Summary

In Episode 9 of The AAAi Podcast, Carrie McLain, CEO of the Helton Law Group, and Maged Helmy, Founder and CEO of Newcode.ai, join AAA President & CEO Bridget McCormack and Legally Disrupted’s Zach Abramowitz to explore what the next legal ecosystem could look like—one where firms aren’t retrofitting AI but designing around it; where law firms no longer resemble traditional firms; and where technology is not just smarter, but purpose-built by people who truly understand the unique demands of the legal industry.

Key Takeaways

1. Build the Ark Before the Flood

The Helton Law Group didn’t wait for AI to become mainstream. They’ve been building tech infrastructure for over 20 years, making it easy to integrate AI by design. Carrie described wanting a system “like Legos”—modular, flexible, and purpose-built. She found that in Newcode.ai, which deploys AI directly inside a firm’s environment, keeping data secure and enabling full functionality. Maged’s core principle: “Move the AI to the data, not the other way around.”

The lesson for other firms: Don’t wait for the perfect tool. Build on the assumption that the tech is going to get exponentially better, because it will.

2. The Law Firm of the Future Solves One Problem Really Well

Helton Law Group focuses exclusively on solving one problem: hospital reimbursement disputes. Their team—lawyers, data scientists, coders, analysts—operates like a precision task force, gaining efficiency and value through specialization. This niche model creates network effects: each client improves outcomes for the next. AI enhances this by enabling faster, smarter use of growing data.

3. Second-Wave Legal AI Is Already Here

Maged Helmy represents a new generation of legaltech founders—deeply technical innovators who were early to explore large language models, but patient enough to observe how AI does and doesn’t work for lawyers. He began experimenting with GPT-2 and quickly recognized its limitations without access to real-world data. Today, NewCode.ai delivers modular, secure AI infrastructure tailored to the unique needs of legal, healthcare, and government environments. Their approach is pragmatic: design AI tools around how law firms actually operate, with a focus on privacy, control, and integration—rather than flashy interfaces.

Final Thought: A Blueprint for Legal Builders

This episode offers a playbook for entrepreneurial lawyers: identify a real problem, invest early in infrastructure, and choose technology that supports your mission. As Carrie put it, “We didn’t set out to be different. We just built what made sense for the work.”

Watch Episode 9

Transcript 

Below is the full transcript of Episode 9 of The AAAi Podcast. 

Bridget McCormack: Welcome to the AAAi Podcast. I'm Bridget McCormick, the CEO and President of the American Arbitration Association. 

Zach Abramowitz: And I'm Zach Abramowitz, founder of Killer Whale Strategies and investor in disruptive legal startups. The AAAi Podcast tells the story of the American Arbitration Association's AI journey. We discuss emerging trends in artificial intelligence with movers and shakers inside the AAA, as well as with key influencers in the broader legal AI ecosystem. 

Zach Abramowitz: So this is the culmination of bit of what was a world's collide moment for me. Last November, I was a judge on a startup, like a kind of shark tank competition at the Legal Innovators Conference in London. And one of the startups that presented, didn't show their product, but explained critical issues with AI as it was currently being applied to legal.

Zach Abramowitz: He was a PhD in AI. Super impressive. Almost like too impressive to be in AI for legal. Come on, now we're having our moment now. I actually came back and reported to the AAA. I said, wow, there is a new wave of entrepreneurs coming. And that was Maged Helmy, the founder of newcode.ai. And at the time he told me I'm working with a firm in the US called the Helton Law Group. They're not like other law firms. They deeply care about privacy, and they told me they want to introduce me to the American Arbitration Association. And I was thinking to myself, not if I can first.

Bridget McCormack: Because the amazing Carrie McClain and I had been talking for a long time about the ways in which we can, make our process better, faster, and, add more value to the people who need us. And she had been telling me about the Norwegians. 

Carrie McLain: My Norwegians that I'm working with on all this. 

Zach Abramowitz: So now we finally get all of us in one place, the Future Vision Law firm, the Future Vision, Dispute Resolution, and the Norwegians, all in one place. 

