IAM018 – CEO and Co-Founder Experiences Rapid Growth Focusing on Making Legal Work Transparent & Accessible to Startups

Alexandra Isenegger is the CEO and co-founder of Linkilaw – the legal platform for startups and SMEs. At 21, Alexandra left her corporate law firm job, with a clear focus on making legal work transparent and accessible to startups. From 2015 to 2017, Linkilaw pivoted from solely a legal marketplace to also becoming a legal platform for startups and SMEs. In 2017, Linkilaw acquired the UK leading legal marketplace LawyerFair. This last year Linkilaw experienced 500% growth. Alex is also featured in Forbes 30 under 30. Her core strengths lie in legal, business strategy, and implementing vision and culture in a team.

• CEO Hack: The inside rules and the outside follows. Getting centered and being present before starting the day. A little break can make you more efficient.
• CEO Nugget: Be honest with others and yourself
• CEO Redefined: Responsibility to its people

Website: http://linkilaw.com
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexandra-isenegger
Angel.co: https://angel.co/alexandra-isenegger
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/linkilaw
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/linkilaw
Twitter Linkilaw: https://www.twitter.com/linkilaw
Twitter Alexandra: https://www.twitter.com/alex_isene

Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:27

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. Alexandra Isenegger of Linkilaw. Alexandra, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Alexandra Isenegger 0:38

Thank you for having me. It's awesome to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

Great, great, great. Well, what I wanted to do was just kind of read a little bit more about Alexandria so you can learn a little bit more about her and all the awesome things that she's doing. So Alexandra Isenegger is a CEO and co-founder of Linkilaw, the legal platform for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises at the age of 21. Alexandra left her corporate law firm with a clear focus on making legal work transparent and accessible to startups from 2015 to 2017, Linkilaw pivoted from solely a legal marketplace to also becoming a legal platform for startups and small to medium size enterprises. In 2017, Linkilaw acquired the UK's leading legal marketplace lawyer Fair. This year Linkilaw experienced 500% growth. Alex is also featured on Forbes 30 under 30. And her core strength lies and legal business strategy, and implementing vision culture to a team Alexandra, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Alexandra Isenegger 1:39

That's quite an introduction. And yes, I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:42

Awesome. You're doing so many phenomenal things. So what I wanted to do was just kind of give you the floor a little bit more to see if there's anything additional, you kind of wanted to let us know about your CEO story.

Alexandra Isenegger 1:50

Well, that was a pretty complete description there. I think what I could add, there's just that my drive is around seeing people grow and seeing people that come all that they're meant to be. And I love doing that both for our clients, but also for our team. That's I think my biggest achievement.

Gresham Harkless 2:13

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, it makes so much sense. Because when you kind of peel back the onion, when you are like the leader and the CEO routine, a lot of it is in developing the team members beneath you and working with you. So it makes a lot of sense. So I wanted to kind of drill down a little bit more and kind of learn a little bit more about Linkilaw and figure out what exactly are the products and services that you're providing to these startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.

Alexandra Isenegger 2:36

Sure. Well, contracts are expensive. Lawyers are expensive as we all know. We, most of us, if not all of us have heard countless stories of lawyers charging 500 bucks an hour. We all know this joke of how much you charge $200 for three questions. Serious? Yes. What's your third question? And that's really what we're going by. And so that's the gap that I saw in the legal industry access to easy-to-understand transparent and affordable legal services.

And that's what we're trying to do here at Linkilaw is really to help businesses grow. And one of the key pillars of running a successful business is being legally compliant and having the right legal foundations in place so that you're not only able to protect yourself as a business, but that you're also able to use legal as part of business strategy, not just as something independent from everything else.

And so what we love doing at the link is making law really simple. And so our entrepreneurs are not only giving it all to the lawyers but empowered by legal enabling them to then become better negotiators and investors, with clients with partners, whoever that is, our goal is to make sure that we help enterprises thrive. And we do that by concretely providing anything that a business might need. So that might be intellectual property, applying for a trademark or getting a shareholders agreement in place or raising your next round of funding, or anything like that, that a business would need we can help with.

And thanks to technology, we've developed processes we've streamlined, we're able to do legal work on average, 80% faster, and therefore we're able to provide up to an 80% cost discount compared to traditional law firms in the UK. And actually meet the price points that entrepreneurs, startups small and medium-sized businesses can afford.

