Ep 018 Interview with Shrey Gosalia, Founder and CEO of Docket

In Episode 18 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast (www.legaltechstartupfocus.com/podcast), your podcast host, Charlie Uniman, interviews Shrey Gosalia, founder and CEO of Docket (www.getdocket.com). We kick off with Shrey describing his journey into legal tech. That journey took him from business school at Chicago Booth to roles in corporate venture capital and a non-legal tech business and then eventually to founding Docket. At this juncture, Charlie and Shrey discuss how Shrey's conversations ("pre-Docket") with a former business school classmate who then worked as a trading firm's compliance officer inspired Shrey to focus on building a solution for in-house lawyers' workflow and related problems (which stemmed largely from having only email, spreadsheet and file storage storage to work with). And that solution (which, of course, is Docket) is designed to be a champion for in-house lawyers that delivers what Docket describes as the in-house legal department's "system of record." In short, as Shrey mentions, Docket is aimed at providing in-house legal departments will tools so those departments can be seen for what they are; namely, not "cost centers," but "centers for excellence." Shrey next describes just what Docket does. As Shrey explains, Docket offers in-house legal departments numerous features and benefits, including: (i) a way of standardizing the sourcing of legal requests from the business people who are the in-house lawyers' clients, (ii) tools for managing -- on one platform that's dedicated solely to legal department matters -- the department's documents, tasks, calendars and other aspects of its workflow and (iii) when it comes to legal department management, a showcase for the department's activities which, among other things, offers charts and dashboards and allows for the creation of KPI's for monitoring and reporting legal department work. Charlie and Shrey conclude the podcast episode by taking up Docket's experience in two well-know startup accelerator programs: (i) 500 Startups, which invites tech startups in a variety of verticals into the program and (ii) the accelerator program operated by Lexis/Nexis, where the program is devoted to startups in the legal tech vertical. Shrey recounts his experiences with both programs in some detail and, in doing, helps clarify the difference between accelerators and incubators and describes the benefits Docket derived from its participation in these programs.