Legal AI platform, August, is launching a self-serve capability for all customers. The move should accelerate sign-ups and onboarding for the fast-growing startup. Meanwhile, they’ve also rolled out August Academy, a comprehensive library of over 100 video tutorials ‘designed to help lawyers adopt and master AI in their practice’.
Both moves are structured to help small and medium-size law firms engage with legal AI, first via an easy to use path into August – rather than having to engage with a sales team; and secondly, they’re providing a way to learn as much as you’d like about AI and the law, to give lawyers at smaller firms the confidence to use August’s multiple AI capabilities.
It’s a smart two-prong strategy designed to separate them from some other players in the market which are more focused on Big Law and tend toward more complex sales channels.
As the company, which offers a broad range of AI skills across deal and litigation work, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘Until now, powerful legal AI has required months-long sales cycles, extensive implementation, and significant upfront investment.
‘August’s self-serve model flips this approach. Lawyers can sign up today, receive two weeks free, and immediately start using AI across their entire workflow, from drafting motions and demand letters to due diligence extraction to reviewing contracts with playbooks generated through precedent.’
A screenshot of how August engages online with customers.
Meanwhile, the August Academy provides the ‘guidance to make that adoption successful, with practical lessons covering everything from document review strategies to advanced research techniques’.
Lessons can be filtered by practice area, use cases, and comfort level with AI. The library is continuously updated with new content as August adds capabilities and as the legal AI landscape evolves, they added.
In short, we could call this strategy: ‘Simplify and generate confidence.’
Thomas Bueler-Faudree, co-founder of August, commented: ‘Most legal AI has been built for Big Law. That means the solo practitioner in Anchorage or the three-partner firm in Austin gets left behind.
‘I worked for an attorney in Alaska at a small firm where a tool like this would have been invaluable, but the barriers to entry were impossibly high. We built August to change that. Any lawyer can sign up right now and start getting work done immediately, with August Academy there to help them learn as they go.’
And, Patricia Wolfe, Shareholder at Hunt Ortmann Attorneys at Law, and a customer of the platform, said: ‘August has become a really valuable partner to how I work. The platform quickly and easily handles the tedious parts of discovery work, like drafting discovery requests, summarizing depositions, and running deposition transcript searches for key terms, so that I can focus on the high level strategic decisions that actually require legal expertise. I’m excited for other attorneys to try this powerful tool.’
Is this a big deal? Yes, for August certainly, as it’s the embodiment of their business strategy, i.e. while some platforms spend months and months trying to get a 4,000-lawyer firm with 50 offices to do a PoC, August can sell direct to anyone who comes to their website.
Then, rather than leave the buyer unassisted – perhaps at a firm with no innovation team – there is plenty of tutorial support to enable them to make the most out of what they offer.
Some of the new legal AI players are also hoping to scoop up Small Law and Mid-Law, but it’s not easy to do at the same time that you’re operating a business structure focused primarily on larger firms.
In which case August may well be able to build a lot of market share, quite rapidly.
More here about August.
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