Gresham Harkless 4:42

Yeah, that's awesome. Especially, you know, with startups and like you said, like, the joke you told in the beginning, you're always kind of afraid to even ask any questions because you don't know what it's gonna cost you. But the fact that you guys have been able to kind of leverage technology and to reduce costs, and power these entrepreneurs and business owners, I'm sure it's been huge. So I'm I know you kind of touched on some of the things that you guys are doing that make you kind of unique. And one of the questions that I want to ask you just is there anything else additional that you can kind of speak to that says, this is why Linkilaw is different than, you know, maybe any other legal platform that there is out there?

Alexandra Isenegger 5:15

Well, I'm gonna come back again to the people because that's really the center of what we're putting things at. I know, we are a legal tech platform, and we are heavily reliant on technology, but it's the people that make a business. And it will always be the people that make a business. And so from the model that we've developed, we're able to actually, despite the cost discount,  provide our clients with the most specialist, and the most experienced lawyers out there. So we've developed with the lawyers that we work with is we're seeing increasingly a lot of lawyers leaving the corporate scene and leaving the best law firms because they want to focus on their families because they're tired of working 7 am to 11 pm, every single day, and not being able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. So we've developed a network of lawyers who work from home work remotely but are equally highly specialized in their needs.

And because, you know, one startup might have employment needs, they need employment contracts, they also need a trademark, so they need an intellectual property lawyer, then you need some commercial contracts, such as shareholders agreements, and each of those pieces of work will take a different specialist. So you need a different specialist for all of this. But from a client's perspective, you don't want to be speaking to five different lawyers, even if you have five different lawyers working on your case, you want to have one point of contact. And that's one of the other things that make us unique, we have a project manager for each client, so the project manager's role is just simply to ensure that the client's work is done on time is done to the client's satisfaction.

And to make sure that all the different moving plates, all the different lawyers working on a particular case, give feedback to the project manager who can revert the information to the client as that single point of contact. I think what makes us unique is really what needs to be changed in the legal industry. So in the legal industry, you have processes that are three, four, or 500 years old, I don't know how old they are, but they haven't been changed. And the legal process is not client-centric, we just scrap the legal process altogether. And we started with the client, what does the client want from us? What can we do for you to give you the most outstanding legal experience? And that's how we worked our processes. And we're constantly innovating on that. But I have to say, I'm pretty happy with how we're doing. And we're receiving incredible feedback from our clients, which is always nice to hear.

Gresham Harkless 7:50

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, you guys are essentially like reverse engineering where you're realizing that the clients are the reason for the business. And you're kind of working backward from there. So I imagine that because you have that client-first focus. It probably does, you know, result in a lot of satisfaction for the people that you're actually working with. And one of the next questions I wanted to ask you was kind of like for a CEO hack. And that might be like your favorite resource, or a business hack or book, or something that you do or use on a regular everyday basis that you feel like makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Alexandra Isenegger 8:23

Well, it isn't a particular tool, I would say it's more a way of life. I realized after a couple of burnouts, after a few achievements, and after a lot of failures, that everything comes from the inside out. So the inside rules, and the outside follows. And so my priority is to ensure that on the inside, I am at peace, I'm balanced and full because that always that's where everything flows out of I don't believe that I can be a good manager, good leader, good worker if I don't feel good inside of myself. So some of the practices, you could say, or some of the habits or some of the rituals, you could almost say I've developed over time is to center myself and be present.

And that really starts from the morning onwards. So I don't get out of bed in the morning until I'm fully centered. I've learned with time that I now wake up two to three hours before I actually have to get to work. And sometimes it takes me five minutes to center myself. Sometimes it takes me an hour and a half, but nevertheless, I won't get out of bed until I feel like the step that I'm making out of bed is fully grounded and everything comes out of that. Sometimes there's as a CEO, there are so many things on your plate. There's so much flowing through every side you know, it's always ups and downs but some days you're just going crazy at it. You know everything is going wrong.

Gresham Harkless 9:54

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Alexandra Isenegger 9:57

Taking five minutes to stop up and just reflect, stop everything, shut it down and focus on myself makes me 10 times more productive than if I would just keep going nonstop. And so I think it's important to see that sometimes a little break can really boost your efficiency, as opposed to wanting to go the whole way. And you're then just burning yourself out. It's being kind to yourself.

Gresham Harkless 10:23

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love that, you know, it was all about being able to center yourself, as you said, and self-love. And, you know, one of the things I always try to do is ask myself, did I win the morning, in order to win the day, I gotta win the morning, and that hour, two hours, sometimes, as you said, whatever it takes to kind of center yourself and get yourself present on the task at hand and be you know, at peace is really what it takes to kind of make sure you maximize the day.

