Learning for Civic Action Challenge
Accessible Legalese Translation for Diverse Humans
What is the name of your solution?
Accessible Legalese Translation for Diverse Humans
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Story LLP translates legalese by helping lawyers and clients cooperate to get what they deserve.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Todays legal services market doesn't actually serve most humans - it's optimized for those with the most power and privilege. Those with the most wealth often get the most free legal help. Humans, and particularly startup founders, who do not have personal wealth face a disadvantage in life, in work, in civic participation and in access to justice as a result of disparate access to quality legal help. In fact, founders with less privilege are most likely to be DISadvantaged by automated services designed for the needs of those with power and privilege.
As a result, only about 30% of the humans who could use legal help for themselves or their businesses ever even TRY to reach a lawyer for help - including those who would qualify for available pro bono assistance.
Founders without personal means and without lawyers in their network are far more likely to use a BAD legal form online because they can't afford thousands of dollars for a custom lawyer form. They lack quality, affordable alternatives. Therefore, the less wealth and privilege you have, the more likely you are to create expensive problems that cost your business precious capital to fix - or kill that business altogether - because you simply didn't understand the legalese you're forced to work with.
In addition, quality lawyers from historically underrepresented communities, who do more with less to achieve the same things, are systemically disadvantaged in traditional law firm models that reward and advance lawyers based on the networks of privilege they are born with and the business development skills that historically underrepresented community members rarely have an equal opportunity to learn. Of the 600-700,000 lawyers in the US from historically underrepresented communities, most are paid far less than they're worth. The single biggest barriers to their leaving these harmful jobs for independent practices where they're paid what they are worth is fear of (1) losing access to the firm's library of document precedent and (2) failing at business development because they received no training in that skill.
For both historically underrepresented lawyers and clients, the legal playing field is both unequal and inequitable. As a result, historically underrepresented founders and lawyers face disparate costs to grow and gain economic power with their talents. With lesser economic power, historically underrepresented humans lack equal participation in politics and other civic functions, and lack equal access to justice.
What is your solution?
We help all humans translate, understand, and acquire legal processes, documents, and information through cooperation. Our goal is to enhance their lives and business initiatives, economically empower them, and enable their greater civic participation.
Our solution includes three components:
1. A free web app with an inclusive an accessible UX design to help any human identify the lawyer they need for their issue, receive important context of related legal issues and processes, and understand the likely costs or different options, as well as asses their options for pro bono support - all using only their plain-language story. This web app helps clients identify what they need for free, then offers clients two types of paid solutions: standard and custom.
2. "Story standard" documents and services are customized to the client's stage, dimensions, and circumstance, but are not legal advice and are delivered without lawyer edits. This includes automated general counsel oversight, document forms, and more. They're designed to be affordable while still delivering quality.
3. "Story custom" documents and services are legal advice and include custom edits from a lawyer. They cost clients 1/3 to 1/4 the price of a comparable service at a big law firms, but are performed by highly vetted specialist attorneys with partner-level experience. Story custom services are provided by our law firm and/or our growing Alliance of attorneys (currently 66 attorneys at 25 US law firms) from historically underrepresented communities, whose practices Story supports with operational and business development functions that allow them to (1) earn more per hour than comparably-experienced counterparts at big law firms, but work less, (2) receive the helpful parts of law firms (like excellent document precedents and access to other specialists) but eliminate firms' discriminatory downsides, and (3) serve clients they identify with, without paying the operating taxes associated with systemic biases. Our Alliance today is 93.3% comprised of firms with women and/or BIPOC principals.
Our technology generates the Story Standard services affordably. It also generates the document precedent and client leads historically underrepresented lawyers need to build better lives through providing Story Custom services to client who can afford them.
These components work together to empower historically underrepresented humans to use our legal system to get more of what they deserve, to build and retain greater economic power, and to participate more equally in the legal system.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We begin by focusing on serving two groups that allow us to design a solution that will serve many more: (1) business founders from historically underrepresented communities and (2) specialist lawyers from historically underrepresented communities.
