Accessible legalese translation and General Counsel AI

We help all humans translate and understand legal processes, documents, and information. Our goal is to enhance their lives and business initiatives and economically empower them. We do this through General Counsel AI. 

Our General Counsel AI includes three components:

1. Free web app with an inclusive and accessible UX design to help any human identify the lawyer they need for their issue, important context about their legal issues and processes, and the likely costs of different options, as well as asses their options for pro bono support - all using only their plain-language story. This allows them to make better decisions and makes it easier for them to access legal help.

2. Subscription General Counsel software that maintains structured files and prevents the most common IP, governance, and employment mistakes inexperienced founders make. The General Counsel AI also produces hyper-customized contract forms that can be licensed by clients very affordably or given to their lawyers to increase efficiency and lower fees.

3. An Alliance comprised of attorneys (currently 656+ attorneys at 40 US law firms) from historically underrepresented communities whose practices Story supports with operational and business development functions that allow them to earn more, work less, find the right clients, and lean on administrative and billing support.

These components work together on top of our proprietary data model to empower historically underrepresented humans to use our legal system to get more of what they deserve, to democratize access to legal services, and to level the playing field.

Our patent-pending General Counsel AI system leverages 

1. A proprietary Rules Engine that facilitates proactive best practices to prevent legal issues before they happen;

2. A means for considering and adjusting outputs based on clients' expressed preferences and current legal setup (including the full text of their legal files), organized into a client-specific language and operative model;

3. A dedicated email inbox that authenticates users and (soon) "speaks back" as a General Counsel to answer questions and raise red flags; and

4. A Legal Data Model that maps relationships between stakeholders, assets, and events to support better legal decisions.

Using these components, we can, for example, (a) take in a client's raw legal file and automatically reorganize, analyze, and identify issues in the existing legal setup, (b) update and re-analyze that file based on forwarded emails and new documents, (c)  use email triggers like "hire employee" to initiate a workflow that sees the client take the right actions with the right documents at the right time to optimize legal setup, and (d) generate customized contract forms that can be affordably licensed.

We have 17 startups in our paid pilot now, and have 250~ more on the waitlist for it.

While we are still building more advanced features, we know that this works because we've successfully delivered the service to our 17 pilot clients - including both nonprofits and for-profits. We know it works well because these clients have encouraged 250+~ other clients to join our waitlist with just word of mouth - we have not yet marketed this solution.

We serve all humans with organizations or interests in forming one, but we are most useful to founders without personal wealth, and founders who are underestimated based on appearance or circumstances of birth and therefore working with less capital.

We serve all the companies, whether nonprofit or for-profit, that have less than $2000~ a month to spend on legal.

When we sell a for-profit subscription, we allow the customer to select a nonprofit organization that they want to gift free access.

The easiest way to explain our value add is the story of how we came to be fiscally sponsored by Health in Harmony: a board member was a startup legal client of mine, and suggested to the team that Story could help them design a better strategy to address growing legal needs - which had been repeatedly dropped and backburnered by the "pro bono" work of lawyers at big law firms. I told HiH that the system I developed for for-profit corporations would serve the vast majority of their legal needs as-is, and that only corporate governance and tax rules differ for the nonprofit implementation. I told them that I eventually want to offer this service to all nonprofits free - having run a nonprofit, I know this pain well. HiH subscribed to the pilot gratefully, sent all their documents, and we organized and analyzed them. We found and cleaned up several issues. Along the way, I described the vision for our software in detail. Health in Harmony offered to fiscally sponsor our platform so that it could be developed and expanded to serve founders regardless of their personal wealth and whether their companies were out to make money or to make change.

We talk to customers every single day, usually multiple times a day, to ensure that our work continues to serve their needs and helps them accelerate their businesses.

With respect to support scaling: we help small business owners grow by ensuring they have fewer risks and liabilities as they grow, and by saving them time and money as we add value to their organization's setup. They end up with both more budget to work with (because we made legal guidance far more affordable and eliminated liabilities that cost money), and more time (because legal troubles take time and energy to address) as they grow. To use our system, one only has to copy or forward from existing email, which also saves time.

