Some quick updates April 27, 2025
Catching you all up on what I've been working on, and what I'm focused on these days
Hello friends!
I know I haven’t written as much as I used to in recent months. Life and work have been busy! But I thought I’d take a moment to share a few updates on what’s been happening in my professional life. It may not surprise you that in addition to my day job, I have been keeping busy with adjacent projects and creating content—although perhaps in a different format than I have in the past.
Today I’ll share with you the big 3 things that occupy my mind: (1) my new partnership with Stanford Law; (2) my Chief Revenue Officer role at Latitude Legal; and (3) the book about legal sales that I’m working on.
Partnership with Stanford Law
As some of you may have seen on LinkedIn, I recently became a fellow at Stanford Law School! I’m partnering with its fledging executive education program (led by the incomparable Adam Sterling) to develop content and programming to improve lawyers’ business acumen. It all came about when Adam reached out to me a few months ago.
Adam is truly a pioneer in this space. He spent 9 years building up the executive education program at Berkeley Law, and achieved all sorts of recognition and accolades during his tenure. We decided to meet over coffee, and immediately hit it off. All sorts of ideas emerged from that meeting, including building digital content, roundtables, summits, and even teaching opportunities.
We decided to kick things off with launching a video podcast/program that’s eligible for CLE credit. Stanford Law, in partnership with PLI, is launching a series of interviews with academics & industry veterans hosted by yours truly. The show will be called Under Review (with Alex Su), and the audio will be made available to everyone publicly via podcast feeds. For those interested in the full video episodes, it’ll be accessible to PLI members on their platform.
This past Friday, we recorded the first episode down in Palo Alto.1 Our featured guest was Kristin Sverchek, the former President (and former General Counsel) of Lyft. We recorded the content at Stanford’s own studio, which was a really cool experience. I learned so much from the conversation with Kristin that was applicable to my own career, and I suspect it’ll be eye opening for all of our listeners.
In addition to the conversation with Kristin, we will also be including in the episode interviews on topics related to Delaware corporate law and generative AI for teaching purposes. Adam and I will be speaking with Stanford Law professors and academics to have them help explain some of these developments.
Honestly, this whole thing has felt surreal. Years ago when I first joined a startup as a BDR to cold call lawyers, I never imagined I’d end up with this type of opportunity. My original goals were to simple: Do work I enjoyed, become good at it, and work with people I liked.
It goes towards what I’ve written before about unicorn jobs. Follow your instincts on your interests & superpowers, and don’t worry about prestige or status. Do good work and be generous with people. Many of the opportunities I’ve received (including Stanford) came from friends & acquaintances saying incredibly generous things about me behind my back.
I hope my journey is helpful to all of you who are considering making a pivot yourself. Not because you can follow my career path to a T—that would be unrealistic. But to show that the journey often includes unexpected stops and detours but (to quote Conan O’Brien) if you work hard and are kind, amazing things will happen.2
One year anniversary at Latitude
I recently hit my one-year anniversary at Latitude Legal and shared a few thoughts about it on LinkedIn. It’s been an amazing ride and I couldn’t be more proud to work with such a talented team. Not to mention having such incredible support from my CEO, executive team, and the board. I’ve worked at places where I’ve had none of that so I am definitely not taking all of that for granted.
Back when I first started the job a year ago, I wrote a few words about what I thought I’d be focused on, and I thought that it would be interesting to share how it actually worked out. From 12 months ago:
As Latitude’s new CRO, my goal will be to lean on our competitive advantages, and help us take things to the next level by: (1) driving awareness of our offerings via my personal brand and social media audience; (2) supporting sales and marketing by sharing best practices from the legal tech startups I’ve worked with; and (3) help advise on operational initiates to help prepare the company to scale.
Looking back, all of that has played out largely as expected. I’ve felt incredibly supported by our team at all levels of the organization. Scaling systems, processes, and org structure is a lot and I’ve been amazed at how so many members of the team have come together to push it all forward.
Another interesting observation is how things have played out since last year when I explained my thinking about why I was joined a flex talent provider vs. some “hot” legal AI startup. Again, from that same article:
It’s not clear to me who’s going to be the big winner in legal AI. However, it *is* clear to me that AI will have a dramatic impact on the future of legal work and how legal teams are structured. Especially amidst the changes taking place in the industry, where the balance of power in the value chain is shifting to clients.
This has played mostly as expected, although I underestimated how much investor appetite there would be for legal AI startups. Seems like even more startups have come on to the scene with huge fundraising announcements.
Although AI for legal dominates the headlines, it’s still not clear who the winners will be. (I have since learned to be skeptical of fundraising amounts as a proxy for customer traction—some investors are incredibly susceptible to unrealistic narratives & hype)
On the other side of things, corporate clients have increasingly relied on ALSPs (like Latitude, but others as well). Demand for legal work continues to skyrocket and as law firms continue to raise rates, there will be plenty of opportunity for other types of providers that can meet that demand. The evidence isn’t just anecdotal—Thomson Reuters recently published a report highlighting the sharp growth of the ALSP market.
As for me, the next 6-12 months will be dedicated to driving growth to the Latitude. A big part of that is infrastructure—training, data, org planning, etc. But a big part of that is also hiring for specific roles that will help us scale. This is not a novel undertaking—every company that’s reached a certain size has also gone through this process. But I do think for us it will require a unique hiring profile, someone who is experienced in law, but has the right mindset to handle biz dev for a fast-growing legal services provider.
It’s an incredibly exciting to help drive growth through this next phase of Latitude.
Book project update
Last thing—as some of you may have seen a few weeks ago, I’ve started working on a passion project of mine: A book on sales for lawyers. Many of you graciously volunteered to serve as reviewers for the first draft, and after working on the project on and off during nights and weekends—I just finalized the second draft this weekend.
The book’s scope ended up being more narrow than I anticipated when I first wrote it. Instead of being a general guide to sales, it’s about how to run biz dev meetings for lawyers who sell to other lawyers. I realized from the feedback that that’s where I need to focus on for now, and to carve out the rest of the content for a future book.
I’ve also been using this super cool web-based software called helpthisbook to gather highly specific, real-time feedback on certain passages and sentences. It helps me determine where people get lost and confused, or passages that readers find compelling (see screenshot above).
If you’d like to be a reviewer of the book, I would love to get your comments! Just make sure you fit into the target audience as described below.
This book is meant to help lawyers who sell products/services to other lawyers . . . In my conversations with law firm partners and sellers of legal products & services, I’ve realized that many do not run tightly focused meetings that drive towards a revenue-focused outcome. As a result they are disappointed with the results of their activity.
If that’s you, my hope is that this book will help.
A quick note on who this book is written for: Lawyers who sell products/services to other lawyers. That’s the core of my personal and professional experience. So if you’re a general sales professional who sells to the legal industry, or a lawyer who sells products/services to a non-legal audience–the tactical advice in this book may not apply to you.
Then, shoot me an email telling me a little about your background and why you’re interested in the book. Note: I am less interested at this point in hearing from readers who want to “teach” and more interested in readers who want to “learn” if that makes sense.
Once I finish this phase of review I will reach out to subject matter experts to get their thoughts on the substantive content.
Conclusion
Alright this email update has turned out to be far longer than I expected. Thanks for reading the whole thing. And hope you all have a wonderful week!
Until next time,
Alex