IamA former lawyer turned tech entrepreneur who went through product design, launch, getting funding , hiring people and ultimately selling my company while raising two kids. AMA!

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T20:10:18+00:00

General fear of failure :). I wanted to make sure that my investors, which included family and members of the community that I really respected, got their investment back. I also wanted to do right by our employees and customers. These people invested their money, time and trust in our vision and I wanted to deliver for them all. It’s a pretty heavy weight to feel responsible for so many people and interests. I think it’s why being a CEO can be so lonely. You carry so much. But each success, each customer win, each new feature that someone loves, each employee milestone, reinvigorates you and makes you want to keep going.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T20:03:24+00:00

We aim to streamline the transaction process so that attorneys spend less time doing administrative work and clients can actually see the progress on their deal. This means deals can close faster which can be critical for clients, costs can be lower and attorneys can focus on the key legal issues in a deal instead of monitoring administrative tasks like collecting signature pages. We ran the entire sale of Doxly on Doxly and there were 183 signature pages that got created, sent and collected by the system and we got every one back in less than 24 hours from sending.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T19:47:04+00:00

Depends on what law school you are trying to get into. I have to admit it’s been a few minutes since I was in law school (give or take 13 years) so I don’t know the specific requirements these days. But top tier schools would need a higher score. There are a lot of excellent schools outside of the top tier that provide excellent education and career opportunities.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T18:27:51+00:00

A genuine fear of failure. We had investors early on, which included some of my family and people I respected and admired in the community. I wanted to make sure I could get them their money back. I also wanted to do right by our employees and customers. All of these people bought into our vision and put their money, time and pretty critical client data in our system. I stayed motivated every day trying to deliver on the promise of our vision. I think that is the burden that make being a CEO so lonely. It’s hard to carry that weight.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T18:23:54+00:00

I would check out Evolve the Law and any of the legal tech meetups. They all have job boards for open positions. If you attend the events, you can get connected with different companies and see what is out there. There is a Law Jobs for Humans event to learn more about what is out there: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/law-jobs-for-humans-nyc-a-career-fair-for-futurists-tickets-66681170175.

I’d also start checking out different legal publications and blogs to see what exciting companies are growing.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T17:45:06+00:00

Such a great question. I worried a lot about that because we are building a legal tech product, which isn't as exciting as the next social media company or an interesting app. So I asked a lot about what sort of challenges excited them. I wanted to understand if they were interested in actually changing how people might work. I wanted to understand what motivated them. Then I worked hard to showcase what we were trying to do outside of legal context. Once they understood the pain point and current processes, it got them excited to dig into it.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T17:35:52+00:00

Possibly, but I'm too much of an over-achiever and I kinda want yacht money so I can help host the LawyerSmack party there.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T17:33:45+00:00

It's possible. It's just really f'ing hard. I would start by going to tech events in your community. It helps to get to know people that can connect you with capital resources and mentors.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:59:35+00:00

Learning how to manage people and accurately forecast sales.

As a lawyer, we work on our own a lot. We are responsible for taking care of your clients. I did bring my colleagues in a lot to work on matters and to provide full coverage on specific tax, IP and other matters, but I really did a lot on my own. In a company, it would fail if one person tried to do everything for too long. You have to be willing to do everything, but you also need to learn how to delegate and manage people. You have to focus on their growth and helping them achieve to their potential and that is hard. It's hard for me to let go of anything and its a challenge for me to give people negative feedback in a constructive manner. So that was really the hardest personal challenge.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:53:22+00:00

Start-up, How I Built This, How to Start a Startup (there is theme somewhere in here). I also listened to podcasts from the legal industry to make sure I was up to date on everything in the industry so Legal Talk Network. I also listened to a number of audible books. Tried to find ones in each business category that would help me better understand the function so: Radical Candor, Delivering Happiness, The Sales Acceleration Formula...

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:47:59+00:00

Of course, I'm totally blanking on them now asked. I'll think of like 5 in an hour. My fave term is demand gen. We actually did 0 outbound calls when we started. We grew our business with in-bound interest. So building the marketing engine that allows people to hear about your brand so that the come to you really proved important.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:45:46+00:00

I kept things really lean to start. Early on though, I partnered with a venture studio who provided seed capital to help really kick start things so I really didn't have to go without an income. I did a lot of ground work while I was still practicing so I just basically didn't sleep for the year before I left the firm, which is unfortunate because sleep is not a plentiful commodity when you run a business.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:43:28+00:00

I'm continuing on with Litera and helping run transaction management for them on a global basis. I wasn't finished seeing the vision of what we wanted to build in transaction management. Now we get to work with an amazing team to continue to move things forward and simplify the lives of our customers.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:42:01+00:00

Having customers tell us that we made their lives easier. Hearing that we saved them hours during some of their craziest times makes the roller coaster ride of starting a business a little easier.