Historically underrepresented founders (who also have personal legal needs) have always been required to do more to prove their equal worth with fewer resources. Because they receive less capital, they have less money to spend on lawyers to set their businesses up for success, create legally-compliant strategic plans, or navigate disputes. They try to get by with free options they don't really understand, and make costly, preventable mistakes as a result. They also are treated as less important by most lawyers at big firms, at times being told explicitly that the firm doesn't care about them because they're too small.
Historically underrepresented attorneys have also had to do more with fewer resources and overcome more systemic barriers to attend law school and get legal jobs. However, once they reach such jobs, they are overwhelmingly treated with skepticism that they deserve to be there, and they receive less access to opportunities for advancement. They do not usually share in business development opportunities and training other than through tokenization. When they're able to open their own practices, they face discrimination from clients who often refuse to hire or pay them for purely discriminatory reasons.
By offering technology that allows historically underrepresented attorneys and clients to collaborate to build an accessible library of legal forms and information - whether for a human to consult, a founder to use, or a lawyer to customize. We listen to them speaking in plain language, and adapt forms and information to their diverse circumstances. By helping historically underrepresented lawyers and clients cooperate, we serve both. Founders can use better legal forms and info to minimize cost while avoiding the most harmful mistakes, which helps their businesses grow into power. Attorney Allies can leave bad jobs for better lives with the comfort of a precedent library better than that of any law firms and a steady flow of high-quality client leads from Story. These functions allow our clients and lawyers to build greater economic power and see greater business success - which positions them to engage in meaningful civic participation.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
The Story LLP team includes both software company staff and Attorney Allies.
Our founder, Jessica Hubley, is a serial social entrepreneur and has also served as general counsel to over 200 startups. In her prior role as CEO of AnnieCannons, where she was selected as a Solver in 2017, Jessica worked with survivors of human trafficking and gender based violence to train them to be software engineers and entrepreneurs. She found that AnnieCannons' survivors and her startup founder clients had a common problem: their lives and business initiatives were stunted because they simply could not translate legalese. In particular, they lacked the vocabulary to properly understand their circumstances, and often signed documents or agreed to actions which harmed them as a result. She created Story LLP to automate and scale the guidance she gave to both founders and survivors in need, including by writing code herself. This includes offering affordable access to her own procedures and rules built through founder experience for getting startup legal right from the start. Story free web app is designed to help even those with no money or power access legal information and help, and to fund that pro bono support through the success of for-profit clients.
Jessica is joined on staff by a stellar team: a data analyst, a systems architect, and an AI engineer each from historically underrepresented communities. Our team shares concern that careless development of AI systems will exacerbate systemic biases, and has set out to create AI that instead corrects them.
Story LLP's Attorney Alliance is comprised of lawyers recommended by other lawyers in the specialties our clients need. The Alliance is 93.3% women and/or BIPOC-led firms, which range in size from 1 attorney to 10 attorneys. They have 10+ years experience (and sometimes 30+) in their specialities, attended great schools, and trained at big firms before setting out on their own. They are therefore both small business owners themselves and attorneys, each with lived experience succeeding despite social obstacles. They have joined our Alliance out of a shared interest in helping those who must do more with less get more of what they deserve.
Together, our team and Alliance are poised to translate legalese with cooperative AI technology and enable greater civic engagement by diverse humans.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Help learners acquire key civic skills and knowledge, including how to assess credibility of information, engage across differences, understand one’s own agency, and engage with issues of power, privilege, and injustice.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Atlanta, GA, United States
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model that is rolled out in one or more communities
How many people does your solution currently serve?
66 lawyers and 200+ startups, or roughly ~500 humans
Why are you applying to Solve?
First, we need help reaching like-minded capital. Our team, our lawyers, and our clients all come form historically underrepresented communities which systemic biases cause to be systemically undervalued. As a result, access to capital is a challenge - most investors don't have the problem we solve, and believe they have funded the best founders rather than the founders with the most privilege. From Jessica's time with AnnieCannons, we know that Solve provides access to networks of investors who recognize the untapped value of the under-appreciated humans from historically underrepresented communities.
