Entrepreneurial Insights from Legal Maverick Karl Seelbach

Karl Seelbach:
I think that the first question you have to answer is, what's your why? Like, why are you doing what you do? And there can be more than one answer, and that's okay. Like, for me, the number one answer, if I'm just being transparent and honest, is to provide for my family, right? That is the number one reason I'm doing what I do. That is my number one why is just to be able to provide a nice quality of life for my wife and my two kids. My number two why, which I discovered through the process of starting a firm and really finding a practice area that I truly enjoy and then launching a software company that has a similar mission, is I was trying to figure out my second why. Like, why do I do what I do? Why does it matter? And what I ultimately came away with is I kind of took a step back and looked at it and thought about it. This thing we call life, right, is finding out the truth is extremely important. And as we talked about earlier, depositions are often the best way to do that.

Ali Katz:
Hello, and welcome to the NewLaw podcast, where we guide entrepreneurial lawyers to build law practices into businesses they love. I'm Ali Katz. In today's episode, we're talking to legal maverick Karl Seelbach. He is a well respected litigation attorney and now lawyer entrepreneur who is making waves in the legal tech industry with his revolutionary legal tech platform, skribe.ai. And if you have ever considered being a truly entrepreneurial lawyer, especially in legal tech, you're going to want to hear this episode and you're going to love learning from Karl and how he went from traditional litigator into being a true legal entrepreneur. Let's get into it, and I'll see you on the other side.

Ali Katz:
All right, so everybody, I have Karl Seelbach here today. Seasoned litigation attorney. I don't know. You seem way too nice to be a seasoned litigation attorney. We're going to have to talk about that and how you maintained your heart through it all with over 17 years of experience in the courtroom, in personal injury, business, employment, litigation, skilled advocate, tenacious fighter. We haven't seen that part yet. Who handles cases with precision and an eye towards trial from day one. Wow. I feel afraid, I gotta tell you, because his adversaries describe him as skilled and whip smart. But Karl's legal expertise doesn't stop there.

Ali Katz:
He's the founder of skribe.ai, which is skribe with a k, a software platform for capturing testimony. That's changing the game for attorneys and their clients. I have no doubt about that. We're going to be talking about that today, because really, this is about the entrepreneurial parts of being a lawyer. And prior to launching your own firm in 2015, Karl worked as a litigation partner at one of Texas's largest law firms and was mentored by some of the state's top litigators. We've got former appellate judges, veteran trial lawyers, all mentoring Karl. And still, Karl turned out to be a really nice guy, it seems. So I want to find out about that for sure.

Ali Katz:
And in his free time, Karl enjoys spending time with his wife, daughters in Dripping Springs, Texas, as a girl dad, love that, who proudly cheers on his kids in volleyball, basketball, dance and more. So here's where we need to start. How many girls do you have, Karl?

Karl Seelbach:
Two kiddos. So we live on a ranch in Dripping Springs. We have two kiddos. We had about 32 goats and a couple of miniature donkeys and three dogs. But we have, we have downsized the herd, not the children, but the farm animals. And so we have about, I think, ten or eleven goats at the moment. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. Tomorrow morning I've got to get up at, my wife told me we're leaving for a volleyball tournament at 05:30 a.m in the morning to make it up to north Austin for my oldest daughter, Annabelle. She's the twelve year old, her club volleyball tournament, so should be a lot of fun.

Ali Katz:
Lucky you. Lucky you.

Karl Seelbach:
Lucky me.

Ali Katz:
I'm so glad I'm past those days. My kids are 21 and 24 now, so I remember how that was. And you'll get through it. But the more important question I think here is, are you going to get rid of the goats? I used to have goats as well, and they smell. They're very stinky, these goats.

Karl Seelbach:
So people ask me all the time, like when I mention that, why do you have farm animals? Or how do you have time for farm animals? And the answer is very transparent, because there's really only a couple of reasons. In no particular order, they're entertaining for my kids and they learn a little bit about life, like when these things give birth or sadly, when, you know, maybe a kid goat dies during childbirth or something like that. So there's an education component to it. And I did say in no particular order, the next one is the tax exemption because it is, it does make all of the land ag exempt. So the taxes are much, much lower. And they're kind of like my built in lawnmowers. So we live on almost 17 acres and they keep it nicely trimmed so it doesn't get overgrown.