Carrie McLain: It was fun when we realized we were all talking about the same people.

Zach Abramowitz: Carrie, I think we should start with you. 

Carrie McLain: Sure. 

Zach Abramowitz: For those who may not be familiar, tell us about the Helton Law Group and about your journey to starting what is really a unique vision for a law firm? 

Carrie McLain: Yeah, I think we've always been a little bit unique, but we're still unique.

Carrie McLain: But Helton, at its core, what we do is represent hospitals in navigating challenges with health plans regarding reimbursement. We are like a firm that's built to solve one problem and we do a lot of it. We've been doing that as a single focus for about 25 years. The firm itself has been around for about 30, and we come at this one problem with a variety of skill sets. We have lawyers, we have data scientists, contract analysts, document specialists, hospital reimbursement, coding, clinical expertise on that side. We bring all of this team, this league of legends together, to focus on this one problem in wherever the problems, sits in. However we can do that, and we have been on a journey to continue to do that and to do that in better, smarter, faster ways since 25 years ago, 

Zach Abramowitz: how else, or I guess what are some of the ways that Helton might not be recognizable, or might really differ from how a traditional law firm operates? And obviously it was hyper-specialization, right? Like you said, solving one problem. But what are some of the things that I might find about the Helton Law Group that I would not have gotten at a different law firm? 

Carrie McLain: A couple of things. We focus on that one problem, but that one problem is pretty complex and it can be very confusing. And so there's not a whole bunch of lawyers, certainly in this space that really understand healthcare reimbursement. It's a bit of a challenge. And so resolving the disputes that are inevitable, so confusing, complex, high volume, lots of codes and rules and regulations and restrictions and changes and everything else, and tons of contracts.

Carrie McLain: So as we come at that problem and  dissect it and look for ways to solve some of these inevitable disputes that come up, that's, and where Bridget and I's conversations have really been focused is. How to better and more efficiently get to the solutions of those problems in a timely way so that the solution can then prevent the problem from happening again.

Bridget McCormack: I actually think Carrie's the only lawyer I've ever met who is literally on a path to put herself out of business. She won't ever get put out of business because her ideas are so big and brilliant that she'll probably just get lots more business. But to me she's like more motivated by solving a problem that society has, not solving a problem that, lawyers want to solve to be able to do more lawyer things. 

Carrie McLain: I think that's the job of a lawyer. That's really the job of a lawyer, in the bigger context. 

Bridget McCormack: Well, I know that's why we all went to law school. But people get off on other like tangents and you are still like focused on I think I can solve this problem for society, even if it means I don't have any more work to do.

Carrie McLain: Exactly. 

Zach Abramowitz: And we were talking about this a little bit before the podcast at dinner last night, that it, the idea that someone automates themself out of a job is a. It's just a nonsense narrative. I've never met a person 

Bridget McCormack: It's a great goal, 

Zach Abramowitz: Right? But my point is people who automate themselves out of a job usually have, usually more jobs, usually are promoted. If someone would come to me and an employee and say. Listen. I've, put some tech in place and as a result, I've completely automated what I do, so you don't need to pay me anymore. I'm promoting this person. Of course, this is huge.

Zach Abramowitz: What does happen? There are people who are automated out of jobs. Yes. No one automates themself out of a job. 

Bridget McCormack: Totally. 

Zach Abramowitz: But I like your point is that it's not only about. Unbottlenecking the lawyer or automating the process. It's really focused on a societal goal. This is what our mission is to do, and if along the way that means. X, Y, and Z for the business. We’re good with that because that's our laser focus is on solving this highly complex problem in the best way possible. 

Bridget McCormack: And it's like another podcast that would take a few hours. But the way in which the problem, Carrie, is solving impacts healthcare and makes it just far more inefficient. Less effective and therefore out of reach for lots of people is so significant that we could do an entire series on that. We're not going to, we should turn to Maged yeah. Because, honestly, that's like a whole, it would take us forever, but it's so important. 

Carrie McLain: it is important. 

