The Future of Law with Ryaan Ibtisam | We Live to Build Podcast

Ryaan [00:00:00]: 
If AI is going to replace your junior level people, then who is going to be promoted to the mid level and senior level? You know, like in all the investment banking, private equity, legal industry. That's how it works. Like you work through to get to that senior level. And so I think the answer we both came up with or kind of were comfortable talking about was that it's not going to entirely replace your lower associate classes. What's going to happen is welcome back. 

Sean[00:00:28]: 
To another episode of the We Love to Build podcast. Today's episode is with Ryan Ibtisam, the co founder and head of legal at Symphony AI, a company that has been funded over $5 million and has teams split between Silicon Valley and New York. Their focus is to help Silicon startups and venture capital firms to better manage their legal matters. In this conversation we talked about the legal profession, the current and future situations for it, as well as how AI is going to take the center stage for this profession. 

So if you're interested in AI or legal matters for startups, then you're going to love this episode. Now, before we jump into the episode, I do need to mention that this episode is sponsored by Symphony. They are the modern law firm for startups. They started because they realized that trying to get legal matters handled for startups is quite difficult and very expensive, especially when starting out and sometimes it's prohibitively expensive. And so they thought that if they set out to use AI to make it possible for startups to handle things much more quickly and cheaply, then they would be able to capture a large segment of the burgeoning startup ecosystem. If you're looking to have help with your legal matters, then go check it out. Symphony AI. Let's get to the interview. What is it that you love so much about the legal profession that made you want to dedicate your life to it? 

Ryaan [00:02:14]: 
The first time I kind of thought about it was heading into high school, and I didn't go to high school in the US by the way. So I came to the US to pursue a legal education, obviously going through undergrad and then getting a job doing all the things and then kind of getting into the law after that. So I very much appreciated the justice system here and kind of all the opportunities that the law gives you and the way to think about it. I think for me the big part is thinking about things, analyzing things, and talking it over with colleagues. Like the. The biggest draw for me. 

Sean[00:02:53]: 
Why is AI the future of the legal profession? 

Ryaan [00:02:56]: 
The big part of what AI is doing to the legal profession is making Lawyers evolve. I don't think think that AI is going to replace lawyers, but I do think it will supplement a lot of lawyers practices. And what, where AI is right now. Like in, in our, my previous firm, they were very AI friendly and so we had AI policies to go through. How do you supplement your work? How do you make it more efficient in order for you to service your clients the best way? And so making the jump over to Symphony, I got to go one step further and be like, how much is AI capable of? And like I've really gotten a chance to like play around with Symphony and go through everything that it's capable of. And there's like I'm very impressed and scared at the same time that the AI is capable of doing so much for, for lawyers in this field and where it's heading. 

Sean[00:03:55]: 
You said you didn't think AI was going to replace lawyers. Why are you scared then? 

Ryaan [00:03:59]: 
Not scared in a way that AI is going to replace lawyers, but scared in the way that I didn't know this technology existed. Like being able to draft documents. The way that I'm seeing, being able to go through those nuances and now pick out those issues that junior lawyers on a day to day basis kind of go through. It's kind of like I'm not a technology person. And so seeing it in the state that it's in, I can only imagine what it's going to be in the next few years. 

Sean[00:04:31]: 
I think the issue that I'm seeing with AI is that people are saying it's not going to replace people, but actually what it's being done, what's being done with it is training it to do the things that at least entry level people can handle right now. Which means that the thing that scares me is is that if the goal is for people to be able to use the AI to do their job better, that means that they're senior level people. 

And so if we get rid of the junior level class of jobs because an AI can handle it, then when our generation dies or retires, there won't be another class of humans or generation of humans that learns that entry level position to be able to learn how to become a senior level. And so then the question is, do we then have to teach AI to take over the mid level and senior level jobs? Do we have to stop working because AI is going to do all of our jobs in a few decades? I think those are the larger questions, but obviously not the focus of Symphony. 

Ryaan [00:05:31]: 
You make such a good point. Because I've thought about This, I just had a conversation with one of my friends who's in private equity last week and we kind of discussed this where it was like, if AI is going to replace your junior level people, then who is going to be promoted to the mid level and senior level? You know, like in all the investment banking, private equity, legal industry, that's how it works. Like you work through to get to that senior level. And so I think the answer we both came up with or kind of were comfortable talking about was that it's not going to entirely replace your lower associate classes. 