Ali Katz:
I love it. I love it. Well, those are all really good reasons to deal with the smell of the goats. And maybe you have them far enough away. I only had two acres when I had goats.

Karl Seelbach:
Yeah, yeah, we have them far. We have a homestead fence around the house, and they're far enough away that we don't smell them. Thank goodness.

Ali Katz:
I love it. That's so great. I have a class coming up on April 4 for lawyers on how to pay your kids, not the government. And my guess from hearing about your agricultural exemption on taxes is you're either already doing that or you could benefit from that class. So I'm going to share more about that with you.

Karl Seelbach:
No, I think that's fantastic. After the episode, I will definitely want some details on where to join.

Ali Katz:
Yes. Great. Okay, well, let's go ahead and dive in here with. As I mentioned here, you were a litigator for a really long time. Maybe you still are. So we're going to find out about that. But before that, tell us about your path to becoming a lawyer. When did you decide to go to law school?

Karl Seelbach:
Yeah, that's a great question. I've been interested in the practice of law since I was a kid, and that sometimes strikes people as unusual. But the reason is, when I was probably about eight or nine, maybe ten, somewhere around that age, I would walk into my dad's home office. I grew up in a small town in northeast Texas, Henderson, Texas, on a ranch property. And my dad would work. He kind of worked rotations. He was in the oil and gas business. He'd work about 30 days at home, and then he'd work offshore, often across the pond, so to speak. And he also did safety expert witness work in personal injury cases.

Karl Seelbach:
It was kind of like a side gig before side gigs were so popular. And so when he was working from home, I would go into his office and say, hey, dad, what are you working on? You know, let's go throw the baseball or let's go do this or that. And he'd find a really interesting part of a deposition in one of those catastrophic injury cases, and he'd hand it to me and say, hey, why don't you read this? You ask what I'm doing, read about it. And I just kind of would start reading the depositions and would be really interested as a kid, especially at some of the grotesque injuries and how they happened and whose fault was it. And so that was what originally inspired me. I also met a lot of pretty big personality plaintiff, personal injury lawyers that my dad worked for that had had some pretty big success in their practices. So that also kind of getting to know some of those folks also made me think, oh, that seems like it could be a cool job. So that was what originally inspired me.

Ali Katz:
I love that so much, because that's also how I got inspired to go to law school, was reading depositions. The depositions I was reading were depositions of my dad's criminal trial.

Karl Seelbach:
Oh, wow.

Ali Katz:
He was the criminal. But I found it so fascinating. You know, it was a story of these people's lives that was being told through these depositions, and I just found that extremely fascinating. And, of course, I wanted to get to the bottom of, like, was my dad really a criminal? What was actually happening here? And it just pulled me right in. I thought that I'd be a criminal defense lawyer or prosecutor, maybe working for the FBI or something like that. Didn't turn out to be that, but that is also, interestingly, what pulled me in. So, lawyers, if you're not yet sharing depositions with your kids, this is the time to start, because you'll never know what it'll get them interested in.

Karl Seelbach:
I mean, one thing you said really resonates because it's been a consistent theme the last few years and how I think about the practice of law as well as my software company, and it's kind of finding out the truth of what happened. And to me, finding out the truth is so important. And I think in most practice areas, not all, but in most practice areas, depositions are usually the best way to do that is to get someone under oath and spend, you know, a few hours asking extremely detailed questions about what happened. What do they know, who said what? And so, yeah, I think, you know, if you have kids and you're a litigator, hand them a few depositions, and you never know, maybe they'll want to be a lawyer without you pushing them to be a lawyer. Or maybe. Maybe they'll decide they don't want to be a lawyer. And maybe that's okay, too.

Ali Katz:
For a long time, I did not want my kids to be a lawyer because I didn't love being a lawyer. I had to find my way to really loving it before I could even think, oh, maybe I would want my kids to go down that path. They will not choose that path. They're more of, like, work with your hands type of people. But now that I love being a lawyer and that I really understand this entrepreneurial lawyering piece, I would love my kids to go down that path if they chose it. And I'm curious for you, with the entrepreneurial lawyer piece, it seems clear that you knew you were into personal injury and litigation and depositions. But what about the entrepreneurial piece? Did you always anticipate you'd be an entrepreneurial lawyer?