Second, we would like to collaborate with Solve to develop better impact measurement and reporting tools to demonstrate the value we are adding for founders and lawyers in their professional and personal capacities.
Third, we would like to help build communities of Solvers collaborating to better remove biases from artificial intelligence systems, perhaps in collaboration with MIT.
Fourth, we would like to support other Solvers with better legal options and help them get legal right from the start so that their organizations have a better chance of success. Even if we're not chosen as Solvers, we'd still love to do this!
Our founder Jessica had a wonderful Solver experience and hopes to bring Story LLP into this amazing community.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Jessica Hubleuy
What makes your solution innovative?
Existing legal tech scales the problems of a broken, discriminatory legal system rather than solving them. Story works to build a better system.
You can find directories of lawyers online. They elevate bad lawyers who look like users expect but who aren't good enough to get word of mouth business, and overcharge historically underrepresented lawyers to have them overlooked by head-shot level bias. They only work for humans who already know what kind of lawyer they need. Story instead chooses lawyers based on skills and merit after helping clients figure out which lawyer they need. This achieves a more equitable distribution of work based on lawyer talent.
You can find form document generators online today, too. They've designed for the world's most privileges, and those who have historically started companies. For founders who don't understand legalese when using them, they create more problems than they solve.
You can also find AI tools today which claim to provide legal services, but they require a lawyer-user to work - either by creating a document to be reviewed or by editing AI outputs. More importantly, these tools can never preserve attorney client privilege while also taking inputs from diverse lawyers at different firms - but Story LLP, through our Alliance model, can.
What you won't find online is a service to provide a more affordable practice of law. Law firms don't want to do this - their model is billing by the hour. Directories, document generators, and other matter management software CAN'T legally do this, because only a lawyer-owned entity can practice law. Story leverages our law firm and software company collaboration such that we can practice law through software. This includes generating affordable Story Standard documents that are tailored to the realities of historically underrepresented founders.
Story's key differentiator is diversity. We treat clients as equally relevant and valuable whether or not they can pay us. We tell clients who can pay us transparently that their cooperation will help others, and they consent to participate. Our AI systems are designed to consider the human behind the business where other generative tools treat all humans as alike (and assume they're like the most privileged humans). We also engage our stakeholders with radically transparent cooperation where others compete in silos, following antiquated business models.
Because we are cooperating, we are aggregating our power to equalize the legal playing field.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
To reach our goals, we continue on the trajectory of growth in both paying client base and Attorney Alliance. Within a year, on this trajectory, our Alliance will be over 100 specialist lawyers, and we'll have over 400 paying clients.
Today, we focus on historically underrepresented business founders who must transact with large counterparties who have in-house legal departments.
We can already produce quality, affordable legal documents that help diverse founders get more of what they deserve - for example, B Corporation incorporation at an affordable fixed fee. In the next year, we will (1) develop tools to transform the legal matter information we already receive from our Attorney Allies and clients into hyper-customized, high quality contract forms that position them for success and (2) move our current free tools, which help web app users via email to identify the right lawyer, understand context, and project costs to the 100% in-app.
From 1-5 years, we're focused on seeing our historically underrepresented founder clients succeed.
Within 5 years, we'll grow with our clients to serve individual legal needs and larger enterprises with our technology, enabled by the client success we've helped enhance along the way. Our AI tools will produce legal documents and translations for specialties beyond the common startup transactions we support today. Our free web app will help those in need find pro bono help without painful phone calls or help a founder identify mission-aligned merger counsel. Our five year goal is to have added so much value for our lawyers and clients that the legal services market is changed, is accessible to those with few resources and privileges, and as a result those with less never have to spend more on legal help. Instead, they'll be in an economic and intellectual position to engage in changing discriminatory legal systems.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
Story LLP measures:
1. Economic power delivered to diverse attorneys (over $700,000 delivered since Jan 2022)
2. Client and user satisfaction with free information we deliver (9.9+ NPS)
3. Legal fee savings delivered to paying clients (roughly 85% today)
4. Legal problems prevented (~6 per pilot subscribers) to enable greater innovation by historically underrepresented founders
5. Word-of-mouth traction rate (currently 95%+ of our clients come from word of mouth recommendations by other clients; the remainder simply heard what we do). We do not spend money on marketing.
