Podcast Interview with CoParse CEO – Personal Injury Marketing Minute #18

The Personal Injury Marketing Minute episode #18 is an interview with Jacob Beckerman, the Founder and CEO of CoParse.

CoParse is an app and a software for your computer used in many industries, including legal. Attorneys like CoParse because it replaces both Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat Pro. It handles both DOCX and PDF files and allows attorneys to view, edit, compare, and review documents in a fast, modern application. CoParse automatically allows users to click on sections, terms, case law references, exhibits, and more to get an instant preview. CoParse has several other features and integrations which cater to attorneys from solo operations to large law firms.

Visit CoParse online here: https://coparse.com/.

Listen to all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

Transcription:

Lindsey:

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. One of the biggest challenges and time sucks in a lawyer’s life is paperwork. Even listening to the word paperwork might give you a rush of anxiety. That at being said, take a deep breath and know that by the end of this podcast, you might have a tool you can use to streamline your paperwork process. This tool is called CoParse. CoParse is a paperwork platform designed specifically for lawyers. This software helps lawyers cut down on unnecessary reading, scrolling, and scanning so that they can more effectively get to the sections they need to use.

Lindsey:

Today, we’ll be talking to Jacob Beckerman, the founder and CEO of CoParse. Hey Jacob, how are you doing?

Jacob Beckerman:

Hi. Good. Thanks for having me Lindsay.

What is CoParse?

Lindsey:

So CoParse is an all-in-one Word and PDF processing app. But what specifically does it do?

Jacob Beckerman:

So CoParse is purpose-built for the type of documents that lawyers are trying to read. So it takes any Word or PDF file and it essentially extracts all of the defined terms, sections and makes it into a Wikipedia page. So instead of scrolling to find what you’re looking for, and when there’s defined terms or these cross references or references to statutes or things like that, it makes all of that clickable so that you have infinite context at your fingertips or at the tip of your fingers and you don’t have to scroll and search for information.

Lindsey:

And so you don’t need to keep 12,000 tabs open and try to hunt and peck and find whatever it is that was referenced in the first section when you’re already 12 sections in.

Jacob Beckerman:

Exactly. Yeah. So it makes it so that you can have everything on screen at once, even if you’re on a seven inch iPad screen or a mobile screen. It’s better than if you’d had two 40 inch monitors when you’re using the software.

Lindsey:

That’s fantastic. And so I know that it goes beyond just being able to reference and read it. So what are some of the other key features that set it apart from just using a traditional Word or PDF document?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. So in short, we’re doing it all. We’re doing lots of different tools that we’re putting into one desktop app. So we just released our advanced compare tool, which will tell you what’s changed across different documents. So it does simple redlining, but it also tells you how the terms and clauses have changed and how that affects the business implications of any of those changes. It works for contracts, briefs, whatever you happen to be looking at.

Jacob Beckerman:

It integrates with e-signature. It integrates with document management systems. And it allows editing. It also pulls out key errors in documents, which is a feature that we didn’t expect would get used as much as it has been used. And so it detects broken references. It detects all kinds of things that you may not catch, especially if you’re working quickly, which we all are these days. And it’ll flag those for you before you send documents out to clients, it’ll flag those for you and let you know.

Lindsey:

Absolutely. That’s a super important CYA built right in. And I know that if I spend too much time staring at any computer screen or typing something up, it can be unfortunately littered with typos or errors when I say things in ways that I don’t necessarily want to. So that’s a fantastic feature. I’m sure it gets used a ton. But as someone who has used PC and Word for my whole technological life, how easy would it be to jump into CoParse with that background?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. So when we started the company, it was uncertain whether we could replace Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word as people’s PDF and Word processing apps, because they’re just so ubiquitous, right? Word has been around since 1983. I don’t think it’s changed in my whole lifetime. Adobe Acrobat, I think is 1993. And similarly, the buttons haven’t even moved in at least a decade and a half. So it’s a question we had is, can we actually supplant these apps?

Jacob Beckerman:

So we do maintain the file formats. There’s no proprietary file format. It works with PDF and it works with Word files, which is really important, because you need it to work with all your existing files or else it’s not very useful to you. And it’s also, those files are the language of business. So you can’t just change them because you have to go back and forth with other parties, with courts and so forth.

Jacob Beckerman:

So it maintains compatibility with those existing formats that you might associate with Adobe and Microsoft, and it also works offline on your PC. So it’s a desktop app. It’s not a cloud app where your documents are getting sent to who knows where. It’s just like those apps work locally on your computer. You can use them on an airplane. CoParse is similarly completely offline. So you don’t have to worry about data or anything like that. So from a user perspective, what we call change management, is actually not that high, despite it really supplanting these core tools that we use every day.