Karl Seelbach:
You know what's so funny about that is I didn't. But when I think back to my interviews when I was in law school, the law firm that ultimately hired me out of law school, really great firm in Texas, Winstead, is the name of the firm. I can remember that interview with two extremely smart, super friendly female litigators, Yasmin Atassi and Theresa Snyder. And I think back to that interview, and I remember one of the comments that they gave in that interview was, gosh, you seem to be really interested in the business of law, and you kind of seem like the type of person who's just going to hang out their own shingle and open your own law firm. When, of course, I was a law student at the time and hadn't really given that any thought. And I said, oh, no, no, no, I want to go to a big firm. I want to get trained. I want to make partner, and kind of had a more narrow view of what it meant to be successful as an attorney.

Karl Seelbach:
And that was, study hard, learn how to do it at a big firm, and eventually make partner. And that, to me, at the beginning of my career, was what I envisioned as the definition of success. And I think that's not uncommon. I think a lot of young people go to law school. They think that that is the best path or maybe sometimes the only path. And the fact is there's so many other options. So, no, I didn't realize it until years later, when I was probably more mid level to senior associate and started having various ideas of how I wanted to build my own practice or have my own clients and start another business.

Karl Seelbach:
And so, you know, we can get into that in a minute. But I've started a couple of businesses, and that bug, I would say, probably was always in me, but I didn't really focus on it or spend any energy on it until years later.

Ali Katz:
What was the moment?

Karl Seelbach:
Well, the first, there's. So, you know, I'll briefly tell this story.

Ali Katz:
The first one. Yeah.

Karl Seelbach:
The first one was, I'll give the short version of a longer story. So the first one was, again, depositions not only inspired me to go to law school, but they were a big part of my litigation practice. I was very fortunate to work with some really great attorneys. I already mentioned two of them, but also Jeff Joyce, John McFarlane. As soon as I started, baby lawyer, I got sworn in at a trial, and within the first three months, I was flying to take depositions. And so they really gave me an opportunity where some big firms don't do that with young lawyers. I'm grateful that they did. And so I was doing all these depositions and taking them and reading the transcripts, and every once in a while would get our firm's child technician or an outside vendor to create video clips.

Karl Seelbach:
And the iPad came out. So whatever year, that was when the iPad came out, very first time, and for about six months or so, everyone was thinking, we're all going to practice law on an iPad. And, like, that's going to be the future of how we conduct business, and not only the legal profession, but a lot of professions. And while I do love my iPad, that's not how I spend most of my time practicing law. But back then, we thought it might be. And so I took a swing with a very small budget, with a very small team, and developed an iPad app called edepo. That was kind of my first venture into being an entrepreneur. And we started it.

Karl Seelbach:
We launched the product. We actually sold the product some. Ultimately, that company did not succeed for a variety of reasons, but I learned so much. And that product was basically taking the transcripts and the video from a deposition and processing them in a way to where you could just pull it up on an iPad app and you could highlight the text, click play, and then the video would play. So it was pretty neat.

Ali Katz:
That seems pretty cool. And you did that when you were still at the big law firm you were working with, or you were in your own law firm at that point?

Karl Seelbach:
I did it while I was at Winstead. They were very supportive. Actually, Stuart Whitehead was. I don't know if he was managing partner of the Austin office at that time, but I went to a few of the partners. They were very gracious, they were very supportive, and they realized it was a side gig. But I did get permission. And if there's any attorneys that are listening that are interested in doing a side gig, and you work at a larger firm or really any firm, you should check your employment contract, you should make sure you get permission. And last thing you want to do is go spend a bunch of time and energy building IP that all of a sudden your former employer claims they own.

Karl Seelbach:
So that's not to give a whole bunch of legal advice, but that is. That is kind of a. That is an important thing. To the extent we're talking about lawyers becoming entrepreneurs, you know, make sure you do it right.

Ali Katz:
That brings forward for me, that when I first decided, you know, had the inclination of creating something myself, it was when I was at the big law firm and I realized that, well, I never had any idea that I was going to go out on my own. Starting my own firm was zero in my awareness or anything at all. But I got this idea that if I was going to be happy at the firm, I would need to get my own clients. That was kind of the first thing that started to bubble up for me, was getting my own clients at the big law firm. And I was second year and at Munger, Tolles & Olson. And I did not think they were going to say that it was okay for me to get my own clients, because it's just a pain in the ass for them. You know, my clients are like little tiny clients paying us a few thousand dollars and probably creating more risk of liability than anything. But they said yes.