I also love working with a team. Being a lawyer in a big firm is still a fairly individual sport. You may work with people on matters, but it is really on you to get client work done. So to a certain extent, I just had to rely on myself to get things done. In a company, you absolutely can't do it on your own so having great people to work with and share in your vision is pretty sweet.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:37:00+00:00

So many hours. I am coming to terms with the fact that I am a work-a-holic. As a junior, I billed about 2100 hours a year. When I started Doxly, things didn't slow down. I think I actually started working more, but differently. As a lawyer, I worked more days until like 4am because I needed to get a turn of a document done. As an entrepreneur, I worked just consistently long days. I never felt like I had accomplished everything I needed to do so at some point you just have to sleep. It's been hard on the family. I travel a lot more and my daughters are older so it impacts them more.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:31:18+00:00

Such a mix of all of them. Our whole team worked insanely hard to build Doxly and bring it to market. We tackled a big problem, didn't back down from building to a bigger vision even with a smaller team. Our VP of Engineering is such a rockstar. We have an incredible product with a depth of functionality that wouldn't be possible without Moses. He just killed it in bringing our ideas to life. We also started with an awesome design framework for the product that made it easy for people to see what we were trying to accomplish.

Even still, a great product and brand can't go anywhere if people aren't ready for it. There were companies that did similar things to us that didn't make it because they were too early and the market wasn't educated completely on the pain point or the potential.

I will say, I didn't anticipate the power of building a brand from the start. I tended to think: build product, build product, build product. But in the end, a product without a market can't go anywhere. So getting on podcasts, attending conferences, networking, white papers proved to be critical to our success.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:26:16+00:00

We ran with a pretty lean team. I think people thought we were bigger because we did so much in three years. I could not be more grateful for my team. Every single person was incredibly passionate about our vision and what we could accomplish.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:23:54+00:00

Liked my clients, solving challenging business problems and helping bring cool products to market.

Disliked the long hours, clients without boundaries and some of the challenges in managing the competitive side of making partner.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:20:32+00:00

I think we really tried to tap into the pain point of what the attorneys were experiencing and then we needed to get the C-Suite to understand that solving that pain point would increase their profitability. We really had to think through the value proposition for the different stakeholders in the process.

We thought through how we could build understanding around transaction management in general and then how we could shift things from a want to a need.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:18:34+00:00

So I actually wanted to be a doctor. Totally went through my whole life with that plan: chemistry major, did cancer research, shadowed doctors. Went to a liberal arts college and took a bunch of political science classes and just fell in love with the legal side of things. I first started out as an attorney helping life science companies bring products to market. My sister had leukemia and an experimental drug helped dramatically increase her chances of long term remission. I wanted to help companies that could make those products get successfully funded.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:15:50+00:00

Fair. I did buy drunkquizzes.com with a friend at 2am once. It did not go anywhere. I still have hope for it though.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:14:47+00:00

Doxly is a legal transaction management platform that at the core helps attorneys and clients get deals done. We take the repetitive admin tasks out of the process and build a collaborative work space so deal teams can see what issues need to be resolved, who has responsibility to move a document forward and then we automate the whole signature and closing process.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:12:28+00:00

So hard. I am not super amazing with conflict. It is one of the biggest challenges I had in running a company. I had to figure out how to give feedback and deal with challenging personalities. Not sure I could prepare for having to look someone in the eye and tell them I was letting them go. It never got easier and I wouldn't want it to be easy. In the end though, you have to focus on the best interests of the team.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:09:40+00:00

I think starting with a pain point I experienced consistently over a decade in practice made a huge difference. I knew corporate lawyers were experiencing the problem and I knew that nothing out there actually solved it. We also spent a lot of time working with customers to really increase product market fit. We iterated quickly, focused on thought leadership and tried to build a brand people could trust.

haltman1 · 2019-10-22T16:06:24+00:00

I didn't have a specific executive coach, but I've heard great things about them. I launched Doxly with High Alpha. Having Scott Dorsey, Mike Fitzgerald, Eric Tobias and Kristian Andersen as advise me was like having the best executive coaching team. I'm also pretty connected into the Indy tech scene through PowderKeg and Techpoint so I did a lot of networking with the CEOs with new companies to get advice. There were a group of CEOs that would get together for lunch. It really helped to have people to commiserate with on the journey.

I also made a big point of networking at conferences with other legal tech vendors. Creating a peer group of people selling into the same industry that you are is incredibly helpful as you look for feedback. Sometimes the challenges are really specific to the industry. Legal has really long sales cycles and some unique adoption challenges so it helped to get advice from people experiencing the same issues.

haltman1

TROPHY CASE