6. Client satisfaction with Story Standard (10 NPS) and Story Custom (9.8 NPS) Services
7. AutoGC pilot subscribers (growing ~20% Monthly)
At core, the measure of success we care most about is that our clients are so happy with their outcomes that they send other clients to us. 100% of our new client leads today come through recommendations of our clients and Attorney Allies.
What is your theory of change?
Civic participation requires code speak - to engage with those who have power to make change - or to become on with power to make change - you must be speaking the same language as those who have power.
Those with the power to make civic change are overwhelmingly lawyers - they speak legalese. But money also serves to motivate those in power to make change.
To change civic institutions to serve more humans, more kind of humans must be able to influence those with power or gain power for themselves. To have such influence, they need (1) economic power, or money motivation and (2) intellectual power, or persuasive motivation.
Story delivers economic power to lawyers and clients. We deliver economic power to lawyers by helping hem get more income with less work and stress. We deliver economic power to clients by saving them unnecessary or wasteful fees for legal services and by helping them get legal right from the start, which makes businesses more successful and, in turn, generates economic power.
Diverse lawyers with greater economic power can better compete to hold positions of civic power and influence.
Diverse clients with greater economic power, and armed with an understanding of the law as it exists today through Story's technology, can better compete to hold positions of civic power and influence AND can more effectively engage with those who hold such power.
Historically underrepresented lawyers and clients working alone cannot hope to participate in, much less change, established systems. Story believes that by helping them aggregate their power and build upon one another's knowledge, each can gain the economic and intellectual power to effect critical change.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Story's proprietary technology includes: (1) a legal specialty taxonomy and data model, (2) a means for feeding real matter data from diverse humans' interactions to train an AI model, and (3) an "AutoGC" process for getting legal right from the start of a company. The "AutoGC" process includes logic, file systems, checklists, and indexing functions, and was developed by our founder to prevent the problems and pains she saw her legal clients grapple with.
Today, each of these three functions is triggered by user interactions with a dedicated email inbox.
Each of these three functions generate not just outputs, but inputs for one another. For example, our AutoGC tool is a standard offering that helps clients identify when they may have custom needs; how clients respond to custom needs trains AutoGC to better spot issues in the future. Work by our Attorney Alliance today creates real matter data from different kinds of lawyers and firms to train a more inclusive "standard" system.
Together, these functions generate and evolve Story Standard documents, information, and services. For clients with less means, Story Standard is affordably priced (or free) and suited to their circumstances. For clients with greater ability to pay, Story Standard is the starting point offered to the attorney Ally who provides custom services.
We also have a free web app which allows users to submit a plain language story and receive free information in return via email it's powered by the insights we get by providing paid services.
We believe that AI for legal must be different than AI for prose. Our AI design uses custom vectors and tuning on larger language models in combination with small, legal-specific language models to generate better legalese. For example, in legal, what happened yesterday is usually far more important than what happened for the last 1000 years. Our AI considers the review and tuning actions of many lawyers at many firms, whereas other AI is trained by lawyers at a single firm, or a small number of lawyers hired to provide input separately from real, practical experience.
Our AI also considers the human beyond the prompt: client profiles, preferences, and circumstances. So, whereas other AI tech (even in legal) assumes that anyone should get the same result from the same prompt, Story knows that the same prompt should be handled differently based on who's giving it and where they are in life and business. For example, from the same prompt or trigger, we produce a different form for a first time founder of color to send to their first, make-or break customer than we would produce for an established company doing it's 1000th deal.
Our team has come together because we believe in the potential of technology to drive social equity, and we fear the results if AI systems are allowed to continue embodying and enhancing systemic biases - especially in law. Together, we're building technology that is designed to ensure no one is left behind.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technology
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
https://www.storyllp.com
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
2 Full time staff, 3 part-time contractors, 66+ Attorney Allies
How long have you been working on your solution?