Bridget McCormack: It’s pretty important. Like we should maybe do that as a second episode. Why it matters to healthcare eventually. But I want to understand why Maged is attracted to legal. Because if you could do anything, you could point your talents at any industry, right? You have the talent that matters right now. I think. Why? 

Zach Abramowitz: and a team of PhDs 

Bridget McCormack: I didn't know that, but I trust you. 

Zach Abramowitz: Tell us about the newcode.ai team. 

Bridget McCormack: Tell us about your team and why this problem is interesting to you.

Maged Helmy: Absolutely. So we're a highly specialized team in AI and software and I started my journey eight years ago in artificial intelligence and I was very focused on how you can run AI in a highly regulated environment. So think legal, think government, healthcare in that aspect. And what we have noticed very early on, for an AI to operate very well, it needs the context which needs the data.

Maged Helmy: And now to go around and speak with firms that, Hey, do you want to move your sensitive data outside here? This is all the promises that we can give you. But instead. We found a lot of resistance. Nobody wants to give away their data, and even nobody wants to share their methods because this is their unique value propositions that they bring to the market.

Maged Helmy: So our angle and target was, okay, we need to deploy the AI. In the firm's cloud or on-prem for the firm in order for them to maintain their competitive advantage in order for them to give the data, to give the AI access to all the data and innovate on top of that. Yeah, so the core idea was AI needs data. We have highly regulated sectors that is looking for digitalization. They're not moving the data out, then we got to move the AI in. And that's how it started. 

Zach Abramowitz: They're not moving the data out. We've got to move the AI in. 

Maged Helmy: Correct. 

Zach Abramowitz: How do you do that? 

Maged Helmy: Yeah, that's a 300 plus page book. That was my PhD thesis that covered multiple angles. But the focus here is that it has been enabled more and more with the availability of the tools, with the availability of the open source algorithms and the large language models that are available today. So if we were to go back three years ago, this conversation might not have been possible.

Maged Helmy: So things are moving very fast. And you, in order for you to do that, you have to be adaptable. Your infrastructure has to be ready. So your organizational infrastructure in terms of how the AI is deployed, how do you manage the modules, how you approach it with a hybrid perspective is very critical.

Maged Helmy: So the way that I see the future, or the future now is like six months. This is how far we can think in, future when it comes to AI is it's not going to be completely off the shelf. It's not going to be completely in-house customized, but it'll be a hybrid modular approach. And this is where I see the future of AI infrastructure is going is I need everything that's already off the shelf. I don't want to build that in-house, but I want to add my competitive edge and uniqueness on top of that. 

Bridget McCormack: And it does seem like more, I law firms are even doing this now. We're doing it, the AAA we're building in-house, although obviously we build on open AI's products. But we're building our products internally. Because that's where our data is and we protect it. Carrie protects hers. That's not going anywhere, right? No, but I, see law firms doing this, right? Cleary's move, whatever you think of like the transaction, like buying a bringing an engineering team in house so you can build your own products on your own data does feel like you guys were a little bit ahead of this trend. 

Zach Abramowitz: The build buy calculus 

Bridget McCormack: is changing 

Zach Abramowitz: has definitely shifted. Yeah. We thought it was going to shift even earlier, but I think what we're seeing now, and this is something I've talked with, with Maged about as well, is with the rise of vibe coding with the I, which essentially means  

Bridget McCormack: I've been vibe coding

Zach Abramowitz: coding by prompting in which it turns people like us into like basic coders and it turns the Mageds of the world and the other folks on his team into like full scale engineering teams right. On their own. So yes, of course. It is now really affecting that calculus. And I think that what's interesting is that they've built in anticipation of that. But before we get more deep into that, I actually want to circle back and go back to your perspective, Carrie.

Carrie McLain: Okay. 

Zach Abramowitz: I track. All of the AI companies. I do a lot, and Bridget does a lot to keep like a deal flow of the top companies coming in so that we see them first. And you found Maged before any of us did. So can I ask you what, when did you start thinking about AI. And how did you identify these Norwegians?

Carrie McLain: It's a fun story, but we started, on the build buy thing, we have built, we started building our platform 20 years ago and our current platform is an iteration of that. So we had started building 20 years ago and we haven't stopped. So all of our platforms. We have built, which I think has in weirdly gone full circle and now gives us a little bit of an advantage.