Ali Katz:
They actually, they said yes, and they were really supportive. And ultimately, that did lead to me going out on my own and starting my own law firm. And I'm curious what that journey was for you, not just the entrepreneurial side, but actually starting your own law firm, which to me is a big way that most lawyers end up as entrepreneurial lawyers.

Karl Seelbach:
Yeah, I think that, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. The most common way that any attorney becomes an entrepreneur is opening their own firm. In fact, I was on another podcast and I was talking about that concept, and I want to say the host was like, well, I never really thought about it that way. And I said, well, a law firm is a business, and if someone's hanging out a shingle to start their own business, they're an entrepreneur. Just because it's professional services versus software or selling widgets doesn't mean it's not very similar in many respects to starting any other business. So, you know, for me, the journey was fairly straight in that, you know, I started as an associate at Winstead, worked there for a couple of years, moved from their Houston office to their Austin office. Loved the firm. Great people, smart lawyers.

Karl Seelbach:
They taught me how to be a litigator. What I realized during that journey was I was doing a lot of types of litigation. At one point in the Austin office, I was the only associate with, like, a whole bunch of different partners to work with, which was fine, and it was a lot of fun, but it meant I was doing everything from commercial litigation to finance and banking litigation, to construction and real estate litigation, personal injury defense. And I had even, before moving to Austin, I had even done appellate litigation as well. So that was good. And I would actually encourage any young lawyers that are listening to try to do as many different types of law. If you're working at a big firm, work for as many different partners in as many different practices, areas as they will let you, without stretching yourself too thin, because what you'll eventually figure out is what you like versus what you don't like. And maybe you'll get lucky and find something you love, but at a minimum, hopefully you find something you like.

Karl Seelbach:
And so for me, I found something that I really enjoyed, which was personal injury defense. And so what inspired Trek and me, Trek Doyle is my law partner, to leave that firm to open our own firm was primarily the flexibility and the low overhead that we could achieve by opening a firm. So Winstead, again, great law firm, but the rates are higher, just like they are at most big firms, right? Winstead has, back then, I think it was over 300 attorneys. They may be 350 now, I'm not sure. And they charge mid to high rates of what you would expect, what their peers also charge. And to do personal injury defense work, you have to have more flexibility. You have to be able to get your rates down lower.

Karl Seelbach:
And so we kind of knew that we've had enough first and second interviews, we'll call them, where we were pitching for business. And we were having these great conversations, and it seemed like the potential client really, really liked us. And finally, sometimes you just have to ask, you know, you can't be afraid to just make the ask. And so I remember I asked this one potential client, you know, we'd really love to work with you. You know, just if you shoot us one case, I think we can show you just how good of a job we can do on it. You know, the high level of quality, high level of service, and the potential client just told me point blank, y'alls rates are too high. We like you fine, but your rates are too high for what we can justify compared to what we pay our other outside counsel. So we were supposed to leave with two clients, and it went horribly.

Karl Seelbach:
It went, like, as bad as you could possibly hope for me, because I really love the firm, and it's where I learned to be a lawyer. And I had a lot of really great personal relationships with partners and associates and staff members in two offices. But one of the two clients did not come with us. And without getting deep into the weeds, it became an uglier exit than I had ever hoped it would. So we ended up with one client and one case, and my wife was pregnant with my youngest daughter at the time.

Ali Katz:
Wow.

Karl Seelbach:
We were really freaking out, honestly. I mean, like, if I'm just really candid about it, we were stressed to the max. I mean, there were a lot of sleepless nights. We had a lot of contacts. I mean, we had been networking and trying to bring in business, and those people had told us, you know, that they were interested, but it was a rate issue. But ultimately, you know, it's not like those people are going to give you a case immediately, right? It's not like I call them on a Monday and say, hey, I have my own firm now. Oh, great, I have a stack of cases I was just waiting to send you. So it took a little time. And during that window that first year to 18 months, that was an interesting period.

Ali Katz:
I get this question a lot from people who want to leave. They want to start their own thing. They can't see the way there because they don't believe that they have the financial resources or runway to do it. It sounds to me that you didn't, and yet you did it anyway. I know that I didn't. At least I felt as if I didn't. Right? I was the breadwinner in my family. I had two little kids at home.

