As founder and CEO of law consultancy ONE400, Allen Rodriguez uses technology to reinvent how legal professionals operate. He speaks with Elian and Juleyka about overcoming pushback in an old-school field, and using his outsider's perspective to drive innovation and profitability while expanding access to justice.
Our listener story features a Latina entrepreneur changing the narrative of what it means to be culturally connected as a social worker.
Elian Savodivker:
Hello, and welcome to Scaled: The Latino Business Story. I'm Elian Savodivker director of engagement at LBAN, the Latino Business Action Network.
Juleyka Lantigua:
And I'm Juleyka Lantigua, founder and CEO of LWC Studios and a proud alumni of the SLEI-ED, Stanford Latino Entrepreneurs Initiative Education Scaling program, which of course is run by LBAN.
Savodivker: And on this show, we speak with SLEI-ED alumni who share their stories and business insights with us and who help us unpack the world class research coming out of LBAN on the state of Latino entrepreneurship. We often talk about Latino business owners as being innovators within their industries and our guest today, Allen Rodriguez truly exemplifies this.
Lantigua: Indeed, he really, really does. Allen is like many Latino entrepreneurs overcoming challenges while also innovating, revitalizing and reinventing entire systems in an industry. He's persuading stakeholders to reshape the old ways that the legal professional functions, the way that they've operated for years.
Savodivker: Let's get right into it. Here's our conversation with Allen about how he's using tech to reinvent access to the legal industry.
Allen Rodriguez:
My name's Allen Rodriguez, I'm the founder and CEO of ONE400. ONE400, is a law innovation consultancy, whose mission is to contribute to a world where everybody has better access to justice. We do that a number of ways, mostly helping law firms and legal tech companies create one-to-many relationships online with people who need their services.
Lantigua: So for people like me who don't know anything about the law, what does your day to day look like?
Rodriguez: Our day to day in a lot of ways is any other creative agency. Our services fall into three buckets. We do some digital marketing work. What that might translate to in my industry specifically, is helping to educate people on the need for their legal services, how to acquire better access to justice, things of that nature. So digital marketing would be one bucket. And then for us as a technology-forward agency, we provide software engineering. I believe the future of law is going to be a hybrid of software and professional services. Law in a lot of ways, is kind of done the same way, like Abraham Lincoln did it. It's very old school, but if we're going to reach the 80 million Americans that currently are underserved by the legal industry, then we have to make that service available online. We have to use all the technologies available.
It has to be as easy as accessing your phone to be able to get legal help. So software engineering plays a role in that. And then finally through our advisory services. So lawyers are trained in what's called precedent. So they're trained to look to the past for their answers, but innovation happens in the future. So there's a disconnect there. And so for us, we spend a lot of time through our advisory services, the consultancy part of what we do, educating lawyers, bar associations on how we can adopt new business models. How we can adopt technologies and how we can make money serving the underserved, because at the end of the day, people have to make money. It has to be a sustainable initiative for this to stick. That's how we divide up the three buckets of service.
Savodivker: That's amazing. And Allen, you started ONE400 back in 2013. What was the gap that you saw previously before forming the company that made you say, "This needs to happen and I'm the right person to do it?"
Rodriguez: Well, I gotta take it back a little. So it started when my career started in the legal industry and that's right after undergrad, I was inspired and I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. So I got this job at the LA County Bar Association. They were hiring for an administrative position and I thought, "Yeah, this will give me a little introduction to the industry. And then I'll get to see what that's like working there." So as it turns out, I just wasn't cut from that cloth. So in a lot of ways, I feel like I dodged a bullet. I didn't go to law school, but I was a really good administrator. I was really good at operations at the LA Bar and I ran their LA County Bar lawyer referral and information service and there, we would fill 130,000 calls a year of people who needed legal help.
And I saw that so many people weren't getting this access to justice. So I was like, "Wow." From the business side, it's like there are 80 million potential customers out there, an entire industry choosing to ignore them. So for me, that's a potential opportunity. From there I ended up getting recruited into LegalZoom.com and LegalZoom.com was mostly a do it yourself provider, online. And they hired me to incorporate attorneys into their portfolio. So there, I had a chance to actually experiment bringing software and attorneys together, because people want the convenience of doing things online. They want pricing predictability. They want to be able to shop and compare online, but they don't want to pull the trigger on a thing that's so important to them, launching your first business, getting a divorce or selling your home. These are big impactful decisions and they want a professional to guide them. So I caught the bug. I realized that there were a lot of areas in law that LegalZoom just was never going to get into. And I thought, I want to have an impact on that part.