Carrie McLain: But with regard to magic, I got excited about AI and in many ways I think we've been, I've been waiting for this to happen, building this firm and this process it just makes sense for technology, embedded legal processes and deliverables. So as we were looking at that and AI hit the scene, I was immediately super excited about it and could see all the possibilities. Of course, we're a law firm and a healthcare law firm at that, so we were always security first, client data security second, and then how can we use these tools and this information? In our current processes and to help change something, we do a lot of arbitrations, arbitration processes to make it better.

Carrie McLain: So after Legal Week last year hired a consultant to just work with us on what is available out there. How are these tools going to come to market be useful? What's the security component? Because we love our use case. We don't know the details. So we hired a consultant to [work with us and we did demos and we talked to people and I learned so much about, so many products out there, but I always felt like it was a product that we were going to have to cram our needs into that had some really cool features, but a ton of features we either didn't need or didn't want.

Carrie McLain: And mostly didn't want. So as we were going forward, do we build or buy having that whole conversation again the consultant we work, I said, I want a product that's like Legos. I want the little genius pieces that we really need, and I want them to work really well and be focused on what we need and what we're going to do.

Carrie McLain: But I don't want all the other stuff, but I want them to fit together. And it's in a Synchronized Ballet of Tech. And as we looked at ways to do that and had the conversation about the build to buy it Cheryl, the consultant, met Maged and I think she was talking to him. And he used the term Legos and she said I have somebody you need to meet and she set up a Zoom call and I think it was supposed to be a half an hour, it was over an hour, and it immediately just clicked. We both have been on the same page about what is possible and exploring possibilities and I ended up, I jumped on a plane. I went to Norway and we white boarded for three days.

Carrie McLain: Yep. And have been building it and watching it come to life. It's really, it's been a blast and a lot 

Zach Abramowitz: Before we get to what's unique and what's new about newcode.ai, I think very aptly named, I want to reflect back to you on something. Which is, for years, people would ask me like, why is it worth paying attention to legal tech? And this is back in the old days, pre-ChatGPT, when there were a lot of limitations on what could be done and the feature sets, and what I always said is it's compounding interest. Starting even before it's mature enough for use with a kind of good understanding okay I know where things are going and skating to where the puck is going.

Zach Abramowitz: And what I hear in your story is someone who was building the ark way before the flood came. And what happened was, is when that happened, you immediately knew. Okay. I can tell that this is a huge step up because I've been looking at everything for years now and waiting, and now it's here. Now we can see it.

Zach Abramowitz: And that wasn't clear to everyone else where I think most lawyers have gotten into it within the last couple of months, if I'm being honest. Like it's in the last couple of months, 

Bridget McCormack: all through 2023 and 2024. In all my presentations to lawyers, they were like, I don't know. Not to us. Now, finally this year, they're like. Okay. I guess it's happening. What are we going to do? But Carrie was like, when is it happening? 

Zach Abramowitz: It makes the case and it makes the case for early investment before things are ready because you're ready to go. It's if you do your calisthenics in the winter, you've got your beach bod in the summer. I think that's what happened here is you were prepped for it. The firm was built with okay. When can we put this engine into this car that we've designed? And then you found the engine Maged when you spoke at Legal Innovators. You talked about the sort of promise of AI, but where sort of the first wave of AI companies may have been a little bit too dedicated to the chat interface into the ChatGPT.  

Zach Abramowitz: You had already been working with GPTs previously. Yeah. Talking about like the flood tell us a bit about that story. And the new wave. 

Maged Helmy: Yeah. So the journey actually started with GPT-2. It was actually available out there. Anyone could have cloned it and you can actually start you could start using it. But immediately the limitations were noticeable. So it had the limited context. You could only do for example. A limited amount of pages. Of course the problem of hallucination. So with lawyers you need it to be right, no can be right, it must be right in order to use it.

