.png)
How it all started
A few years ago, Scott Foster—an accomplished IP litigator and entrepreneur—found himself prepping for trial late into the night. Scott had already broken away from Big Law to start his own boutique IP firm, Seastone IP, so he was accustomed to rolling up his sleeves for everything from high-level strategy to administrative tasks. But this time, the repetitive work had pushed him to his limit.
He shared his struggles with Jack Newton—a legaltech leader and visionary and the Founder & CEO of Clio—during one of their conversations. Scott spent hour after hour copying text from transcripts and other PDF documents, reformatting each snippet to match his Word documents, and then manually creating citations. It might sound like a minor annoyance, but in reality, it ballooned into dozens of hours across an entire trial. Worse, the time was difficult to bill at full rates—leading to hours being written off, plus the headache of reviewing others’ work to ensure manually generated citations were error-free.
Jack, knowing the legaltech industry inside and out, instantly recognized two things: one, that this problem was massive; and two, that it could be solved with the right technology. He also knew it would take someone who could bridge the gap between law and tech to bring it to life. That’s when he brought me into the picture.
Helping lawyers get their time back
I’m a lawyer by training, but I’ve spent more than 15 years building legaltech products, including Tologix and Investor-State LawGuide. My wife works in Big Law as a corporate tax partner, my stepfather was a courtroom litigator, and over the years, I’ve spoken with thousands of lawyers—ranging from solo practitioners to partners at global firms. I’ve seen firsthand the personal toll these demanding workflows take on lawyers who come home late from the office, only to spend even more hours verifying citations or re-checking someone else’s work. So, when Jack explained Scott’s struggles, it resonated with me on a personal and professional level. I knew exactly how draining these tasks could be, and I knew we could fix it.
In the summer of 2023, I joined Scott and Jack as a Co-Founder and CEO to build LexSelect. Our mission was straightforward: eliminate the low-value administrative tasks so lawyers can focus on the high-value work they love to do. We started by automating the tedious copy-paste-and-cite process, which often took 60 seconds or more for each excerpt. Across dozens of PDF documents, that could stack up to 50 hours or more of drudgery. By streamlining this workflow—particularly through a Microsoft Word add-in—we’ve cut those 50 hours down to about 4, a 12x reduction.
But it wasn’t just about saving time; it was about removing the obstacles that plague legal workflows:
- Discounted Fees
When lawyers do repetitive, low-value tasks, they often discount or write off that time, leading to lost revenue. - Overhead and Inefficiency
Delegating the work to associates, paralegals, and legal assistants might appear to be a solution, but it often drives up overhead, diverts them away from higher-value work, and creates inefficiencies associated with incomplete file context, multiple instructions, and version management. - Human Error and Risk
Each time you manually copy and paste text or create a citation, you risk formatting mistakes or referencing the wrong page number. Fixing these errors adds to the workload and can erode trust in the final product.
By lawyers, for lawyers
By tackling these issues head-on, we’ve delivered a solution that frees lawyers to work smarter and faster. They can focus on crafting winning arguments, advising clients, and achieving better outcomes. And that’s our overarching vision at LexSelect: building tools by lawyers, for lawyers, so they can find fulfillment in the parts of the job that matter most.
From Scott’s frustration on a late-night trial prep to a mission-driven product, we’re keeping the “by lawyers, for lawyers” spirit alive by developing LexSelect in close consultation with lawyers and other legal professionals. We’ll also explore why I believe AI isn’t about replacing attorneys but empowering them and how our core technology opens doors for broader applications in the legal world and beyond.
If you’d like to learn more about the product—or if you’ve faced the same frustrations Scott did—I’d love to hear from you. Visit us at lexselect.io, connect with me on LinkedIn, or feel free to email me at morgan@lexselect.io. Together, we can free the legal profession from tedious busywork and open up more space for truly meaningful work.