One size fits all, isn’t always one size suits all. For the team at Josef, experience has proven that to empower legal professionals to build digital tools that transform the delivery of legal services you often need the ‘right’ tools working together.
Enter plug-and-play integrations that connect with your ecosystem of tools. Many lawyers and legal teams have an array of tools at their disposal. That “ecosystem” of tools poses a challenge if they don’t speak to each other. Effective integrations enable that ecosystem of tools to speak the same language, to automate and streamline a lawyer’s work. It’s why Josef is championing the adoption of this approach to legaltech, empowering lawyers to work smarter, not harder.
Josef takes its name from the novel by Franz Kafka called, ‘The Trial’, where the protagonist Josef K is wrongfully arrested and must defend his innocence for an unknown crime. The book’s focal point is centred on who is entitled to justice in society and what role do legal professionals play?
The ‘who’ of this question, is really the part that spoke to Josef and its founders – Tom Dreyfus, Sam Flynn and Kirill Kliavin. In 2017 this ambitious trio, made up of two young lawyers and a tech wiz, came together to address what they saw as an overwhelming number of legal issues that they believed could be addressed by technology.
“Before Josef came to fruition, I launched an online web-based application called mykifines in 2016, which gave people automated guidance and advice in relation to public transport ticketing infringement law in Victoria,” said Sam Flynn, COO and Co-founder of Josef. “We had 30,000 users on the first day, and 60,000 by the end of the first month. The success of this automated legal tool, along with other strategic initiatives, prompted the government to repeal an unfair law. Following this success, Tom Dreyfus and I came together to figure out how to empower community legal centres to build digital tools to help more people and bridge the access to justice gap. Our vision then became about empowering people who already have legal expertise and specialist knowledge to build these tools themselves.”
The turning point or what they describe as their “lightbulb moment” was, “…when we realised that the future of legal automation wasn’t about building tools, but empowering legal subject matter experts to create their own”, explained Josef Co-founder and CEO, Tom Dreyfus.
From this aspiration came the Josef mission – to make legal services more accessible, and so began their journey to build the Josef platform. Rather than working with lawyers to build specific bots, they’d give legal professionals the tools to do so themselves, to multiply the effect of their efforts. So, the trio went back to the drawing board and, after months at kitchen tables, cafes and public libraries, the first version of Josef launched in May 2018.
The first bot launched to the public was called Health Complaints Assist, created by award-winning boutique law firm Polaris Lawyers. By March 2019, Josef raised a $1 million seed round from top startup venture funds and angel investors, made its first few hires, and secured strategic pilot programs with top tier legal firms and in-house corporate teams. The rest, as they say, is history, with Josef now operating globally, with thousands of builders helping tens of thousands of people to solve legal problems.
Today Josef’s platform has grown globally and taken on many new shapes and forms to become a game-changing legaltech platform. The no-code software platform empowers lawyers and legal professionals to automate legal tasks, including lawyer-client interactions, auto-generating legal documents and providing legal guidance and advice.
Josef’s platform has been adapted to many use cases. It’s been used to teach the next generation of lawyers about design thinking and legal tech. It helps multi-billion dollar clients build a contract library complete with automated advice bots so the entire business can self-serve. It’s helped community legal centres and pro bono teams build amazing tools to improve access to justice. And it’s recently even been integrated with some smart e-conveyancing tech.
Learn more about Josef as an integration partner.