Ali Katz:
My husband was a stay at home dad. I didn't have any savings in the bank, and yet I did it. And the resources showed up. It was extremely stressful. I was very scared along the way because I didn't know much about what I was doing, but I made it through. And I'm curious, how did you make it through that time? Like, did you take another job? Did you just tap into, you know, savings in retirement that you swore you would never use? You ask your parents for money, put it on credit? What'd you do?

Ali Katz:
Would you love direct support to help you grow your law practice into a business you love? Go to newlawbusinessmodel.com/show and sign up for a call with one of our trusted law business advisors. Each of our advisors has been trained directly by me over the past five years plus to help you chart your path from wherever you are now to where you want to go as efficiently and effectively as possible. You're ready to grow. We are here to help.

Karl Seelbach:
Yeah. So I didn't take another job. I will say that the thought crossed my mind, and I certainly considered applying for just a full time position at another law firm or an insurance company or the Texas attorney general's office, but it didn't come to that. But I will say the one thing that we learned, it's almost ironic because we thought we were leaving with this really large client, large at the time to us, and this small to medium client, we'll call it. And so we had this kind of comfort, or thought we did, that when we launched the firm, well, we would just take all the cases we were working on. They would get transferred over to our new firm, and that would give us enough money to pay ourselves and hire a paralegal, maybe even an associate. I won't say that we weren't ambitious at that point in time. We were. But when it fell apart and we realized, oh, shit, this is not going the way we hoped it would, it really put some fire in the belly. And so I don't think we would have ever grown the firm to 35 institutional clients with a team of 26 people if that had not happened. Because there was this new appetite for developing business, for going to get business. So how did we do it? I mean, it was a lot of lunch meetings, coffee meetings. This was before Covid so people weren't doing as many zooms back then. It was driving to Dallas, driving to Houston, meeting with everybody we knew. We took a lot of interesting cases.

Karl Seelbach:
We took a lot of cases that we would never take now, but we, you know, we had more time on our hands, so we could take all sorts of cases on both sides of the docket. We took plaintiffs personal injury cases, we took commercial litigation cases, we took real estate cases. I mean, just all sorts of stuff. But we eventually fell into a spot, whereas we put all of those hooks in the water to the personal injury defense clients. And frankly, we enjoyed some of the plaintiffs work. It was a lot of fun. But once we put all those hooks in the water, what happened over that 18 to 24 month period is they started coming in. They started coming in.

Karl Seelbach:
We had, okay, this account, do a really good job on their cases. Okay, more cases, then another account, then another account, and before we knew it, you kind of, you're forced to pick at some point. I mean, it's hard to ride the fence and do plaintiffs work and defense work when you've got 10, 15, 20, 25 defense clients and you're working with a lot of the third party administrators, you know, and the companies are insured by common insurance companies. It was a journey, but I learned so much through it. It was painful journey, but I don't think we would have ended up where we are today. I don't think I would have had the appetite for risk or the financial backing to start Skribe, the software company if we hadn't gone through that chapter of our careers.

Ali Katz:
It's so important. You know, I think so often we're trying to do everything we can to avoid the reality that you were in. And yet, I think if we can turn to face it and embrace it, it's really where the spice of life lives. At least that's been the case for me. And it sounds like for you as well. And it gave you so much. As you said, it was painful. But I think that the pain is where we get honed and sharpened and we become what we need to become in order for life to see us as worthy of giving more. Because if you can't handle, like, a little bit of, where's the next client going to come from?

Karl Seelbach:
Yeah, I think that's right.

Ali Katz:
How can you handle the fruits of the rest?

Karl Seelbach:
You probably experienced this as well. There's something to be said for learning every aspect of starting a business from I'm the one procuring the insurance. I'm figuring out what practice management system we're going to use. I'm the one negotiating the lease. I'm the one figuring out how to hire, eventually fire. I mean, all of the things that you have to do to be a business owner, they don't teach you at most law schools. So that is a process in and of itself. And it's been a really fun journey, and it's led me to now be fortunate to have two really fun, exciting, profitable businesses that I just really enjoy working with on the law firm side and then the software company side as well.

Ali Katz:
Right, so, first of all, you still have the law firm. You're still a business owner of a law firm that is a litigation firm.

