While I am visiting San Francisco for two weeks, I am sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs \u201cin their natural habitats\u201d \u2013 places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, I sit down for lunch with\u00a0Alex Su, chief revenue officer at\u00a0Latitude Legal, over Thai [\u2026]<\/p>\n
While I am visiting San Francisco for two weeks, I am sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs \u201cin their natural habitats\u201d \u2013 places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, I sit down for lunch with\u00a0Alex Su<\/a>, chief revenue officer at\u00a0Latitude Legal<\/a>, over Thai iced tea and tofu dishes at Phnom Penh House, a Cambodian restaurant in Alameda that Alex considers something of a personal institution, frequenting it for both family meals and business meetings.<\/p>\n This episode is recorded live, and is best enjoyed on YouTube. The link is below.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Alex\u2019s career path is anything but linear. He started as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, clerked for a federal judge in Chicago, then drifted through a plaintiff\u2019s firm, a brief solo practice, and ultimately a leap of faith into legal tech sales \u2013 joining e-discovery company Logikcull in 2016. From there, he moved to Everlaw, then to Ironclad, where he served as head of community development, building a reputation that spread well beyond any job title.<\/p>\n That reputation was shaped in large part by TikTok, where Alex\u2019s comedic, self-effacing videos skewering law firm culture \u2013 partners, associates, privilege logs and the absurdities of BigLaw \u2013 earned him\u00a0more than 100,000 followers<\/a>, got shared inside Ironclad\u2019s internal Slack, and ultimately helped land him his next job. It\u2019s a story of accidental virality and deliberate reinvention that mirrors the broader shifts he sees in the legal profession.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Now at Latitude Legal, an ALSP providing on-demand legal talent to law firms and corporate legal departments, Alex represents a kind of poetic symmetry: a lawyer known for championing alternative careers working at an alternative legal services provider \u2014 a label he thinks has outlived its usefulness, given how mainstream flexible legal talent has become.<\/p>\n Alex and I also dig into the current state of legal AI \u2013 what\u2019s overhyped, what\u2019s underhyped, and why the pandemic was arguably a bigger inflection point for legal tech adoption than generative AI. Plus, we even reflect a bit on my three decades of covering legal innovation, the stubborn persistence of the billable hour, and why the justice gap remains stubbornly wide despite all the talk of disruption.<\/p>\n It is a wide-ranging and candid conversation \u2013 one you may want to watch on video instead of just listening to the audio.<\/p>\n