Lantigua: Okay. But you are not a lawyer?
Rodriguez: No, I'm not. Isn't that crazy?
Lantigua: So riddle me this, how did you figure out how to find an opportunity in a field that was not where you were trained and where you were existing professionally?
Rodriguez: I know, it wasn't easy. Let me tell you. So I'm not a lawyer, but I think in a lot of ways, that's my advantage, that's my superpower. Because again, I had mentioned this thing about precedent. Your path is you go to law school and then you acquire this huge debt, because law school is very expensive and you can't take a risk doing something innovative, launching a new legal tech startup, because you got to pay that loan back. And so, you end up falling into this rat race, where you get a job to learn how to be a lawyer. So you get a job at a law firm, that law firm has been doing it the way Abraham Lincoln is doing it. So then you get inspired to say, "Well, I want to start my own firm." But then you just do that. So as where me not a lawyer, I look at that and I say, "That's crazy. Why would you do that?"
And I get to bring experience from outside the legal industry and apply it there. So that's my advantage. My disadvantage is obvious, lawyers might think, "Why should I listen to this guy? He's a bunch of hokey, not a lawyer. He doesn't know what it's like." But I'll tell you what, over the course of my 21 year career, I've learned how to overcome the objections, that's what we do in business. As business owners, we have to overcome objections, we have to overcome challenges and that's what we do. So a couple of things that I did was, I always stay in my lane. I'm not here to teach somebody the law, I'm not qualified to do that, but I can teach you legal operations. I can teach you how to use technology and apply it into the legal field.
Over time, I built relationships with bar associations. I speak frequently at legal conferences. I'm on the National Advisory Council for the Chicago Bar Foundation, sustainable law practice initiative. I've been a California state bar task member for the access through innovation of legal services initiative. I've been an advocate for access to justice, which gave me credibility. Doing that allowed me to overcome these objections more quickly with lawyers. Now, they realize he's not just some businessman trying to tell me how to run my business, that sort of thing. One last thing I want to add recently, the state Supreme Court of Arizona changed the regulation finally, to allow non-lawyers to have greater participation in owning a law firm. And so, I'm the first Mexican-American in America, that's not a lawyer who is the majority shareholder of a law firm in Arizona. And that's Singular Law Group.
Lantigua: What?
Rodriguez: Yeah.
Lantigua: Wait a minute. I did not realize we were going to be speaking to a historical figure, seriously.
Rodriguez: When you add all the labels, first Mexican American and all that, then yeah, makes me first in a category.
Savodivker: I love it, Allen. I love it. And you mentioned something earlier, which is calling yourself a businessman. I think of you more on the innovation side. And I think that what you were talking about with Arizona and with what you're doing with your law firm and with tech, when we look at our research, we see that Latinos are equally or as likely as white counterparts to own tech companies and different pathways or different ways to get there. How are you using tech to service and to create that equality or that access that you're fighting for?
Rodriguez: Yeah, for sure. So law is very expensive, because it's a one to one relationship right now. So you have to go and find a lawyer. And then that lawyer represents you. There's only so many hours in a day, so many hours in a week, so they can only represent so many people. And then if they want to earn more, they charge more. So that's, part of what makes law expensive. We have to develop technologies and this is where ONE400 comes in, that enable law firms where our clients to have one to many relationships. So for example, you call a lawyer for advice, you pay an average of $250 an hour for that advice. But we realized over time, if we collect all those advice calls and build a knowledge base, we can proactively answer those questions in the form of videos and then create a platform for the law firm that says, "Hey, here's our library of all the legal advice questions you're going to probably need as a small business, pay us $10 a month and you can watch them all, on a subscription basis or pay us $49 a month, you can watch them and still ask questions. Or $199 a month and even get your documents reviewed." So instead of this one lawyer representing the one small business, they might have a hundred small businesses using their technology, which we create, to launch a subscription based service that reduces the barrier of entry for the small business person that allows the law firm to create one to many relationships. And it can only be done with technology in my opinion. So we've had to become technologists, if we want to have an impact on this mission.