Karl Seelbach:
That's right.

Ali Katz:
Once again, just like with that iPad product, you recognized there's a need in the marketplace, which, when I read about what your software does, it actually seemed somewhat like what you described with that iPad product.

Karl Seelbach:
There is a little bit of overlap between those two. For me, one thing that if I think about Skribe and what inspired me to co-found it, my co-founder on Skribe is Tom Irby. He's a former court reporting agency owner, so he knows the court reporting side of the business and just an all around nice guy. He's an entrepreneur himself, having been involved in multiple businesses. He's based in Austin. But our mission with Skribe is to make justice more efficient and affordable for everyone everywhere. And to start with that, we're going to redefine court reporting. So if you look at the expenses in a typical litigated case, obviously, you have your attorneys fees, whether that's contingent or hourly.

Karl Seelbach:
But one of the next largest expenses are the court reporting fees because the cost to capture a deposition has gone up so dramatically over the last 10 to 15 years. Part of that is just supply and demand. There's not as many stenographers as there used to be. And so we saw an opportunity to come in after Covid and really redefine and reimagine what court reporting should be and how to help parties and their attorneys get a official record faster, less expensive, and more robust than what they get today. We're just at the beginning of that journey. We have a long way to go, but it's been really cool to see it unfold. In fact, we just had a family law attorney yesterday when a contested discovery hearing in Travis County District Court where the opposing counsel was objecting to the use of Skribe. You know, what is this? You know, I didn't agree to this.

Karl Seelbach:
And the judge said, no, you can do this under the rules. You can do a what's called a non stenographic video deposition, which is ultimately what Skribe is at its core. And so that was a really big win. And for that family law attorney, I was talking to them, what even got them interested in using Skribe, and the answer was so clear, it was, hey, this money ultimately comes out of my clients pocket. I represent people going through divorces, through child custody disputes, through all sorts of horrible moments in their lives for a lot of them. And the last thing I want to do is tell them that to take this deposition, to help me do a better job for your case, it's going to cost you $2,000 or something like that. And so it's helping them save their clients money, but it's also helping them get justice a little faster, because with Skribe, you get everything the same day as the deposition. So that if this was a deposition, after the recording's over, you could go grab a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, and within an hour to two, you would have access to your video record, synced to a transcript, and then you can move on to the next task on your to do list.

Karl Seelbach:
So there's a speed component to this. So as we look, this is just the beginning. With redefining court reporting, we're really looking at all the different ways we can begin to chip away at what has made litigation so expensive over the years and so slow, cases take too long. And so we're looking at all the ways that we can speed things up and reduce the cost for everybody.

Ali Katz:
This is really fascinating. I was recently in a litigation matter myself, so I got an up close personal view of court reporting as it is right now. Or I was in a deposition and it was virtual, and so there was a human that came and sat in a room. I don't know exactly how it worked, actually. I just know that it did cost quite a lot of money, which I wasn't aware was going to happen after the fact to get these records. It was a big surprise. The whole cost of litigation overall was a really big surprise to me every step of the way. Like, whoa, okay. People actually can't really, for the most part, afford to do litigation.

Karl Seelbach:
That's right. It is so frustrating that we've come to this point as a society to where your average Joe or Jane can't afford to hire an attorney in many cases. And not only that, the cost has gone up so much that small medium businesses are kind of sometimes forced to say, well, gosh, I know I'm right, but it's going to cost me an arm and a leg to fight this. So why not just pay some amount of money to settle this case and they just justify it from kind of a pure dollars and cents? And I think that they shouldn't be forced to make that decision. Right. We can do better with today's technology. It shouldn't take two years from the start of a case to the end of a case. And that is about the average duration of a case.

Karl Seelbach:
So it kind of baffles me. And we're looking at all the different ways that software, and particularly AI software, can help speed up that process to hopefully bring the cost down and let attorneys in all practice areas, personal injury, family law, all types of litigation may be excluding extremely complex or high stakes litigation, but be able to speed those things up, it ultimately shouldn't take so long. And the courts play a role in that, too. I mean, the courts have gotten backlogged over the years. So we'll be looking at ways that we may be able to help solve that as well.