What's going to happen is let's say a firm right now hires 10 people, that's going down to two people. And you are just becoming that much more efficient. And those two people, you are hopefully you're counting on them to be good enough and work hard enough to get to your mid level and then senior people. So I think thinning your associate classes and then the human burden is kind of where I see AI going. 

Sean[00:06:37]: 
I think it's noble to have that concept, but I don't think that's what's going to happen because so I vibe coded my way to a SaaS MVP. I previously had a startup where we were funded and we had 16 people full time. This is product marketing, quality assurance, software operations. And I did more in three weeks by myself than a team of 16 did in four years for $200 instead of a million. 

So I'm worried about the designers and developers and the product managers and the CTOs and the product architecture because I was able with my knowledge, which isn't that much. I mean I worked alongside those people for years, but I didn't do their jobs full time. Right. I'm not, I didn't go to school for their jobs. I'm not technically trained like a lot of them and using an AI, no code tool, I was able to do more than them for a fraction of the price at a fraction of the time. 

The only time I would consider hiring a developer now is after I probably have 20 or 30 clients that I'm managing and I go, okay, I want to add more features and I just don't want to manage the development anymore. So, so I'll hire a human to work with the AI from now on. So I think a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. 

But, but yeah, I, I, I don't want to go too off on a tangent because I do want to talk about the legality, right, the, the focus of what you're doing because your knowledge and Expertise is in the legal field. We could talk about this all day long, and I do sometimes, but I do want to focus on something where AI is valuable. What is it exactly that Symphony is doing and why is it unique? 

Ryaan [00:08:33]: 
We serve startups, we serve VCs, we serve them because of a lot of pain points that they've identified, which is as we raise rounds, it costs us a lot of money. All we care about is to not talk to the lawyers and get through and have that funding from point A to point B, one cost. The second part of that conversation is how long it takes to raise these rounds. Symphony, what it's doing is literally eradicating both of those things for you. You are getting that efficiency point A to point B and your costs are being cut four or five times from a traditional law firm in Silicon Valley in New York. And so that is our customer base. 

That's who we are going after. Those are the people that are coming to us right now. Nothing like this exists on the market right now. Like I, you could go to ChatGPT, you could go to Gemini, you could go to any of the other AI and kind of give them the prompts that you would give Symphony and you would get a much more refined product out of Symphony because it, it's been trained to do this type of stuff, you know. And I, I was skeptical at first. I went in and I compare, I put two computers by my side and I was like, all right, the computers aren't even sharing this. 

So put the same prompt in Symphony to give me this. Put the Same prompt in ChatGPT, put the same prompt in another AI. And what I was noticing was the other AIs are capable, but they don't give you the full story. And that's where Symphony is different. Like running a Series A, for example, Symphony can do it from point A to point B in about 30 minutes to an hour. All documents from term sheet to close. Nobody out there can do that right now. And that's what makes us unique. 

Sean[00:10:23]: 
How do you know as a lawyer that you can trust your AI to give you something that is legally binding? 

Ryaan [00:10:31]: 
You don't, right? That's, that's the easy answer. You really don't. You have to review it. That's, that's why the lawyer in the Loop exists. Like our AI plus Lawyer offering is pretty much like, hey you, you can go the self serve route and it won't be legal advice coming from the tech company. You can use Symphony and get this, but when you use a lawyer plus the AI plus Lawyer feature. 

What you're getting is that lawyer review. And for me to be able to go in and actually review these documents, it's no different than having a human, an associate who it could be prone to mistake, someone younger who is doing a lot of this stuff, like the drafting up front. So I get the drafted documents to me much faster than I would with a human drafting them. And then my job is obviously to review, to refine and to make them customer ready, client ready. 

Sean[00:11:27]: 
When I was building my SaaS tool originally I designed it as a SaaS and then I spoke with a number of people and they said, you shouldn't be building a SaaS with this, should be using this to serve customers directly where you do the service with them. Because you could charge a lot more, you can get revenue a lot faster. And from there you can determine what you should put into a SaaS version that you could sell at a lower price point where you're not touching the clients, you know, accounts, things like that. 

So I like that you have this ability to have a lawyer. So how do you plan on filling the time of these lawyers? Like, are you going to be hiring a bunch of lawyers? You're hiring experienced lawyers or people out of school that need experience? Like, how are you, how are you guys planning on staffing that? 

