Interview with Max Cole, co-founder of Autto

You’verecently launched Autto, an online automation platform, could you tell me alittle about it?

It’s a workflow automation platform aimedprimarily at law firms and regulated businesses. We’ve tried to make theautomation easy by having a building block style interface where you canconnect each workflow component together. It’s well priced compared to otherautomation providers so the aim is to make it accessible to all.

Couldyou give me one or two practical examples of how it would those in law firms orin-house teams?

I’d say we are ‘process agnostic’ at Autto.We don’t say “here is a process and this is a way of making it more efficient”.Law firms have a huge amount of processes and each firm does a particularprocess differently. So it is better to give some examples of things we haveworked on. We have worked with a New York law firm to implement a workflow forissuing a particular type of debt claim, from data entry to filing. Forin-house we created a HR advice workflow, which directs users to theappropriate HR documents based on their input.

Ibelieve this is your second lawtech platform – how did you get involved withbuilding platforms?

That’s right. I had an idea for a lawtechbusiness about seven or eight years ago and while I was testing the water tosee if it was viable I met Ian [Gosling]. We created a platform that allowedpeople to create a Will online. While doing that platform, the feedback wereceived was that people wanted the same interface but with different outputs(e.g. documents, emails, etc). So that’s how Autto came to be.

You’vebeen both a solicitor and barrister over the last twenty years – how well doyou think the legal profession is doing at adopting technology?

There has certainly been a convergence oftwo things which push firms to adopt technology.  The first is demand from clients to do thingsless expensively and on a fixed price. The second is the that Cloud-basedtechnologies are now more readily available but some firms are still doingthings the old-fashioned way. There are now plenty of law firms with anappetite for innovation looking at new products. We’ve definitely seen a lot ofinterest for our product.

Apartfrom using your platform, what else should law firms be doing to deliver valueto their clients?

They should be looking at legal design orservice design to make their services more human-centred and satisfying to use.Law firms should review what they do and understand what processes they have.They should then look at technology to make them more efficient, provided theyfollow the “people-process-technology” cycle.

Howdo you think the next generation of lawyers should approach using tech in theircareers?

I think the next generation of lawyersshould be open to technology adoption, curious, be an evangelist for tech if itcan do their job better, and should continue to have an awareness of what techis available.

Lastbut not least, what do you think the lawyer of the future will look like?

In the next 10 – 20 years lawyers won’t be doing the same roles as they are today. It may be that there will be three types of lawyer in future. The first will be those that give legal advice, the second will specialise in designing and implementing legal processes and the third type will integrate tech into those processes.

Thanks for your time Max.