We previously shared how my co-founder Scott Foster’s late-night frustration led us to build LexSelect. The idea was simple: eliminate tedious, low-value tasks so legal professionals can do more of the work they love. From the beginning, Jack Newton and I recognized a shared belief: talk to real users early and often. We’d both been inspired by the “customer development” concepts in Steve Blank’s work and later authors, and we immediately saw how that mindset could bring changes and benefits to the daily workflows of legal professionals.

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That’s the heart of our approach: deep empathy for the legal profession, backed by a deliberate and iterative development process. We’re not just rolling out a feature list from a boardroom. We’re engaging with lawyers, clerks, paralegals, and legal assistants who grapple with workflow issues every single day, then building solutions around their direct feedback. Our approach puts the practitioner’s needs first, ensuring each feature resonates with those who use it daily.

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From real pain points to simple, effective solutions

When we first started building, we were initially focused on deposition transcripts—the problem that originally plagued Scott as an IP litigator. However, once we began talking with lawyers across different practice areas, we realized that while transcripts can be a major headache, they’re also fairly intermittent. Some lawyers see transcripts frequently, others only once a year or never.

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So we did what we believe every product team should do: we tested our assumptions. We interviewed practitioners, tested early versions of our product, and collected feedback from various legal professionals at different levels of experience—from corner office BigLaw partners to small-firm legal assistants. They confirmed that yes, transcripts are painful, but every PDF-based document can be a bottleneck, especially when it comes to extracting and citing text.

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That revelation forced us to pivot from a hard-coded, transcript-only tool to an AI-based any PDF platform. Instead of limiting ourselves to a narrow use case, we built a scalable AI parsing engine that works on a wide range of document types—contracts, affidavits, expert reports, you name it. The more legal professionals we spoke with, the clearer it became that flexibility was essential. By broadening our scope, we could serve everyone from busy commercial litigators in large firms to solo practitioners juggling multiple matters and document types every day.

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Iterative testing and rapid feedback loops

As we expanded beyond transcript workflows, it became clear that simply surfacing extracted text wasn’t enough. Legal professionals needed to interact with the original document in a way that preserved its visual context—formatting, layout, spacing. These visual elements carry meaning and affect how legal text is interpreted. In response, we built a front-end interface that mimics the PDF experience while maintaining structured, selectable text, allowing users to engage with documents just as they would in a traditional viewer—but with enhanced functionality.

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We combine qualitative and quantitative inputs to guide every iteration. That includes running structured beta programs, analyzing product usage patterns, and conducting ongoing interviews with legal professionals—ranging from senior lawyers to paralegals and legal assistants. When a feature underperforms or causes friction, we revisit the design until it’s seamless.

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Security surfaced as another clear priority. From our earliest conversations, users flagged concerns about data sensitivity and privacy. Their feedback directly shaped our approach—we’ve accelerated our SOC 2 compliance efforts and implemented rigorous protocols to protect client data. That direct input from the legal community continues to inform our security roadmap today.

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Why simplicity and intuition matter

Lawyers are busy people who spend a huge part of their day in Microsoft Word. They don’t want to wrestle with a complicated interface or lose their focus by switching between multiple applications on their desktop. That’s why we focus relentlessly on simplicity. We built LexSelect as an add-in for Word so legal professionals can harness our powerful parsing technology without leaving their main workspace.

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This user-centric design also means minimal training overhead. If a tool requires an hour-long onboarding session before you can do basic tasks, it’s already on shaky ground. From day one, we’ve made it a priority that a lawyer or paralegal can open LexSelect and start using it almost immediately. We want to bring genuine efficiency and a spark of joy back to legal work, not just shave off a few minutes. When someone tells us they enjoyed using the tool and it was easy to use, that’s the best feedback we can hear.

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Product-led growth and scalability

Because we focus on empowering each user, scaling LexSelect naturally becomes easier—that’s the core of our product-led growth approach. Some legaltech companies aim to sell directly to firm administrators or technology teams. By contrast, our strategy is to deliver tangible value to each legal professional who regularly uses the product, which then encourages broader adoption.

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By putting end users at the center, we create genuine evangelists. A single lawyer adopts LexSelect, sees how it cuts 50 hours of busywork down to about 4—a 12x reduction—and tells their colleagues, “You’ve got to try this.” Over time, this product-led growth not only scales within smaller firms but also leads to interest from mid-sized and large enterprises—where entire practice groups adopt it once a few attorneys prove its worth.

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Does that mean we never talk to directors of technology or decision-makers? Of course not. But our starting point is always the day-to-day workflows of the legal professionals themselves. By generating real value for them, we naturally earn buy-in at every level of the organization.

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Ongoing partnership with the legal community

Ultimately, everything we do at LexSelect hinges on feedback from the legal community. Whether you’re a solo practitioner, a BigLaw partner, or an in-house counsel, your insights fuel our roadmap. We circulate user feedback across our entire team—engineering, design, product, and go-to-market—so everyone understands the real-world problems we’re solving.

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This partnership mindset keeps us nimble. If tomorrow we discover that most users need structured chronologies or document summaries, we’ll incorporate that. We’re not guessing what lawyers want; we’re asking, observing, and iterating. It’s a loop of continuous discovery that ensures LexSelect remains truly by lawyers, for lawyers—not just another enterprise tool nobody loves.

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Ready to tell us your pain points?

At LexSelect, we believe the best legaltech isn’t built in a vacuum—it’s built through close collaboration with legal professionals who live the work every day. If you’re a lawyer, clerk, paralegal, or legal assistant with thoughts on how technology could make your workflow smoother, we want to hear from you.

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You can reach us anytime at info@lexselect.io, or book a short session with us. We’re always eager to learn from real legal professionals—so don’t hesitate. If you’d like to help shape LexSelect, let’s talk about your practice and workflow needs. We’re here to make the practice of law more focused, efficient, and maybe even a bit more enjoyable.

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That’s what this series is about. If you haven’t already, check out LexSelect Origins: By Lawyers, For Lawyers, and stay tuned for our next article—where I’ll unpack why we think AI works best as a tool for lawyers, not a replacement.

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