, and all of this stuff. I really appreciate being able to expand upon the story that I heard at the Women in AI Summit and hear about all this. Thank you, 

Katya Fisher: 

Zack. Thank you so much.