Maged Helmy: And that was like the first wave you would actually send an instruction or a prompt or a query and you would get an answer back. And that was the first wave. And there was a lot of limitations with that. And it was actually very expensive. Like the cost to build a gen AI back in 2023. In comparison today, you were referring back to vibe coding. It's actually a fraction to, to build something that would've cost you a lot two years ago. And then to solve these problems, the small language models started coming and a lot of people were talking about small language models in 2024. Where you would have one large language model and then you will tune all these specific small language models to plug into this bigger orchestrator. But we ran into the classic AI problems or, okay then I need the data, I need to curate the data, I need to create all these training, validation, and test sets.

Maged Helmy: And it started fading away with the rise of agents. And the main limitations that small language models had is that it was, again, stuck in specific time. It did not update itself when there were new information coming in. And the way the agents solved it is that, wait a second, it now has access to specific tools.

Maged Helmy: It has access to specific workflows, and you're still able to use your natural language to describe how the process should be. Now agents, they open a whole new world of security holes because you're basically giving a little algorithm access in a way, autonomous access to, speak with your data, to pull the information it needs to fill the context, which even increases the need for it running on-prem or on your cloud. You can't just have an off the shelf solution that has autonomous access to all of your data to provide you with the results.  

Maged Helmy: We were OnPrem and everyone shifted to the cloud. There's a huge push to the cloud and I think we're going to end up again, in a very hybrid model, you won't necessarily run OnPrem, but you will run on your own cloud 

Bridget McCormack: Yeah.

Maged Helmy: With your own data. So it's not going to be a vendor's data or sorry. It'll not be the vendor's cloud, but rather your cloud. 

Zach Abramowitz: Yeah. It sounds like you're almost like a security company, a security and a privacy company masquerading as an AI product, right? Meaning because but to the point 

Bridget McCormack: but he has real AI expertise.

Zach Abramowitz: No. But the, my, my point is that the features that are so demanded by a firm, like. Carries are all in the security. So it's like the AI is something to a certain extent that everyone has. What they've figured out is okay, but like how do we actually build that sort of core infrastructure to 

Bridget McCormack: be useful with your data?

Maged Helmy: Yeah. 

Zach Abramowitz: So that someone can get use out of the AI.

Maged Helmy: the AI needs the data. 

Bridget McCormack: Yeah. 

Maged Helmy: So it's fundamental. It was like you’ve got no other choice but to actually put that infrastructure in an extremely secure environment so you're able to maximize the usage of it. So in a way, AI needs data needs, infrastructure where, but they will not move their data out. So then the whole thing has to go in there. 

Bridget McCormack: So it's obviously been true to large corporations with big legal teams that they had to operate this way, right? Like the Ford Motor Company has had an in-house like secure AI, infrastructure for a long time. And the big firms too, I think they figured this out about 18 months ago.

Bridget McCormack: They were going to have to build their own. But Carrie's firm isn't a big firm, it's the kind of firm that I think actually has enormous upside potential if they aree thoughtful and innovative about how they think about this technology. But it's new I don't know anybody else with a firm Carries size doing this. Are you aware of like more mid, midsize firms or smaller firms that are. That are making the play that Helton is? Or is this, is she the unicorn that I think she is, 

Maged Helmy: There are, yes. She is a unicorn regardless of that point. But there are. More and more law firms are exploring this option.

Maged Helmy: Okay. Because the fundamental question boils down to is if everyone is using that AI tool. Where is my competitive advantage, right? How can I add my unique touch to this, my practice, my focus list, the way that we operate, for example, in a due diligence or the way that we approach a case.  And then we have to teach that, let's say that specific vendor, how we do our ways, but. But we're not really interested in that. We want like a low barrier tool that we were able to do this ourselves. And the cost of infrastructure has dropped drastically. 

Carrie McLain: Since we started with the cost of doing this, there's still an investment there, right? A firm has to make a choice. That they're going to, in our case, we maintain our current on-prem, very secure system as we build our own cloud and do these things and get ready for these tools. But it's a choice and then it's an investment. I think in our case, we really see it as we are better and we don't have to necessarily get bigger to have a greater impact.