Lantigua: I want to pick up on the thread of innovation, because part of what you did was going to an industry and say, "I've got some ideas about how you can innovate." But you were very consumer focused when you approach them. So now that you've been in it, now that you're a leader in it, how do you think about innovation? Is it mostly consumer side? Is there your customer side? How do you think about what is the next way that we're going to iterate in tech?
Rodriguez: I always think about my end user. I am client focused because I think that's where, for me personally in my mission, that's where I'm going to have the biggest impact on society. That's an easier problem to solve, but quite honestly, most legal tech is built for B2B. It's built to make lawyers' lives easier. So like contract review software, you could program an AI to understand your preferences in how you evaluate contracts. And so, if you're a general council at a big company and you're having to review thousands of sales contracts, you can just have your sales people upload it, it scans them all and it looks for red flags. So that, way you can say, "Oh, this one's giving up too much IP or this percentage falls outside of a parameter."
So I would say most legal tech innovation is happening in that space. And it's designed for the user. They're trying to help lawyers be more efficient, make their lives easier. But because lawyers charge by the hour, they're not always interested in being more efficient, that’s the honest truth, on the B2B side. So don't tell lawyers, "Oh, this is going to help you save hours." They'd be like, "I don't care. I won't make money." So my point is, all innovation should originate with the audience, with the client. And so, there's the whole spectrum, broad based general consumers, maybe micro businesses, SMBs or corporate fortune 500 companies, innovation can happen anywhere, but it should always be based on, on, with a very focused customer experience. What is the thing that you're trying to improve in their lives? And just focus on that.
Everybody's launching a new crypto coin, everybody's pursuing NFTs. There's all these innovations that people just kind of jump on the bandwagon, innovation for the sake of creating innovation. I don't know that's the best, from a business perspective, I don't know that's the best way to spend your time. Not if you're trying to create a sustainable business. If you're looking for a quick win, you're hoping to sell a couple NFTs on the marketplace to be the next millionaire or be a crypto investor. That's all speculation. That's not really entrepreneurship. Just don't pursue it, just because you want to be called a tech founder, go solve a real problem and get paid to do it.
Savodivker: I love that Allen. And I think your mindset is so often of that, of using innovation, using technology to help close that access to legal. The Arizona work that you're doing, can you just tell us a little bit more about your involvement in that? Why that's such a big part of innovation?
Rodriguez: Yes, for me personally, I want to have an impact on society, but again, the business side of me, these are big numbers that are being ignored by an industry. And so, if I could get $5 out of those 80 million Americans, I'm running a better law firm than any other in the country. So there is a core business motivation for it too.
But getting back to this Arizona focus. So what we look at first, we use tech to gather data. There's a lot of people that research these issues, LBAN has researched these issues for us, we aggregate all of this data. And then we find what are the biggest problems in society that we can start addressing? So divorce, for example, divorce has a way of destroying families, people look at it as kind of ending one thing. They don't always have to be ugly and nasty.
And so, we want to kind of think of, how do we make that process easier for people and how do we maintain the integrity of the family unit? With the focus on co-parenting things of that nature. So that's, one consideration we're focused on the user. The other consideration, is just the volume. So there's 800,000 divorces a year in America. And out of those divorces that are being litigated, 80% of those cases, there's one party that's unrepresented, 80%. So there's probably at least I want to say 400,000 people every year going through a divorce with no legal help. So for us, okay, numbers, again, some parts of divorce are unpredictable and those are hard to commoditize or to build a solid process or technology for, but there are other parts of a divorce that are totally predictable and totally commoditizable for example, the petition or the response.
These are components of a divorce that everybody has to do, or just advice calls, creating limited scope opportunities where you're not doing full service, you're helping at least some portion of it. So what we're doing, is we're automating those portions and then we're using software to do the labor. So that way, our lawyers are really only focused on the strategy. Software is doing heavy lifting and creating the documents, automating the processes, doing e-Filing where that's available. And then now, because the software has done the bulk of the work, we're really only selling 45 minutes of time at $300 an hour, which is way more affordable than paying $5,000 for a retainer just to get started.