Ali Katz:
So if you can just help me understand what I'm seeing here, because I'm looking at your pricing page, it says $349 per record hour. Does that mean that you guys get to have a model where for every hour that Zoom is running, your business gets paid $349? Is that what it means? Or is there like a record hour somehow less than an hour of Zoom recording? I'd love to hear how it works.

Karl Seelbach:Great question. That's a great question. So the average cost to take a deposition today with a court reporting agency is over $800 per record hour to have a transcript, to have a video, to have it all certified. So, our starting price, which is an all in one price to take a deposition, is the $349 you mentioned. It's billed in tenths of an hour, we don't round up. So it's billed like attorneys build their time in six minute increments, but it includes much more than just the software. So yes, it does include the virtual room. And we are an official partner with Zoom, we're an ISV partner with them, but it also includes, we staff the event with what we call a liaison.

Karl Seelbach:
That person's a certified notary in the state of the deposition. They swear in the witness, they help facilitate the recording, they provide technical support to the attorneys, to the other people who are joining, like the witnesses, and they stay on the entire event, the entire deposition, from start to finish, to make sure everything is smooth. We also have redundant recording, so you don't have to worry about your recording potentially being maybe lost or deleted or something like that. So there's redundancy baked into the process. And the other thing that's baked into that price is you get a rough transcript the same day, synced to the video, but then you get a professionally proofread transcript within three to five days that's legally formatted. So you get a as good or better transcript plus all of the other bells and whistles of our web application for less than half of what it would cost to hire a core reporting agency.

Ali Katz:
This is fantastic. So you're also raising capital for Skribe. This is not something you're just funding out of your own pocket, you're raising capital. Is this the first venture that you've raised capital for?

Karl Seelbach:
This is the first venture where I've raised any outside capital. Yeah, edepo was just, just myself and my father. He invested just a little bit, but it was much less than what we're talking about with Skribe. So Skribe has raised almost $3 million and is looking to raise another half a million to close out our seed round. We've had 29 attorneys who have, either through hearing a sales pitch or getting connected through our investor network, have invested in Skribe. So we have quite a few attorneys that have invested, and we're looking to do a series A round, probably in the neighborhood of 6 to 8 million later this year. So probably in the summer, maybe early fall. And we have several VCs that we're talking to who are interested in leading the round, and we're swinging for the fence with this one.

Ali Katz:
I love it.

Karl Seelbach:
Everyone on the team is extremely passionate about the cause and really trying to make attorneys awesome at their jobs by providing really great software and at the same time make the entire process more efficient, more affordable.

Ali Katz:
I love that so much. We have another commonality then to talk about. We'll talk about that off interview. I'm in my first capital raise as well, also raising just from attorneys specifically in our member network first. And I love that we're on a parallel path there. If folks want to get in touch with you to be an investor, obviously they can find skribe.ai. That's with a k, Skribe with a k, dot ai. If you want to use Skribe as a litigator to capture your legal testimony, depositions, et cetera. But what if they wanted to be an investor? How do they find you?

Karl Seelbach:
Either one, if they want to use Skribe or they're interested in getting a copy of the investor packet, they can just shoot me an email. That's Karl, also with a K, karl@skribe.ai. Skribe with a k as well. So if they shoot me an email, I'll also any of your listeners who mentioned the podcast when they email me, I'm happy to give them 25% off their first deposition.

Ali Katz:
Amazing.

Karl Seelbach:
Their first deposition with Skribe so they can see what it's like and even give them a free upload if they prefer to upload. There's two sides to Skribe. There's the live side, which captures depositions, examinations under oath, anywhere that live testimony needs to be captured. We also have the other side of the platform, which is called library, which is where you can upload past events. You could upload a podcast recording if you wanted to, but you could upload, you know, 911 calls, body cam recordings, training videos. We had one customer upload 200 voicemails because, you know, I don't remember what the case was about, but it was just a very voicemail intensive case. So anywhere you need an audio or video file to be transcribed and searchable and clippable and shareable, you can do that with Skribe.

Ali Katz:
That's great. That's fantastic. Well, thank you, Karl, so much for joining me here today. I really appreciate it. So if you all remember, when you sign up with Skribe, you can mention Ali Katz or NewLaw's entrepreneurial lawyer podcast. You'll get 25% off. Or, and I think you said a free upload for the first time. So, Karl, to leave the listeners today, you know, so much of what I do is really about loving your life as a lawyer.

