IAM1325 – 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's 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, implementing vision, and culture in a team.

• CEO Story: Alexandra's drive is to see people (her clients and her team) grow and become what they were meant to be.
• Business Service: Affordable and easy-to-understand legal services. Intellectual property, trademark, getting shareholder’s agreement in place, raising the next round of funding, etc. with streamlined processes.
• Secret Sauce: Provides the most specialist and the most experienced lawyers while giving a discounted cost.
• 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: alexandra-isenegger
Angel. co: Alexandra-snigger
LinkedIn: link law
Instagram: link law
Twitter Linkilaw: linkilaw
Twitter Alexandra: alex_isenegger

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Transcription

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00:26 – Intro

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.

00:27 – Gresham Harkless

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.

00:38 – Alexandra Isenegger

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

00:40 – Gresham Harkless

Great, great, great. Well, what I wanted to do was just kind of 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, Alexander Eisenegger is the CEO and co-founder of Linky Law, the legal platform for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises. At the age of 21, Alexander 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 the UK's leading legal marketplace, Lawyer Fair. This year, Linky Law experienced 500% growth. Alex is also featured on Forbes 30 Under 30 and her core strength lies in legal business strategy, implementing vision, and culture to a team. Alexandra, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:39 – Alexandra Isenegger

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

01:41 – Gresham Harkless

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 kind of see if there's anything additional you kind of want to let us know about your CEO story.

01:51 – Alexandra Isenegger

Well, that was a pretty complete description there. I think what I could add there is just that my drive is is 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 our team. That's, I think my biggest achievement.

02:13 – Gresham Harkless

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 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 kind of drill down a little bit more and kind of learn a little bit more about Linky Law and figure out what exactly the products and services you're providing to these startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.

02:37 – Alexandra Isenegger

Sure, well, contracts are expensive, lawyers are expensive as we all know. 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 3 questions. Is this 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 easy-to-understand, transparent, and affordable legal services. And that's what we're trying to do here at Lenquilo is really to help businesses grow.

1 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 Linky Law is making law 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.

We do that by concretely providing anything that a business might need. So that might be intellectual property, applying for a trademark getting a shareholders agreement in place, or raising your next round of funding. 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 meet the price points that entrepreneurs, startups, small and medium-sized businesses can afford.

04:42 – Gresham Harkless

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 going to cost you. But the fact that you guys have been able to kind of leverage technology and to reduce costs, empower these entrepreneurs and business owners, I'm sure it's been huge.

So I know you kind of touched on some of the things that you guys are doing that make you kind of unique. And 1 of the questions that I want to ask you is, is there anything else additional that you can kind of speak to that says this is why Linky Law is different than, you know, maybe any other legal platform that there is out there?

05:15 – Alexandra Isenegger

Well, I'm going to come back again to the people because that's 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, despite the cost discount, provide our clients with the most specialist and the most experienced lawyers out there.

So the model 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, and work remotely, but are equally highly specialized in their needs.

And because, you know, 1 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.

06:43 – Gresham Harkless

You want to have 1 point of contact.

06:44 – Alexandra Isenegger

That's 1 of the other things that makes 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 feedback to the project manager who then can revert the information to the client was 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 3, 4, 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 scraped 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.

07:50 – Gresham Harkless

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 backwards from there. So I imagine that because you have that client-first focus, it probably does result in a lot of satisfaction for the people that you're working with. And 1 of the next questions I wanted to ask you was kind of like for a CEO hack. That might be like your favorite resource a business hack a book or something that you do or use on a regular everyday basis that you feel makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

08:23 – Alexandra Isenegger

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 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's where everything flows out of. I don't believe that I can be a good manager, a good leader, 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 to center myself and be present. And that 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 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, you know, it's always ups and downs, but some days you're just going crazy at it. You know, everything is going wrong.

09:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

09:56 – Alexandra Isenegger

5 minutes, yeah, taking 5 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. It's being kind to yourself.

10:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes purposes. I love that you know it's all about being able to center yourself as you said and self-love and you know 1 of the things I always try to do is ask myself did I win the morning to win the day I gotta win the morning in that hour 2 hours sometimes like you say 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 that you do that and it's awesome that you kind of share that with us so that we can kind of make sure that we center 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 has made you more successful and happy as a business owner?

11:09 – Alexandra Isenegger

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 in 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 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 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.

12:20 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. I mean, honesty is the best policy, as they say. And it's like you said, I mean, a lot of times when you talk to, you brought up the word peace and when you're trying 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.

So I think that's a phenomenal CEO nugget. So what I wanted to do was just ask you kind of 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 hoping to do is kind of redefine exactly what that means. So I wanted to ask you very specifically, Like, what does it mean to you to be a CEO?

13:02 – Alexandra Isenegger

What does it mean to me to be a CEO? That's a great question. I'm not gonna 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 the chance to everybody that works with us to work in an environment that they love. We spend 3 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 Linquilin, 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 in.

14:16 – Gresham Harkless

That makes perfect sense. And yeah, the people will determine, you know, how far you go, how much you achieve. But as 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 schedule to kind of speak with us. What I wanted to do was just kind of give you the mic, so to speak, 1 more time to see if there was anything additional you wanted to tell us in terms of advice or about Linky Law. And then secondly, how people can get ahold of you or get ahold of Linky Law.

14:51 – Alexandra Isenegger

Sure. Well, 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 experiences is such an important task. And so I really wanna thank you for doing that and for dedicating your life to this. I'm honestly most grateful for that. That's all I wanted to add.

15:53 – Gresham Harkless

We'd love to connect with you Awesome, awesome as well and we'll have those links in the show notes 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.

16:07 – Alexandra Isenegger

Appreciate that. Thank you. You too. Thank you

16:10 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Please 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.

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