So we can sell a petition product for as low as $600 and still make that worth our while. And we reduce the barrier of entry. So now those 400,000 people that are going into court unrepresented at least have some access to justice, if not full service. We'll solve that problem first, then the next one, immigration, then the next one, consumer finance.
And then the next one, we're just working backwards from the numbers. And in Arizona in particular, 27% of the population is Latino. And so, just the access to justice is not just the technology, but it's language access, having Spanish fluent staff, because that's the market that we want to serve. 80% of the population in Arizona is in the majority of Maricopa County and stuff like that. But there are people in rural areas that may not have access to a law firm. But as long as you have a smartphone, then we can give you access, because you'll be using our mobile apps and whatnot to communicate with us.
Savodivker: I want to focus on another piece that I know we've talked about in previous conversations. When we talk about our research, one of the things we focus on is the capital that our entrepreneurs have access to, Latinos in general and their businesses have access to, we know that Latino owned employer businesses are significantly less likely than white owned businesses to get loans from national banks. So as you're looking at securing funding, scaling, what have been the challenges ONE400 has faced over the years? And then how do you mitigate the cost? How do you kind of do the scale? How do you do the growth, circumventing or going past some of those barriers that you're facing as a Latino owned business?
Rodriguez: So we've not raised capital, but we have raised debt. And when we initially started was, it was all self-funded, it was my savings, my credit cards and that stuff. We just went to work and reinvested that money. But then at some point you're going to need capital to grow. I went to the national banks, because that's where I started my first account. And they just through their algorithm, rejected me. Didn't even give me an audience and you learn that lesson. And so, what I did is I attended some, how to raise debt seminar at like a local meetup and the person providing the information was a credit union. And so, I went to meet with them and they actually listened to me. They were in my community. They came to my place of business, went over my books, let me hear my pitch, let me sell myself. And then they told me exactly what they needed for me to qualify that they wanted to work with me, they liked my mission and they were really investing in me.
I mean, granted, it was an SBA loan and it's backed by the SBA, but they still investing that in me. So what that taught me, I got the list of all the things that were required and I made sure that I always maintained that, I always had my documents ready, I always had my P&L closed at the end of the month, within 10 days, all my stuff, I had my insurance, my Pasadena City business license, everything that any creditor can possibly ask for, I always kept it in a folder ready to go. And so, I got an initial loan with them and then COVID hit, was the next time I raised capital. PPP came out and you know what? I was ready to go. I was ready to submit my application the day it opened, because I had remembered from that first experience, you got to have your paperwork ready. You got to have your folder. You have to have your letter of intent. Your letter of need, all of that just ready all the time, work on your pitch. Have it ready.
Lantigua: All right. So I'm definitely going to bring in a woman's perspective on this, because it made me think of the hospital bag. When you know that you're due, you have the hospital bag ready.
Rodriguez: That's right. That's what it is. It's the hospital bag. Ready to go!
Lantigua: I'm going to ask you a little bit of a toughy, because you are so enthusiastic, you are so charismatic. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm like I would invest in this business, but you also have the scars of a hardcore entrepreneur. Someone who really has been tested in the process of growing this company. So talk to me about those moments where you met up with some resistance and where did it come from? What form did it take? How did you overcome it?
Rodriguez: So not just like say the sales objections or potential customers not believing in what I was trying to do. Let's set that aside for a second. Learning how to deal with my own imposter syndrome, was part of my journey. Big part of my journey. I deserve to sit at the same table, but it took me growing up as a kid in Lincoln Heights, in east LA in the seventies and eighties, when you're born of immigrant parents, you're like, "Hey, don't make too much noise. Don't call attention to yourself because, la migra, right?" That sort of thing. So that's, kind of taught to you as a first generation. So that, was one thing. Self-limiting beliefs, not knowing your own self-worth, worried about asking for money, talking about money. You can't be in business and not be comfortable talking about money. So you have to learn, if that's you and you're starting your venture, get over it or get out, get out of the business because you have to be able to ask for money.