Ali Katz:
You first wanted to be a lawyer when you read those depositions, you became a lawyer, now an entrepreneurial lawyer. And I'm curious if there was a moment when you really realized, wow, I'm really glad I went to law school. And if you can just leave, maybe aspiring lawyers or those who maybe aren't really loving their lives as lawyers so much today, one takeaway of what could a lawyer who's not so much loving their life as a lawyer today do to just turn that around and be able to come into that moment of, oh, I'm so glad I went to law school.

Karl Seelbach:
Well, I mean, I think that the first question you have to answer is, what's your why? Like, why are you doing what you do? And there can be more than one answer, and that's okay. Like, for me, the number one answer, if I'm just being transparent and honest, is to provide for my family, right? That is the number one reason I'm doing what I do. That is my number one why is just to be able to provide a nice quality of life for my wife and my two kids. My number two why, which I discovered through the process of starting a firm and really finding a practice area that I truly enjoy and then launching a software company that has a similar mission, is I was trying to figure out my second why. Like, why do I do what I do? Why does it matter? And what I ultimately came away with is I kind of took a step back and looked at it and thought about it. In this thing we call life, right, is finding out the truth is extremely important. And as we talked about earlier, depositions are often the best way to do that. And so in my case is, in my law firm, 80% of what we do is personal injury defense, 80% to 90%.

Karl Seelbach:
And I look at every case as a mission for us to uncover the truth of what happened, what caused this accident, how bad was this person hurt? Was it our client's fault? And how much should our client pay, if anything, to resolve this? What would be a fair settlement? And so we are not a win at all cost mentality firm. And so we try to provide our clients with what I think is very fair and equitable counsel of what we found on that journey that I just described. Like, what is the truth of what happened? Was it our fault and what would be a fair outcome? And sometimes our clients listen to us, and sometimes they don't. Or sometimes they may just disagree. Their definition of fair could be different, or maybe they see the negligence facts different than how we see it. Once, I kind of figured out that, wow, this is like, it's not a game. This is real, this is important. Just like plaintiff's lawyers.

Karl Seelbach:
And I have a newfound respect for plaintiff's lawyers after handling plaintiff's cases for a few years at the beginning, what they do is extremely important, and I think they often get stigmatized because of billboards and commercials and things like that. But I view what my firm does is equally important. It's a check in a balance on society, on companies, on making sure that we have safe products, but they don't cost more than any of us can afford to buy. Because, you know, if there weren't defense lawyers, plaintiff's lawyers would just be getting multi million settlements in every single case. So I love what we do as a firm, and one of the reasons I'm so excited about what Skribe is doing is I think it fits right in. Like, for me, costs should not stand in the way of finding the truth. And depositions have gotten so crazy expensive over the last decade. I think we can do better with software.

Karl Seelbach:
And so when I talk to attorneys like personal injury attorneys, family law attorneys, I hear stories of I couldn't take a deposition in the case because my client couldn't afford it or the case was a small case and I just couldn't justify the expense of taking the deposition and they shouldn't be faced with that decision. I think we can do better with software and Skribe's first start is just that. It's the start, and I think we can build on that and bring the cost down and hopefully someday make it just as easy to capture testimony as it was for me and you to host this podcast together.

Ali Katz:
Yes, I see that with you. And your answer today has helped me love being a lawyer even a little more than I already did with your why of finding truth and finding truth. And that is what we get to do as lawyers, is help find more truth. And that just resonates so deeply with me. And so for those of you that are also on a mission to find more truth, maybe start with finding your own truth about what it is that really is your driving why? And thank you, Karl, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for doing the work you're doing. Thank you for building upon all of your experiences to make legal more accessible, bring the price down for people to be able to find more truth and, and get more justice in the world. So, really appreciate that, and I look forward to being with you again another time. Thanks so much.

Karl Seelbach:
Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Ali Katz:
You got it.

Ali Katz:
I hope you loved this conversation with Karl as much as I did. It is certainly a testament to the power of innovation and determination in the legal profession and the reality that you truly can do exactly what you want with your law degree. And if you are ready to become an entrepreneurial lawyer yourself using estate planning, our differentiated service model of life and legacy planning, we would love to support you down that path. Your next step is to book a call with a law business advisor at newlaw.co/show. That's newlaw.co/show and I look forward to seeing you on the inside.