Jeff Green is the CEO of Lupl, a legal industry platform founded by a group of law firms – including Rajah & Tann and Cooley – in 2020. After being in early adopter mode this year, Lupl recently unveiled its global release. Green says he hopes Lupl will help reduce complexity, bring focus, and solve common pain points for legal professionals.
ALB: Can you tell us about the motivation behind developing Lupl?
Green: We launched Lupl to ease the challenges law firms and legal departments typically encounter when working on legal matters within and between organisations. Lupl was founded by a group of lawyers at three large inter-national law firms who were all getting remarkably similar calls from their clients, as well as requests from staff within the firms themselves. There was a growing sense of frustration that collaboration on legal matters, particularly with those outside of your organisation, wasn’t working like it could. Daily tasks such as communication, document sharing, status tracking, work allocation, knowledge management and project management were harder than they needed to be. It felt like a legal matter was spread across multiple different tools, systems, and channels that did not work well together, and too much of everyone’s time was being wasted jumping between them. They set out to create a single platform for legal professionals to help reduce complexity, bring focus, and solve the common pain points that disrupt workflow for lawyers all over the world – whether they are in a law firm or legal department. Understanding that an industry-wide problem would require an industry-wide solution, an international community was formed to formalise discussions around the problems that needed to be solved.
That community included representatives from law firms and legal departments across the globe. We had input from an advisory board of 16 leading in-house lawyers from a range of companies including blue-chip multinationals through to the world’s fastest-growing tech companies. Our wider law firm testing group included Rajah & Tann (a founding investor), Khaitan & Co in India, Slaughter and May and One Essex Court Chambers in Europe, and Cooley in the U.S.
ALB: What impact do you hope this will have on the legal industry?
Green: Quite simply, we hope Lupl will help lawyers, clients and other legal professionals work better together. Lupl is a shared workspace that makes it easy for lawyers and clients to work together by bringing together all the moving parts of a matter together in one place. The platform enables lawyers to communicate and collaborate more easily, connect, and better leverage their existing tech stack, put their knowledge to work, and better manage teams and legal workflows, both within and across their matters. What’s different about Lupl is that it’s bring-your-own-system technology is open, simple to set up and use, and cross-org by design. We have designed it to be intuitive and accessible and unlike portals or similar technologies, a user can join Lupl in under a minute, create a matter in less than 10 seconds, invite others to that matter moments later and begin collaborating. No law firm or legal department is too big or too small to use Lupl.
ALB: When it comes to effective collaboration, what challenges are unique to legal professionals?
Green: Lupl has been developed by lawyers for lawyers with legal workflows and sector requirements out front. Legal matters are complex, and with so many communication channels, document systems, legal technologies, project management tools and other store-houses of knowledge and information, lawyers face the challenge of having information on a matter scattered all over the place. Lupl provides users with a single, secure, shared workspace that enables lawyers to focus and bring all the moving pieces together in one place.
Another common challenge that legal professionals face is around document collaboration. Lawyers spend a lot of time sharing and collaborating on documents and when you have people operating across different systems, you realise how difficult it can be do something even as simple as sharing files and collabo-rating on documents. Within Lupl, users can sync with their DMS of choice, share files cross-org securely, collaborate on documents, and leverage comparison, scanning, signature, and other document workflow technologies.
Legal professionals also struggle with effectively leveraging their proprietary knowledge – a common set of tasks, workflows, documents, etc. – and often revert to having to recreate the wheel. Within Lupl, users are able to create a new matter using matter templates selected from their own knowledge library or provided by industry third parties. These templates allow users to pre-populate a new matter with tasks, milestones, information, and knowledge specific to a type of matter.