So it's awesome that you do that, and also that you've kind of shared that with us so that we can kind of make sure that we set ourselves before we get started on our days as well. So that brings me to my next question, which is a CEO nugget. And this might be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice that you might give to other CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. So do you have a CEO nugget that you feel, has made you more successful and happy as a business owner?

Alexandra Isenegger 11:09

Yeah, be honest, be honest with others, and be honest, most importantly, with yourself. I think, I don't know if you've heard of the Theranos scandal recently, where many investors and the general public have been misled or allegedly misled. I don't know where the case is at the moment, but we are the startups here, the scaleups. here is a place where there's a lot of buzzes, you're constantly talking to investors, partners to clients, and you're constantly trying to talk yourself up.

And of course, there's a part of it, that's, you know, you have to promote yourself because you're a business and you're selling yourself, but there's so much value in honesty. Honesty breeds trust, whether it's with investors, partners, clients, or with your team. And I find that in all honesty, when I'm being honest, there's just so much less to worry about. And there you're just making expectations open to everyone, you're being clear on what you have to offer and what you can offer. And I found that a lot of respect and a lot of admiration came out of simply being honest. That would be my nugget.

Gresham Harkless 12:20

There. Yeah, I mean, honesty is the best policy, as they say. And it's like he said, I mean, a lot of times when you talk to him, he's brought up the word peace. And when you try to be at peace, and you know, you're not being honest, sometimes you have to juggle what you said and what the truth is. So again, those are more things that you're kind of putting on your plate, but it's a lot easier to kind of manage your business and the team members that you have, if you are being honest, I think that's a phenomenal CEO nugget.

So what I wanted to do, is ask you kind of your definition of being CEO, and a lot of that is because we have a lot of different CEOs on this podcast. And what we're really hoping to do is to kind of redefine exactly what that means. So I want to ask you very specifically, like, what does it mean to you to be a CEO?

Alexandra Isenegger 13:02

What does it mean to me to be a CEO? That's a great question. I'm not going to start listing what I'm responsible for. I think the biggest responsibility of a CEO is its people. And my responsibility or my opportunity, rather, as CEO, I think is to ensure that I give a chance to everybody that works with us to work in an environment that they love. We spend three-quarters of our lives working at jobs. And to me, it's ridiculous that we would work at a job that we don't enjoy, simply so that we can enjoy the fruits of our labors for the remainder 25% of the time at Linkilaw, just as I would expect any other CEO to do. I think it's important to put the people first and to ensure that the working environment that's being created, the culture that's being built, the work that's being done is fully there, is conscious, is honest, is real, is transparent, and is something that people that every person in the organization can be proud of, and can stand for, can admire can respect and can work happily.

Gresham Harkless 14:16

And that makes perfect sense. And yeah, the people will determine you know, how far you go, how much you've achieved, but like you mentioned, that culture and everything that you kind of set the standard for within your organization will kind of make or break the organization and define the organization. So I think that's an incredible definition. So Alexandra, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your Saturday to kind of speak with us. What I wanted to do was just kind of give you the mic so to speak. One more time to see if there's anything additional you wanted to tell us in terms of advice or about Linkilaw. And then secondly, how people can get a hold of you or get a hold of Linkilaw.

Alexandra Isenegger 14:50

Sure. Well, Gresham, what I wanted to say is thank you so much. Honestly, I find that sharing, sharing people's stories, sharing advice, and sharing experiences is such an important task. And so I really want to thank you for doing that and for dedicating your life to this, I'm honestly most grateful for that. That's, all I really wanted to add. And I'd love to connect with anybody listening to this podcast, any of the other CEOs that have been interviewed on your wonderful podcast, you can reach me on my email, alexandralinkilaw.com. And our website is Linkilaw.com, which you can also find us on. We're also very active on all social media accounts. Our handle is Linkilaw, so Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, or whatever you have, we'd love to connect with you.

Gresham Harkless 15:52

Awesome, awesome, as well. And we'll definitely have those links in the show notes. So Alexandra, thank you for doing so many awesome things so that I have an opportunity to tell some awesome stories about all the awesome CEOs and entrepreneurs doing phenomenal things. So I just hope you have a good rest of the day.

Alexandra Isenegger 16:06

Appreciate that.Thank you. You too.

Outro 16:08

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co.   I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening