IAM2003 – CEO and Co-Founder Experiences Rapid Growth Focusing on Making Legal Work Transparent and Accessible to Startups

In this episode, we have Alexandra Isenegger, CEO and co-founder of Linky Law, the legal platform for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.

Alexandra has been recognized for her outstanding work, including being featured on Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

We'll dive deeper into their conversation, exploring the unique offerings of Linky Law and Alexandra's insights as a CEO.

Linky Law was born out of Alexandra's desire to make legal work transparent and accessible to startups. The legal industry has been plagued by expensive lawyers and cumbersome processes. Linky Law aims to bridge this gap by providing easy-to-understand, transparent, and affordable legal services. By leveraging technology and streamlining processes, Linky Law is able to provide legal assistance up to 80% faster than traditional law firms, all at an 80% cost discount.

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Transcription:

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Alexandra Isenegger Teaser 00:00

Contracts are expensive. Lawyers are expensive, as we all know. We've, most of us, if not all of us, have heard countless stories of lawyers charging 500 bucks the hour. I, we all know this joke of how much do you charge? $200 for three questions. . This is 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 is access to easy to understand, transparent and affordable legal services.

Intro 00:31

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 Harkness 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 00:59

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

Alexandra Isenegger 01:09

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

Gresham Harkless 01:15

Great, great, great. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Alexandra so you can learn a little bit more about her and all the awesome things that she's doing.

So Alexandra Eisenegger is a CEO and co-founder of Linky Law, the legal platform for startups in small to medium size. 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, Linky Law pivoted from solely a legal marketplace to also becoming a legal platform for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.

In 2017, Linky Law acquired UK's leading legal marketplace, Lawyer Fair. This year, Linky Law experienced 500 percent growth. Alex is also featured on Forbes 30 Under 30, and her core strength lies in legal, business strategy, implementing vision, culture to a team. Alexandra, are you ready to speak to the I Am CEO community?

Alexandra Isenegger 02:10

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

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Gresham Harkless 02:13

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

Alexandra Isenegger 02:21

That was a pretty complete description there.

I think what I could add there is just that my drive is around seeing people grow and seeing people become 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 02:40

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, it makes so much sense because when you peel back the onion, when you are like the leader and the CEO of your team, 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 drill down a little bit more and learn a little bit more about Linky Law 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  03:02

Sure. Contracts are expensive. Lawyers are expensive, as we all know. We've, most of us, if not all of us, have heard countless stories of lawyers charging 500 bucks the hour. I, we all know this joke of how much do you charge? $200 for three questions. . This is 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 is access to easy to understand, transparent and affordable legal services. And that's what we're trying to do here at Linkilo 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 link law 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 with 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. Anything like 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 percent faster and therefore we're able to provide up to an 80 percent cost discount compared to traditional law firms in the UK and and actually meet the price points that. Entrepreneurs, startups, small and medium sized businesses can afford.

Gresham Harkless 05:01

Yeah, that's awesome. Especially, with startups and like you said, like the joke you told in the beginning, you're always afraid to even ask any questions because you don't know what it's going to cost you. But the fact that you guys have been able to leverage technology and to reduce costs, empower these entrepreneurs and business owners, I'm sure it's been huge.

So, I know you touched on some of the things that you guys are doing that makes you unique. And one of the questions that I wanted to ask you just. Is there anything else additional that you can speak to that says this is why lengthy law is different than, maybe any other legal platform that there is out there?

Alexandra Isenegger 05:31

I'm going to 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 at 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. 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. 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 5 different lawyers. Even if you have 5 different lawyers working on your case, you want to have 1 point of contact.

That's 1 of the other things that makes us unique. We. Have a project manager for each client so that 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 feedback to the project manager who then can revert the information to the client 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, 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 scrapped 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 08:00

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You guys are essentially like reverse engineering where you're realizing that the clients are the reason for the business and you're working backwards from there. So I imagine because you have that client-first focus, it probably does, 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 like for a CEO hack, and that might be like your favorite resource or a business hack or a book or something that you do or use on a regular, everyday basis that you feels is that you feel like makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Alexandra Isenegger 08:30

It isn't a particular tool, I would say it's more a way of life. I realized after a couple burnouts, after a few achievements, after a lot of failures that. Everything comes from the outside 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. I'm full because that always that's where everything flows out of. I don't believe that I can be a good manager, a good leader, or a 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 2 to 3 hours before I actually have to get to work. And sometimes it takes me 5 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. And sometimes there's as a CEO, there's so many things on your plate. There's so much flowing through every side, it's always ups and downs, but some days you're just going crazy at it. Everything is going wrong.

Gresham Harkless 09:59

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Alexandra Isenegger 10:02

Yeah, taking five minutes to stop and just reflect, stop everything, shut it down and focus on yourself makes me 10 times more productive than if I would just keep going nonstop. And so I think it's the importance of seeing 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.

Gresham Harkless 10:25

It's being kind to yourself. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love that. It was all about being able to center yourself, as you said, in self-love. And one of the things I always try to do is ask myself, did I win the morning?

In order to win the day, I got to win the morning and that hour, two hours, sometimes like you said, whatever it takes to center yourself and get yourself present on the task at hand and be, at peace is really what it takes to make sure you maximize the day. So it's awesome that you do that.

And it's awesome that you share that with us so that we can make sure that we send ourselves before we get started on our days as well. So it 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 like has made you more successful and happy as a business owner?

Alexandra Isenegger 11:10

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 were many investors and the general public have been misled or allegedly misled.

I don't know where the case is that at the moment. But we are the startup sphere. The scale-up sphere is a place where there's a lot of buzz. You're constantly talking to investors, to partners, to clients. You're constantly trying to talk yourself up. And of course, there's a part of it. That's, 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 or clients or with your team. And I find that in honesty, when I'm being honest, there's just so much less to worry about. And there's. You're just making expectations open to everyone. You're being clear on what you have to offer and what you cannot offer.

And I found that a lot of respect and a lot of admiration came out of simply being honest. That would be my CEO nugget.

Gresham Harkless 12:19

There you go. Honesty is the best policy as they say. And it's like you said, a lot of times when you talk to him, he's brought up the word peace. And when you're trying to be at peace and 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 putting on your plate, but it's a lot more easier to manage your business and the team members that you have, if you are being honest. So I think that's a phenomenal CEO nuggets.

So what I wanted to do was just ask you your definition of being a 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 redefine exactly what that means. So I wanted to ask you very specifically what does it mean to you to be a CEO?

Alexandra Isenegger 12:57

What does it mean to me being 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 it's people and my responsibility or my opportunity rather CEO, I think, is to ensure that I give the chance to everybody that works with us to work in an environment.

that they love. We spent three-quarters of our lives working at jobs. And to me, it's ridiculous that we would work a job that we don't enjoy simply so that we can enjoy the fruits of our labors for the remainder 25 percent of the time. At Linky Law, 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 conscious honest 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 14:08

And that makes perfect sense. And yeah, the people will determine, how far you go, how much you achieve.

But like you mentioned that culture and everything that you set the standard for within your organization will 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 schedule to speak with us.

What I wanted to do was just 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 linky law. And then secondly, how people can get a hold of you or get a hold of a linky law.

Alexandra Isenegger 14:41

Sure. Gresham, what I wanted to say is thank you so much.

Honestly, I find that The word of sharing, sharing people's stories, sharing advice, sharing experience 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 alexandra@linkylow.com and our website is linky low.com, which you can also find us on. We're also very active on all social media accounts. Our handle is, so Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Quora.

Whatever you have, it's we'd love to connect with you.

Gresham Harkless 15:39

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 15:52

Appreciate that. Thank you. You too.

Outro 16:09

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Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I Am CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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