Ben McGuire, the former managing director of Simmons & Simmons Solutions, has joined legal tech build studio Purple as a venture partner. Purple was founded by Tim Pullan (former founder of ThoughtRiver) and Dom Conte (ex Gowling WLG lawyer), who have built a company that designs and builds custom AI-powered legal technology solutions that help generate income.
McGuire, who was also a partner at Simmons, helped the firm’s clients to develop the capabilities, skillsets and technology to build differentiated offerings.
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Speaking to Legal IT Insider, McGuire praised the company that Pullan and Conte have built, observing: “Maybe the gap is that they haven’t run it inside a law firm. The gap I’m filling really is to be a venture partner, which essentially means helping law firms actually make products and services that they’ve built with us inside their context.”
Questions that he will help to address include “why should partners be interested in this? Where’s the money going to come from? How are you going to pay for it? What does the outlook look like? What does the operating model look like?” And he points out, “Because that’s basically what I did with Solutions for nearly a decade.” He will also be helping law firms to process questions including how to leverage time saved and reinvest it, “doing more profitable things than they were before.”
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There has been a strong emphasis recently among law firms on leveraging their own knowledge and IP to build proprietary solutions. While many firms are still battling with legacy infrastructure projects, McGuire observes: “I think you can do more than just worry and think to yourself, ‘right, we need partners to suck it up for five years while we sort this out before we get any benefit.’ Because you can do quite a lot to generate revenue directly using AI and other technologies and approaches, which will help to significantly pay for that change.”
He adds: “One of the great things about the technology we’re using now is you can curate the quality of the context that you’re giving to generative AI. And you can make sure that it has high-quality context without completely re-engineering your document management system or making sure that everything’s in place. And it might only be in small verticals initially, but you can still engineer data and give context to generative AI, which will produce a very high quality outcome in that small vertical, which will start to help you pay for other things. It’s not the whole answer, right? Because there are some big infrastructure projects that people need to do. But why not get ahead of the loop instead of thinking ‘I’ve got this ball and chain holding me back for the next two or three years while I make sure all my data is in the right place.’”