With respect to data: we're building the world's richest data set about the costs, process, timeline, risks, and outcomes of different legal matters. We can already give users price and process information up front to help them make decisions, but over time this information gets ever-richer and can be shared (in anonymized, aggregate format) publicly in our free web app to drive price transparency in legal services generally.

Talent is equally distributed; opportunity is not. 

By increasing access to legal information and legal services through software and providing accessible opportunities to get legal right, we allow underestimated founders to see greater business success long term and realize economic empowerment aligned with their inherent talent and value. They, in turn, build more solutions for historically underrepresented needs and hire more humans to power those solutions, which create generalized economic growth and equalize wealth distribution.

Current: 255+ as of Aug 3

One year: 1000

Five years: 200,000

This community is broad - it includes anyone who might need legal help. It's just that historically-represented persons who need legal help have plenty of ways to get it, but historically underrepresented persons do not.

Small businesses stakeholders matter because of the massive impact emerging companies can have on overall employment and economic growth, and because small businesses (whether nonprofit or for profit) have very similar legal needs and considerations. As they grow, we grow.

Attorney Allies (primarily boutique law firms) stakeholders matter too - our solution provides a means to leave discriminatory big firm environments, and take home more per hour for fewer hours of work.

In general, we believe the whole world will be a better place when it's not only rich, powerful people who can use the legal system to their advantage.

We build trust with our community by earning the trust of our community. We've earned trust in five key ways:

1. We designed a system that will genuinely add value in excess of its cost and stay accountable that it does so.

2. We spent two years talking to small business owners facing legal issues to deeply understand their priorities and constraints, then designed our software to accommodate them.

3. During those two years, we delivered immense value to our customers through analog pilots of the functions our software now performs or will perform. 

4. We use our own solutions. Our team trusts our database with their personal info, and we use our own product to run our legal operations.

5. We plan for and perform social impact work from day 1, even if we don't have cash to donate.

Our goal for 2023 is to have 80%+ of our past clients subscribe to our "AutoGC" software platform currently being piloted with 17 clients. To achieve this, we need to refine and stress-test our beta technology. If successful, we will (1) generate $50K+ monthly recurring revenue to hire and scale and (2) generate data that proves our solution delivers equal quality of legal service while drastically lowering costs.

In five years, we hope to surpass 100,000 subscribers and 100,000 pro bono subscriptions to match them (delivered to nonprofits, social impact organizations, and humans in need). We expect to offer a free social impact subscription to a public benefit organization chosen by each paying for-profit subscriber.

In five years, the system we're building today will have the capacity to generate hyper-customized contract forms, answer client's legal questions in seconds, and provide immediate guidance from lawyer-trained and supervised AI tools. We'll be able to screen and intake clients for pro bono and legal aid organizations in the same way we do for attorney allies today, deliver them massive savings on client intake.

Whether in 1 year or 20, our goal is to democratize access to legal services and information. Success means that 100% of the people who might benefit from legal help have affordable access to that legal help and honest information about why it may or may not benefit them to seek it.

I was chosen as an MIT Solver (acknowledging that this is a registered trademark of MIT) in 2017 for my nonprofit solution, AnnieCannons. The legal barriers faced by our human trafficking survivor beneficiaries at AnnieCannons drove the mission of Story LLP. I love the team and staff at Solve, and have paid attention to Challenges since starting Story LLP. I have applied to one before, but this Challenge was the best fit for what we do.

We want to serve social impact organizations. There is no better place to find a concentration of incredible social impact organizations than MIT Solve. We'd love to support all solutions with optimized legal, hence the distribution selection.

We seek capital to accelerate, hence the financial selection.

We would appreciate being acknowledged for our impact through Solve, as it would underscore our mission, hence the PR selection.

As we grow, we hope to hire talented, mission-driven people and learn as much as possible from experts, hence the Human Capital selection.

Overall, we hope that Story will make a great contribution to the community.