Descrybe's Quest to Democratize Legal Research (Kara Peterson & Richard DiBona)

Kara Peterson and Richard DiBona, the husband-and-wife co-founding team behind Descrybe, discuss the legal research platform they built designed to "democratize access to the law." The discussion explores the unique dynamics of married cofounders and how they are leveraging Generative AI to disrupt a landscape long dominated by high-cost legacy providers. Richard, a software engineer, and Kara, a marketing expert, share their journey from a personal legal issue to building a platform that processes over 100 billion tokens of legal data. They explain why they chose to build an AI-native system from the ground up rather than simply layering a "wrapper" over existing models—a decision that allows them to offer professional-grade tools at a fraction of the traditional cost. In this episode, they discuss: 🔷 Why legacy legal research platforms have maintained such strong moats—and how AI changes that 🔷 The difference between "wrapper" AI tools and building a system from the ground up 🔷 How their structured, multi-step reasoning process improves accuracy and reduces hallucinations 🔷 What benchmarking against the Bar Exam reveals about legal AI performance 🔷 Where Descrybe is headed as they expand their toolkit