Carrie McLain: If we can build these tools in a way that we can take on more information, do more work, because the work we do gets better when we do more of it. Because there's such a data component. It's reimbursing reimbursement trends. It's how payers are paying hospitals over various regions in different contracts, in different areas. Like all network.

Bridget McCormack: All your clients benefit when you have more clients. 

Carrie McLain: Yes. So it's that network effect that everybody. In the pool. Pool 

Bridget McCormack: with AI? 

Carrie McLain: Yeah, with AI allows us to absorb more of it and more intelligently and action it so much sooner. Yes. It's great if three years from now we can look back and say, yes, but this contract in this area wasn't performing, or you had an operational issue that was causing these claims to get denied three years ago.

Carrie McLain: Yes. Like it doesn't necessarily help. So our motive is to get to the information sooner so that hospitals can get better when they need to. Health plans can get better when they need to, and we all get to the kind of the answer and the data sooner. And I think these tools for us. Really make that possible. Whereas I think without them it wouldn't be. 

Maged Helmy: And I believe for mid-size firms, this is the time for them to compete with larger ones. 

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, totally. There's an open lane for them right now. 

Maged Helmy: Exactly. It's I think 

Carrie McLain: we're, that we're nimble. We're also, clever when we really are focused on how are we going to crack this nut and solve this problem. And as we do that. There's, 

Bridget McCormack: you don't have the leveraged labor like billing problem that the large firms have. You have a little bit more wide agility, a wide lane to think about how create value. That's interesting. 

Maged Helmy: And I believe we spoke about a couple of times how AI has now set the field. It hit the reset button. because now you can far ahead with what's already out there instead of reinventing the process. There's now well-known methods when it comes to embedding it into an existing workflow rather than changing how, changing everything, but rather, as you mentioned, the high high throughput low latency.

Carrie McLain: Yeah. No and different payers are different and different hospitals are different. So it allows the flexibility and the infrastructure to really act quickly. So it's a really, really fun use case for us. 

Zach Abramowitz: Yeah. So whenever I get excited about tech, for me, it ultimately comes back down to the humans. Yeah. And you talked about what the sort of societal problem that the Helton Law Group is trying to solve, which I think that's going to be the ultimate winners, but I am always excited for people who now have entrepreneurial opportunities that they might not have had before. And where I think that AI, I think the real winners of AI are going to be a little bit like the iPhone, like the real winners with the iPhone and with the smartphones in general. Were the consumers. The consumer is who got to be incredibly more productive to have access to information wherever.

Zach Abramowitz: There were a lot of companies that invented flashlight apps. It became very easy to do, but  how many who got rich off flashlight apps or off chess apps? it Eventually it became listen there's tons of them out there. And I think that what. What first we're going to see, and I think that the Helton law group up as a kind of canary in the coal mine for this trend.

Zach Abramowitz: For what? We're going to see hyper-specialization of law firms. We're also going to see lawyer entrepreneurs who are going to be the big winners here, meaning I think more and more lawyers. Are going to look at the big law firm that they work in, and they're then going to look at AI and they're going to say, okay, I used to come to my big law firm every single day because I needed an office. I needed an army of attorneys that I could push work down to. I needed the knowledge management and everything that went with it, that was provided by the law firm. And I needed whatever tech they had. Now today you don't need those things anymore. The office, in many instances, downtown is a commute that people don't want to make anymore.

Zach Abramowitz: I'm not saying work from home, but they don't want to necessarily commute an hour and a half each way anymore. That's no longer normalized. You look at the leverage model, that's, that could be really under threat now with AI, with, without the sort of need

Bridget McCormack: totally under threat 

Zach Abramowitz: need to always push it. Where you hear these sort of stories like the forecast of the billion dollar one person company that may be overstaying it a bit, but I do think that we're going to see the big winners in AI are going to be people who realize that with commoditization of the work itself that really you need to look to solve societal problems, hyperspecialized, lean, like you're talking about with AI. And I think we're going to see some startups do exceptionally well. And I think the startups who platform firms like Carrie are going to be in there as well.