Ryaan [00:12:10]: 
A lawyer at Symphony is going to be much more efficient because the AI is helping to automate a lot of that back end. So we won't need to hire that many lawyers in the future. But our plan is to do as the need arises. As our like service areas and our practices evolve. We would love to kind of manage and see how that plays out. 

Sean[00:12:33]: 
Can you ever see Symphony not hiring human lawyers and instead building an agent lawyer that can kind of check the, the core AI for the work it's done? 

Ryaan [00:12:47]: 
That is kind of how Symphony is built, right? The final product is very close to finish, like 95, sometimes 99% ready to go. And with company formation and whatnot, it's 100% ready to go. But when we talk about regulations, obviously an engagement is with an attorney and an attorney is responsible for that work. So regulatorily, any I can't be a lawyer. So you have to have a person with a license reviewing everything before it goes out to the client. And kind of what we've noticed is the, the two different coasts handle this very differently. On the west coast, people don't want to deal with that human that much. 

Like they prefer that AI plus lawyer. Like let us deal with the AI and Then we want this document reviewed. That New York crowd wants to wine and dine. Like, hey, I, I want the human interface. Like, I know whatever you do on the back end, you do, but I want to deal with a human. I don't want to talk to an AI. Like, when I have a question, I'm going to pick up the phone and. 

Sean[00:13:55]: 
Give you a call for the people out in New York. Is your model getting a bunch of law firms to use your product on behalf of the client? 

Ryaan [00:14:05]: 
No. So it's not law firms. Right. So Symphony has a law firm component to it. So we are serving our clients as a law firm. So we don't, we're not going to law firms. The clients are coming to us and the clients are signing engagement letters as they would with the traditional law firm. And then on the back end, obviously we're able to be much more efficient by using Symphony. 

Sean[00:14:29]: 
So you're giving them that wine and dine physical presence kind of thing. 

Ryaan [00:14:33]: 
Out in New York, in New York, that has worked out a lot better. But obviously a lot of startups being out of Delaware, but being situated in Silicon Valley, it's. They prefer that model of the AI. So we don't really have to adjust our model as much. 

Sean[00:14:51]: 
I think you being in the east coast and having your, your knowledge and experience of that probably brought a lot of value for ARPAN to be able to have that piece. Otherwise, I think it would have probably just been AI. Let's, let's push AI only. Right? 

Ryaan [00:15:06]: 
I agree. Me being out on the east coast really, really helps because I'm able to get out to New York, like very, very frequently. I'm able to interact with the customers out there. And it's so different. Like when I was in San Francisco, it's just a whole different vibe out there with the clients that you're meeting with, with the people. And then it's in New York, it's still kind of the conservative suit and tie type of deal and a little bit less, but you know what I mean? Like in the business casual sense, like it's still there. 

They still expect you to go to lunch and kind of talk about these things. And that's kind of how the experience plays out. But in New York, I feel like you are forming a lot deeper relationships. Obviously the human factor plays into it a little bit, but that client loyalty is a lot better. They want, they want counsel from start to an acquisition or to IPO. 

Sean[00:16:05]: 
Hey, just give me 10 seconds of your time. I really appreciate you listening to the episode so far, and I hope you're loving it. And if you are, I would love to ask you to subscribe to the channel because what we do is a lot of work, and every week we bring you a new guest and a new story. And what we do requires so much love so that we can bring you something amazing. And every week, we're trying really hard to get better guests that have better stories and improve our ability to tell their stories. So your subscription lets the algorithm know that what we're doing is fantastic and no commitment. 

It's free to do. And if you don't like what we're doing later on, you can always unsubscribe. And either way, we would love a. Like, if you don't feel like subscribing at this time, thank you very much. And we'll take you back to the show. Since this is not really a traditional VC play, it's. It's kind of different because of this hybrid model. How do your investors and your board take it? 

Ryaan [00:17:07]: 
Our board only has ARPAN on it, so we're. We're pretty good. And being oversubscribed pretty much for a seed round just kind of tells us that our investors really want to be in this space, really want to see what we're doing. So it. It helps us to pick our investors, the investors that are aligned with kind of where we're heading, aligned with our journey, and kind of help supporting us through that. 

Sean[00:17:33]: 
You had mentioned previously what you were concerned about with AI. What are you excited about with AI in the legal field? 

