Lecia Kaslofsky works full-time as the CEO of Lynx Workflow. Formerly a private investigator, she continues to play a limited role in Lynx Insights, an investigative firm, which
is managed full-time by another partner. She is also a
full-time mother, wife and friend, so I'm grateful to have caught a few minutes to interview her.
Tell me
about yourself.
As a corporate investigator, I worked with the best litigators in the world for decades and have personally managed multi-million dollar professional-services organizations. I have the utmost respect for litigators. We find the facts, and they use the facts to win cases! It's a great partnership.
I’m a native San Franciscan and spent many
years in New York. Out of college I started a small research company – mostly
as an excuse to hang out in the library – and that very quickly grew to a staff
of subcontractors doing mostly investigative and financial research. I next
cofounded the international investment arm of a DC-based bank and ran that
before heading back to the field of private investigation. Then I turned 25. Using
technology and visualization software to streamline work has always been part
of my DNA. Writing HTML and knowing basic programming languages helped. With my
partners, I ran and grew an investigations business and that was enormously rewarding. I
eventually left to develop Lynx Workflow.
Ed was also a partner at the investigation
firm. He had always been very active in the art scene in New York and
eventually co-founded an organization that brings awareness about climate change
through art. Through his work with that organization, he was offered the
prestigious Loeb fellowship at the Harvard Design School and left the
investigations firm to do that. It was not his first journey to Harvard; he
also holds a Masters degree in Japanese poetry from there, and is quite the
renaissance guy. He still plays an active role in the international
art/climate-change discourse while not leading design and product for Lynx
Workflow.
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| Record facts, notes, and ideas |
Tell me
about Lynx Workflow and FactBox
In litigation, attorneys must work with big
volumes of complex factual information. Our flagship product FactBox is an easier way to manage all those facts by
capturing all the ideas, facts, and notes of the workday, making connections
between all those facts, and readying those facts for a client-focused
report. Although Lynx Workflow has other offerings, FactBox is dedicated to the professional services industry. It’s an SaaS
product that transforms ideas into work product.
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| Analyze, sort, and dig into your facts and notes |
How is it
different from its competitors?
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| Generate work product directly from your facts |
FactBox could be described as Evernote meets
CaseMap. It has an intuitive, easy interface with the organizational features
of a more robust product. Other litigation management platforms require 100%
adoption and profess to do all things related to the litigation process. That’s
great for some firms, but we hear that even with these total packages,
litigators are still working the way they always have – email subfolders, Word
docs and sticky notes. FactBox meets litigators where and how they already
work.
What
inspired you to create FactBox?
As a partner in a large investigative firm, I
grew increasingly frustrated at the inefficiencies of the job. I found timekeeping,
report editing, and organizing exhibits to be an excruciating time drain. So,
my cofounder Matthew Carmody and I created a skunkworks program to solve these
workflow problems. Our first product made it much easier for investigators to
record expenses related to their searches. That sounds boring at first, but
these types of minutiae weigh down a professional’s life. In the first month,
we saw widespread adoption and thousands of dollars added to the bottom line. We
made happy investigators and happy partners.
The cofounders went our separate ways and
eventually reconvened to work on innovating workflow solutions for professional
services. Lynx Workflow recognizes that that facts and ideas in the litigation
process get put in email, folders with subfolders, and Word docs, so this
workflow system allows people to save time and energy, and results in a better
work product. We found that litigators that bill over $500/hr often spend 10
hours a week redoing the same work. We are passionate about automating work a
computer does better, and leaving the real service-level work to the
human.
What's
innovative about it?
The real trick with work-productivity software
is not making the user change his/her
current way of working. We spent almost two years iterating and testing
different solutions before we got to the current FactBox product. FactBox is
designed to let each person – and groups of people – continue working in their
own style, with the lightest of interference. The result is an easy-to-use tool
that gives back 1000X what you put in. There are other, and even more robust,
fact-management tools for litigators but they require a thick manual and
training program. That’s not realistic to how professionals like working
today. Plus, we really love
professionals and have the highest respect for what they do. That respect shows
in every nuance of FactBox.
What's been
your greatest challenge thus far?
Finding the balance between getting FactBox
into the hands of users and building out all the features we know our customers
will want. Our initial customers – litigators at major law firms working on
high-impact cases – don’t have extra time and expect the highest quality from day
one.
What is the
demographic of your main customer?
Our initial customers are litigators and more
specifically tend to be: (1) senior associates who are ready to maximize the
efficiency of their workday and (2) partners who want better work-product from
their associates. Even though FactBox does reduce unbillable time, we find the
prime motivator for our customers is providing the most exceptional service to
their clients. FactBox helps them do that.
What's been
your greatest success so far?
We provided a very early version of FactBox to
five firms – including two Amlaw 50 firms – for them to use on real cases and
provide design feedback. This required the firm to sign-off on our security and
SaaS technology--an important benchmark for us.
Additionally, despite the basic interface and bugs, every one of those firms
opted in to continue using (and pay for) FactBox.
What changes
do you foresee in the company? the legal industry?
There are many features and exciting dimensions
of FactBox waiting in our roadmap. I can’t wait to grow and deliver excellent
products to our customers.
As for the legal-industry prognostication: it
really bothers me when people talk about big law dying or predict a world of
total legal self-service. There are huge leaps of productivity needed for sure,
but the bottom line is that lawyers have real skills that add real value. Being
a counselor is more than reading a law book; great lawyers are trained to think
about a problem and give you expert legal-specific advice. That will not go
away. The professional-services field will not be commoditized and I challenge
anyone who thinks it will be.
Are you an attorney? Did you go to law school?
I am not an attorney, nor have I ever
considered it. My partner Ed got close to being one. He got a perfect LSAT
score, in fact, and turned down Harvard Law School to pursue a dual career in
investigations and climate-change activism.