Story LLP's law firm was founded in 2016, but our Software company was founded in June 2021. We began building our data model and the community necessary to train in in fall of 2021.
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
Inclusivity is the core of our mission - here's our WHY and HOW:
WHY
Help humans cooperate to get what they deserve.
HOW
Change the system: Target system-level changes
Use Technology to offset and correct system perversions
Design for the marginalized first, by the marginalized first
Challenge the patriarchy: Question and disrupt the old way
Plan to end conflict with compromise, not victory, so we create conditions of collaboration and sharing to optimize collective growth
Ally humans to share costs and enhance benefits (opposite of “every man for himself”)
Assume there is always a better way, but each is doing the best she knows
Seek genuine mutual benefits
Eliminate exploitation
Never knowingly exploit living things or the environment
Eliminate waste to show respect and preserve resources for the tribe
Maintain mindfulness against self-exploitation
Empower the individual to serve the tribe: enable each team member to bring her full self to advance the tribe
Respect every human as the sole expert on themselves
Value ourselves appropriately
Assume we always have more to learn about one another, and treasure that
Listen to others with true openness to hearing them
Acknowledge our limitations and mistakes + work to improve
Serve those who have shown they deserve respect, or are ready to
Be honest and forthright about your capabilities and limitations
Respect one another’s primary commitments to family and close friends
As for WHO:
Our founder is a queer woman
Our technical staff, including contractors, is 100% women and/or nonbinary persons
Our engineers are over 50% survivors of human trafficking and/or gender based violence
Of Attorney Alliance firms today, 93.3% are led by women and/or people of color, including both immigrants and indigenous communities
Diversity, equity, and inclusion drive every element of Story LLP, starting with our tech.
What is your business model?
We use a combination of lawyers, support staff, and technology to deliver two types of services: Story Standard and Story Custom. We focus on serving diverse founders with these services, but they work for individual human needs too.
Story Standard services are offered at a fixed fee or on subscription, and 100% of the revenue for these services is retained by Story. For example, we sell a custom form for $100 or offer a subscription to the AutoGC service pilot for $150/month. We launched Story Standard services in January 2023. We've earned $22,000+ from Story Standard Services in the first 3.5 months of 2023. They are provided through automated means.
Story Custom services are generally hourly services provide by our law firm and/or attorney Alliance. Clients pay between $80 and $30,000 in a month for Story custom services depending on their needs. Of this revenue Story pays 80% to Attorney Allies and retains 20% as our fee share. Since January 2022, we've earned ~$640,000 in gross revenue from Story Custom services. They are provided through a combination of automated means and human services. Automated tools serve functions like payment processing, form generation, and preparing client background information to allow for more enjoyable and efficient hourly human services. Though our Custom services through the Story Attorney Alliance cost clients 1/4-1/3 of a comparably-experienced lawyer at a big law firm, our Attorney Allies take home more than double per hour when those firms pay. Our technology also takes care of the more boring parts of lawyering, allowing Allies to focus on the fun parts. Our Attorney Allies have signed perpetual 20% fee sharing agreements with us for their Custom services to Story clients.
Most Story Standard customers have already returned to engage at least some Custom services.
Whether Story Standard or Custom services are engaged, our clients generally save 50-90% of what they would have spent for a comparable service from another lawyer or document service; they also prevent problems that create massive (but uncertain) costs or time and money in the future.
To enable us to practice law with software, we operate both a law firm (which receives revenue) and a software company (which builds tools to enhance that revenue in exchange for an exclusive license fee equal to the law firms net revenue).
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
We are currently profitable.
We are re-investing most revenue into growth in Q2 2023.
We have waitlist for certain services and now seek to scale to meet existing client demand.
We are exploring debt and equity investment to hire more AI engineers to scale our AI tools to help meet existing client demand more quickly, among other needs, given our viral word of mouth growth rate.
Solution Team
-
JH
Jessica Hubley CEO, Story LLP
to Top
Our Organization
Story LLP