Ryaan [00:17:39]: 
I think the possibilities are endless with AI. Right. Like, as we're seeing so many more AI shops kind of pop up in the legal space, which, like estate planning, a huge need, everyone needs or should have a will. And now we're seeing, like, that being automated with that lawyer model in the loop. And then obviously Symphony is also going to do something similar. So we're like, I'm excited about all the practice areas that we can develop until we hit our ceiling. You know, like, what can. And what can AI do and what can't AI do right now? 

Sean[00:18:18]: 
The thing about AI that I'm fascinated the most is that for specifically legal and medical, how an AI can be capable of reading all of the medical cases or all of the legal cases, the lawsuits, and have an understanding of what a human might, you know, expect or precedent. And so it can say based on this thing, you know, this thing might happen or based on it. So you could use an AI to build a case on. Obviously, litigation is different than, like, document preparation for businesses. But what's the state of that right now? Because I, I've heard of, like, someone used an AI to do this for a lawsuit, and it ended up hallucinating the. The precedents that it was citing. 

Ryaan [00:19:10]: 
Yeah, the lawyer got in a lot of trouble. I mean, that's. That's the classic case of you don't use AI like that. Right. You have. You owe ethical duties to your clients, and you need to review and you need to make sure that everything you are putting in a brief is perfect. No cases are being made up. And obviously Symphony doesn't do litigation. But I, I'd like. I'd like to explore that too. You know, I'd like to explore that further to kind of see what the AI is hallucinating and why it's hallucinating all those cases. We don't have that case law. Use no briefs, nothing of that nature. But yeah, it's just something. I always look at it on the review side that the attorney needs to be diligent in their review of the documents that are coming out. 

Sean[00:19:59]: 
Since your responsibility is for ensuring the legal soundness of the output of the product, what does your process look like for being able to do those things? Are you throwing in prompts of like, hey, make me a business registration document. And then do you just check it to see if there's any hallucinations? And then if there is, you go, hey, guys, I found this. You know, how do we fix this? Blah, blah, blah. 

Ryaan [00:20:25]: 
I'll compare this to. To buy time at a traditional law firm. Right. Just so we can have two different perspectives on this. In the traditional law firm sense, you have templates of everything as you are doing. So in this case, company formation, a Delaware corporation that you are forming. How do you go about it? There you go through your list of documents. You have pretty much, I have a checklist of documents that both ways. Symphony, traditional law firm. I will do the same thing to make sure everything is in order. But there you are using templates to kind of fill everything in. Here at Symphony, you're getting. 

You're just get, hey, form a company for me. And you're not even giving it the list of documents. It's just coming up and giving it to you. It will ask you all the basic questions of how many shares, what par value, who's going to be the officer, directors and whatnot, bylaws, all those provisions, and then it will spit that back to you. So it's a lot faster process than having to fill Everything in, in a template that might not be curated for this specific business. So I'm getting all those documents and then I'm. 

Obviously the first step for me is to, to go through my checklist to make sure did it give me everything. Okay, I, I have everything from Symphony. Now my second step is to go through all those documents and verify all the information that's not boilerplate, which would look like. Is it like starting from the. Is the company name correct? Are the. Is everything that you've done in here, does it work like it's. Symphony is working off of template as well, but we want to make sure that the custom stuff that is in there is. There's not something wrong with it. And thankfully I haven't found anything wrong with our like company formation. 

Sean[00:22:21]: 
I was using ChatGPT recently and I was giving it like a picture or I was giving it text and I would say turn this into text or turn this into picture and it would always mess it up. It would like, process the information incorrectly and then generate the wrong information. Sometimes pretty close, but sometimes glaringly obviously wrong. Do you ever notice like, the force majora section is missing or like, like just something is missing and so you just, you have to check every single time to make sure that it's correct. 

Ryaan [00:22:58]: 
100% of the time? Let's say the force majeure clause has been perfect. I will check it every single time just to be sure because that one time it's not right. That falls on me. And so you, you get those documents right. But that human verification process on my end will always look the same. 

Sean[00:23:18]: 
So in quality assurance testing for software, we call this smoke testing. So you're, you're smoke. You're smoke testing your product to make sure that it's doing what's expected. 

Ryaan [00:23:26]: 
I'll give it like some really bad prompts too, but it's fascinating to see how it will come back to me and be like, did you mean this and that, like the clarification is there to make sure that there's no miscommunication. 