Zach Abramowitz: But I think the ultimate winners, and this is what has me excited is like there are a lot of lawyers who'd like to be more entrepreneurial. But. The practice and the profession has not always lent to it as well. I think we're going to see a big sea change there, and I think a lot of lawyers should start figuring out like, how can I make my own Helton Law Group and who are the providers that I need to get there?

Carrie McLain: And I think for us, a lot of what we're doing too is, I'm always looking way past what we're doing right now, as we look to the possibilities of some of this stuff we're building, I think getting to the client and enabling the client to solve so many more, so much a greater chunk of these problems themselves efficiently and quickly and economically.

Carrie McLain: that's why I say building the business that puts us out of business. If this really works, then we're getting the stakeholders back together again with a process that will allow them to resolve these disputes in a different way that technology is going to help foster.That's really all, I think, the ultimate value proposition at the end of this. 

Bridget McCormack: Do you talk to people at other firms who think you're nuts 

Carrie McLain: Probably for different reasons, but yeah, that's true. Doesn't really. Yeah. I do and I don't, I love talking, I love what we do and talking about it, but we didn't set out to be different. We just. Are different. So I don't really compare and contrast to what other firms do. We encounter them when we work with them. We certainly have them on the other side of what we do. And I met a lot of lawyers doing this for a long time, but we are, evolution has really been just, we do the thing that makes sense for the work we do that's in front of us.

Carrie McLain: And when, In moments like this where we stop and look around and go, oh, we are different, but we didn't set out necessarily to be different. 

Zach Abramowitz: Yeah. It reminds me of I sent you recently in the video of Paul Graham talking about Y Combinator and he was comparing it to JR Tolkien.

Zach Abramowitz: It was great. And the and the Hoit and the Lord of the Rings, and he said. Tolkien didn't ever go and try to write a book about, fairies and elves and trolls. He wrote the Lord of the Rings. Others came after him and tried to create this sort of genre of fantasy, but that he was writing about his world and he was talking.

Zach Abramowitz: Paul Graham was talking about I Trying to create an incubator or an accelerator. I created Y Combinator and I think that, the other one that, I think about, especially with the with the Helton Law Group and how they're thinking about it, how she's not trying to be different from law firms.

Zach Abramowitz: Like you said, she's just focused on this societal problem. And fixing that. And it reminds me of the desk that Jeff Bezos used to have in his office that was made from a door and like four sort of strung together legs. And when he was interviewed on 60 Minutes, they asked him like, what you can't afford like a nicer desk. He said, this is a symbol of Amazon. We don't spend things on, we don't spend money on things that are not important to the customer, and no customer cares what my desk looks like. And. I think that that kind of laser focus on the end user and the focus on the clients and the focus on the societal problem.

Zach Abramowitz: Because you're doing that, you don't have to look outside. You've got your focus and yeah, maybe you are different from law firms, but it wasn't because you tried to be different because you try to solve this problem. 

Carrie McLain: And we, and so we just do, sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don't. And then, I'll come to some of these conferences and I'll think, oh wow, okay, that's a good idea. I never thought of that before. 

Zach Abramowitz: And by the way, I think it's true of the AAA as well. 

Carrie McLain: Yeah. 

Zach Abramowitz: Meaning you're not looking at what others. Are doing, you're just trying to be the AAA and 

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, Oh, no, I hope I inspire others to like, come up with, I think we need like lots of better dispute resolution processes I hope a lot of others, copy us, leapfrog us, whatever. I want to fix the way humanity resolves disputes which is like the AAA is just a great place to do it 

Maged Helmy: And our mission is to enable you to achieve that in a secure way with the best tools out there in your cloud. 

Bridget McCormack: Yeah, I think we got a winning formula here. We got to check back in for sure. And by the way, 

Zach Abramowitz: We have a pretty good track record with the startups that have that have interviewed with us.

Carrie McLain: We call ourselves a middle aged startup, 

Zach Abramowitz: The middle aged startup looks to have found really the right partners. 

Carrie McLain: Yeah, we're very excited. 

Zach Abramowitz: Thanks. Thanks for coming and sharing your story. 

Carrie McLain: Thanks you guys. It's been fun.