You have to make decisions based on your desires, not your fears. Like an example, and I go through this all the time, I think all of us business owners do, is I know I need to fire this person, but then I have to hire somebody else and I have to train or whatever. So your fears start infecting your head and say, "What if they freak out like, oh, but they just had a kid or whatever." There's always a thing. There's always a thing. The fears are going to tell you “don't fire.” The desire is, "I need the right person in this seat." And so, just make a commitment. Always make decisions based on your desires, not your fears. And I think those are the real challenges that I've had to overcome that have allowed me to see the amount of success I have thus far. But I'm still on my journey. I'm not at the end of my journey. And so, those things still creep back up every now and then.
Lantigua: Oh my God, Allen. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to have you on the show.
Savodivker: You're absolutely amazing, a trailblazer. You're closing the gap on something that's absolutely necessary. It was great to have you as a guest.
Rodriguez: Thank you all.
Lantigua: I really love that the big takeaway is I'm not a lawyer, but here I am innovating for lawyers and for law. And I really want people to hear that in his story, because so many of us feel like if we don't have a degree, if we don't have a certificate, if we don't have a license, somehow we are not permitted to enter into certain spaces, but he went at it from his superpower, which is tech. And then he went at it with a very clear mission, which is get legal support for the tens of millions of people who go without it.
Savodivker: And I love when he talked about getting started and the conversation around capital, he was able to show the credit union, he was able to show them who he was, his business and show that when you invest in a Latino, you're going to get not just your money back, you're going to get more than that. You're going to invest in someone that's causing change and that's doing it with a business mind, because all his answers, he's thinking about that number. He's thinking about the business side and that's somebody you should be investing in, because that's someone who's going to take your money so much farther.
Lantigua: Yeah. I also like that he went to his community credit union. That is a testament to the credit union and him investing locally. So whatever success was going to come out of that first SBA loan that they helped him to secure was going to go right back into the business that is in the community. And I think so many people are enamored with the idea of VC funding, enamored with the idea of raising millions of Dollars in capital, enamored with the idea of getting some big shot to come and back them, that they forget that there's some pretty great resources locally that you can tap into, to get you started,. to make sure that you have the capital to hire your first employee, to make sure that you have the equipment that you need. A good local credit union can facilitate all those things for you just as well.
Savodivker: The last thing I want to talk about is just, he mentioned that imposter syndrome, which we see so often with Latinos and Latinas in business, but also across the board. The power that we have as a community of Latinos and Latinas to bring each other up, when we see other people succeed, when we see other people doing things like Allen, innovating, we need to bring them up. And when we need to tell me, "You deserve that spot. You need to be at those board meetings and at those tables." And Allen is doing that. And it takes a lot of courage. It's difficult, but I think he's finally in a spot where the accolades are there, he himself is there and he's moving mountains.
Lantigua: I know I'm so excited to bring him back a year from now for the first show anniversary, to see what he's done in that one year.
When we started the show, we put out a call asking listeners like you to share your business stories with us. And man, do you have stories. Here's one of our favorites.
Anne: My name is Anne Hernandez, and I'm an immigrant Afro Latina from the Dominican Republic. I have been a clinical social worker for the past 22 years. And during the summer of 2020, I started my own consulting practice, which focuses on advocating for BIPOC social workers. I began Hernandez Consulting after having a very long conversation with a mentee who pitched to her supervisor at a major hospital. The idea of hiring an outside BIPOC clinical social worker who could provide the space for conversations about supervision, anchored on cultural and race-affirming practices, within very white spaces. I've now been doing it, this is going to be my second year. I do have two major clients definitely looking for, to growing in my practice, but also to change the narrative of what truly means to be connected culturally, that it's not something you learn in a book, but that is something that comes from within you
Lantigua: To share your business story with us and to be featured on the show, send a detailed voice memo via email to our producer, Virginia. She's at virginia@lwcstudios.com.
Savodivker: This podcast is produced by LWC Studios for LBAN. Virginia Lora is our producer, Kojin Tashirois our sound designer and mixer. Paulina Velasco is managing producer. To learn more about the work and research LBAN is doing and our SLEI-ED program, please visit lban.us. That's lban.us. Thanks for listening. I'm Elian Savodivker.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka and Elian Savodivker, hosts. “Bypassing the Legalese, Letting the Tech Do the Talking.”
Scaled: The Latino Business Story,
LWC Studios., October 10, 2022. LBAN.us/scaled.