Sean[00:23:38]: 
What's something I haven't asked you yet about legal and AI or Symphony that you feel we should know about? 

Ryaan [00:23:47]: 
A lot of people in the legal field or otherwise are looking at AI in a way from a, from a doomer standpoint, you know, like, can't do this or it won't do this. It will never be able to do this. Like, I hear a lot of these things and then I also hear, see a lot of LinkedIn posts that are like, oh, AI messed this up. But I never hear the stories of how AI is helping you succeed. 
You know, I get people are afraid for their jobs and whatnot, but there's some sort of recognition that needs to be given to the technology that exists, which is, hey, you can use this to help your clients even further. And I, those types of lawyers are in the minority. 

Sean[00:24:29]: 
I notice that business owners are thinking about how AI can help their business. And my friends who work for other people are worried about AI taking their job. And I think that's a big difference. I'm not hearing business owners be worried about AI unless they don't use it or don't understand it, in which case they're trying to learn. But it's the people who don't have their own ideas for how to generate value and therefore rely on other people telling them how to generate value in order to earn money, which is nothing wrong with that. But those people are the ones that are worried and they should be. 

Ryaan [00:25:10]: 
It's more the value. You know, how do you justify being able to. How do you justify being able to hold your job and charge people what you are? And that's where that type of content comes from, where it's like, yeah, no, AI can't do this or won't do this. But then business owners are embracing it because it's making them more efficient, it's cutting their costs. And I like, as a lawyer, I tell business owners, like, explore other avenues. Whatever is going to give you the best product for the best price, because you don't need a lawyer for everything you can as a sophisticated business owner. And that's the era we're heading in. A lot of business owners are going to be able to do their preliminary kind of stuff using AI, but then. 

Sean[00:25:54]: 
They still need a lawyer to make sure that it's right. 

Ryaan [00:25:56]: 
It also depends on their risk aptitude. Right? You can get ChatGPT to give you a contract that would be legally enforceable. Like you don't need a contract like a bill of sale or stuff like that. Like, like little stuff that hopefully will not lead you into litigation. But litigators always love to say we come in when transactional lawyers mess up the contracts. 

Sean[00:26:24]: 
It's not that the transactional lawyer made a mistake, it's that somebody broke the contract. 

Ryaan [00:26:28]: 
Let's say you have a more complicated contract, right? You want to make sure on the, on the transactional side that you are doing everything to make it airtight, which. 

Sean[00:26:39]: 
As a normal person you wouldn't know how to do, because I'VE seen lawyers go, well, do you mean and or do you mean and? Is there a comma here? Is there not a comma here? Because the presence of a comma will change it like this. And the absence of the comma could cause them to be able to do this. And you're like, damn it. It's like a single, you know, punctuation. Like, yeah, but that, that could be worth $10 million if you don't put that punctuation incorrectly. We got to make sure it's right. 

Ryaan [00:27:05]: 
The definition section, that always gets me, like, defining everything. You can't just put stuff how it is. Like with AI, now I'm noticing, like, I am able to put something, be like, define everything, like, make it as clear as possible. 

And then when you review it, you kind of see, okay, thankfully every single term is defined so that both people will be able to understand it the same way. And in. In law school is a classic contracts case about what a term means. And the term is chicken. What does chicken mean? And it's not defined. And I forget what the case is, but I remember it's such a, such a funny way to kind of look at things, on what people will litigate for and how to make things airtight. 

Sean[00:27:52]: 
You didn't specify that the chicken had to be alive, Exactly. Right. 

Ryaan [00:27:56]: 
Stuff like that. Like, it could be minute details. And I feel, honestly, I feel you can find something in every contract. But in, in most business relationships, a contract from the business side, what I've noticed is a contract is mostly a formality. Like people who want to work together, they want to work together, you know, within specific parameters to keep one, both sides obviously safe for their own interests, but they want to work together. 

A lot of the times, lawyers just make things more complicated than they need to be. At the end of the day, kind of people are looking to be more efficient, people are looking to save money, and Symphony is the future for them. 

Sean[00:28:39]: 
This episode was sponsored by Symphony. You should go check out their website. Symphony, AI, the modern law firm for startups. Go check them out now and they will help you square away your legal matters when it comes to documents for your startup. Thanks again for watching this episode. I look forward to the next one.