Are you selling Software or a Service?

Guest: Jake Jones

Role: Co-founder and COO, Flank

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-jones-b8769b75/

Website: flank.ai

This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline's trusted and verified legal AI today for free.

Sources mentioned in the episode:

• Flank — flank.ai

• Insights portal — insights.flank.ai

• The Intake (Substack, Flank's team blog) — intakezero.substack.com

I spoke with Jake Jones, co-founder and COO of Flank. He’s spent years at the forefront of legal AI across what he counts as four different paradigms and half a dozen hype cycles.

He started the business in 2018 as Legal OS, modelling how experienced lawyers make decisions as knowledge graphs, built on his co-founder's father's academic work, and sold it to German law firms doing M&A.

In 2021 he moved the business in-house, rebuilt it on LLMs, and now Flank runs agentic legal work inside enterprise legal teams under a model where they don't get paid until the outcome is live.

We discussed:

→ Why vendors are already moving beyond "agentic AI" to full end to end outcomes.

→ The difference between selling software and selling an outcome, and why so many legal AI vendors are stuck between the two.

→ His theory that legal is heading toward the same moment retail banking hit with digital challenger banks in 2015, and what Big Law should do about it before it's too late.

I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it!

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