Lindsey:

Right. And you hit on a couple of really important pieces there, where government agencies can be 10 years behind the times. And while we do want to see CoParse grow and be a foundational element on everybody’s digital landscape. If it’s not there yet, you need to be able to use Word documents and Adobe documents and have those compatible with everybody who’s operating in your field. So I think that’s definitely an important piece of that.

Lindsey:

And the other thing that you talked about was having CoParse both, be a digital cloud based hybrid, as well as on desktop. And I think that that’s really important for information security, which is clearly hugely important to law firms who have to protect their client’s data. So what steps does CoParse take to ensure the privacy and security of client information?

Jacob Beckerman:

Very simply, we just don’t deal with it. We don’t want your data. We don’t store your data. We don’t transmit your data. The desktop app, this is why we made a desktop app. It lives on your computer or your device, whether an Apple device or a Windows device. And it works offline. So there’s a little bit of telemetry in that it integrates with your existing document management system. So if you already trust iManage, if you already trust something else, we will integrate with that to enable sharing of documents and things like that.

Jacob Beckerman:

But if you don’t have that and you want to just work as a single player experience, it also just works offline. So I think the best answer to that question is instead of talking about how smart we are and how secure we are, we just avoid the question by saying your documents stay on your computer.

Lindsey:

That’s great. Yeah. Absolutely don’t have to jump in through any hoops, if you have less data going back and forth, you just have totally hands off approach. So most of our listeners are personal injury lawyers. And so imagine that you’re a personal injury lawyer in a small to mid-size firm, how might you use CoParse on a daily basis and how might that optimize parts of your operational flow?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. So we find that the best way to use our software is to make it your default application for documents. You can replace, whether you’re someone that really doesn’t have anything except maybe the Microsoft suite of products or whether you’ve adopted other legal tech tools, CoParse can really be your one stop shop. And we generally suggest if people pretty much only have the Microsoft suite of products and they’re looking to add in a new legal tech product, that we be the first thing they add, because we’re doing a lot of things, whether that’s comparison, Word processing, PDF viewing. We’re really just accelerating lots of different workflows.

Jacob Beckerman:

So it’s not the kind of thing that I can say when you have a specific document or a specific use case that, that’s when it’ll make it 63.5% faster. It’s just, you make this your default Word processor. By that, I mean, when you double click a DOCX file in Outlook or you double click a PDF file in your database or document management system, it’ll automatically open with our program. And that just makes it into this passive process where you don’t even have to think about using it, it just gets built into your workflow and accelerates all the work you’re doing across searching documents, editing documents, revising documents, and so forth.

Lindsey:

And so when it opens up a Word document or a PDF, and it has all of those additional tools at your disposal, all of those are just automatically integrated and show up as options when you’re interfacing with the document?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah, that’s right. So Word and Acrobat, they were not purpose-built for attorneys. They are generalist tools that are used by, I don’t know, three billion people. And that doesn’t cover the needs of personal injury lawyers in specific. So there’s someone, I forget whose quote this is and I won’t misattribute it, but a good way to come up with business ideas is to think about what is still done in email or Word or Excel. Right? And can we make a faster horse for that? Right? So that’s what CoParse is. It’s a purpose-built version of those programs that deals with the complex, interlinked, jargony documents that we’re dealing with and accelerates those workflows.

Lindsey:

That’s fantastic. And so CoParse has received so many accolades over the past year or so. So what is next for CoParse’s journey?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. We are continuing to iterate on our Word and PDF processor. The big thing that’s coming up for us is we’re expanding to others types of applications that lawyers can use and putting those into the same desktop app that we’ve already built. We have our eye on communication. Let me leave it there because we’re still planning through exactly what happens when on the roadmap. But when you’re going back and forth with documents over email naturally, whether that be in track changes or with PDFs to clients, we’re starting to think about how can we enable those multiplayer experiences beyond just the 10X better experience we’ve built for documents living on your computer.

Lindsey:

That’s phenomenal. Well, Jacob, if people want to learn more about CoParse and whether or not it’s right for their law firm, where can they go to find more information?

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. Well, they can go to our website. That’s CoParse. That’s C, like Charlie, O-P-A-R-S-E.com or they can email me on Jacob@coparse.com.

Lindsey:

Great. Well, thank you so much, Jacob. It’s been a pleasure having you on today.

Jacob Beckerman:

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Lindsey:

Take care.