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| Kristen Sonday |
A former international affairs specialist at the U.S. Department of Justice, Sonday cut her teeth as a tech platform developer in 2011, when she joined the founding team at Grouper Inc., a New York-based online, invite-only social club that used algorithms to organize blind group dates. Sonday helped the platform, which was supported by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Y Combinator and shut down in 2016, scale up internationally.
"I got a lot of on-the-ground training in terms of how to build a tech company from the ground up," she said.
In 2015, after meeting Felicity Levey, who was then a partner at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, at a music festival on the Jersey Shore, the two began discussing the idea for a platform that could streamline pro bono matching.
The big break came in 2017, when their budding tech idea was selected to be part of Techstars Chicago, a business accelerator program that has nurtured successful startups such as TradingView.
Partnerships with corporate in-house legal departments and law firms began to flourish soon after that, starting with Verizon and the pro bono program at Dentons, led by partner Ben Weinberg. In a few years, Paladin had signed contracts with more than 60 large law firms and Fortune 500 corporations, and hundreds of legal aid organizations.
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the New York State Bar Association and the American Bar Association partnered with Paladin to create the first nationwide pro bono portal for pandemic-related issues.
When Russia invaded Ukraine and started the deadliest conflict on European soil since World War II, Paladin helped create a portal to get law firms involved with immigration issues stemming from the war, helping more than 4,000 people in the first few months of the conflict.
"I think there's just a lot of potential applicability of this type of software to help in crises at scale," Sonday said. "And I hope that by mobilizing people through advanced technology, we can help in a more streamlined way that increases capacity and, at the end of the day, helps people get more help faster."
Sonday spoke to Law360 about the idea behind the platform, its origins and its ambitions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did Paladin come about?
After working for the DOJ, I met my co-founder, Felicity Levey. She was a litigator at Skadden at the time in New York, she had done a lot of pro bono work with the United Nations, the International Criminal Court. She had just taken on and won an asylum case for a Colombian man who was being persecuted by a local guerrilla group.
We met at a music festival on the Jersey Shore, and we ended up spending hours in this tent on the beach together talking about her asylum case, my work at DOJ and access to justice. She was telling me that she had so many friends who wanted to do pro bono work, but they didn't really know how to start, and that that ecosystem — the way that the workflows ran — were incredibly manual and ad hoc. So, she wanted to do something tech-related to help make the system more efficient.
I realized immediately that was a place I could plug in. I'm not a lawyer. She was the lawyer. I'm more the business tech person, but I realized there seemed to be a pretty big opportunity to plug technology into this very old process and help make the system more efficient.
We started working on the idea [for Paladin] doing research in 2016 and then, in 2017, we joined the Techstars Chicago program, and that's when we picked up with the company and really started building.
That was also the year, as you may recall, of the Muslim ban [the Trump administration's ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries] — and we had some pretty quick realizations as we were building.
Initially, we started out wanting to build a platform for small firms because we figured that the big firms had large teams and so many resources that they wouldn't necessarily need the tech infrastructure.
What we quickly learned after the Muslim ban is that we had a number of in-house corporate teams and firms come to us and say, "Hey, we need better technology infrastructure to manage pro bono programs, especially at scale, because we have so many people wanting to get involved. Can you help us with that?"
So we shifted our project from a more B to C type of product to one that was more enterprise.
Who were your first clients?
Verizon became our very first client that we worked with to build out kind of the corporate version of Paladin, to help them streamline their pro bono program. They have hundreds of attorneys, and they all are really interested in pro bono. So they became our first corporate co-development partner.
On the law firm side of it — due to all the intricacies around risk management conflicts and in-house systems — that took another year to build. Dentons was our first law firm co-development partner. We built with them in 2018 and launched in 2019.
And after that, we were off to the races.
We increased Dentons' pro bono numbers by over 30% in the first year they used the platform. That was our first big proof point that Paladin was actually working.
Clifford Chance LLP was another one of our first three BigLaw firm partners. We started with them in New York and Washington, D.C. In their first year on Paladin they increased their pro bono hours by 93%. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC, another initial partner, increased theirs by over 30% as well.
So we knew pretty quickly that we were on to something.
What's the philosophy behind Paladin?
You need to meet attorneys where they are, and emails and spreadsheets tend to get lost in the shuffle. When you have new work that's so important and so high-stakes, you want to make sure you're delivering it to the right potential volunteers as intelligently as possible, and that's what we were able to do through the platform.
Just so you understand how the tech works, it's essentially software as a service, or SaaS, where we provide a free version to legal services organizations. They input their pro bono cases into the platform once. With the click of a button, they send it out in real time to all the firms, corporate in-house departments, and bar associations.
With the help of Clifford Chance now we've expanded globally, and we're getting a lot of really good data about where the need is and where the resources are that can help. We've been able to increase engagement pretty significantly by creating this one-stop shop where people can go, rather than having to go to their emails.
How many partnerships does Paladin have currently?
We don't share client numbers, but I can share that we work currently with over 60 AmLaw firms and Fortune 500s and that we just crossed over 400 legal services organizations on the platform. The DOJ is another client of ours; we power the federal pro bono program.
It's been amazing to build this evolving, dynamic, essentially real-time database of pro bono needs across the country.
Are you planning to further expand Paladin's international reach?
Yes. Internationalization is a big focus for us. At this point, we have proven that the concept works and is successful here in the U.S.
When we think about what needs look like around the world and who's driving pro bono engagement, it is concentrated around multinational firms and corporate teams. So now that we have a number of them on board — I can share that 80% of our client base is multinational — and that we've done this pilot expansion with Clifford Chance to all their offices worldwide, now we can demonstrate that the tech could actually work when localized.
We think there's a tremendous opportunity for Paladin to become the go-to platform globally to connect the pro bono and legal aid ecosystems and help people in need at scale in a way that's never been done before. That's what's really exciting to me. So that is a big focus for us this year.
Tell me about the development team. How many people are working to build up the platform?
Felicity and I came up with the original idea. I've been more wrong throughout this process than I've been right, but we really rely on the experts in the field on the ground to guide the development.
Our team is all in-house. We're about 15 now full-time working on it. Everyone just cares so much about the mission. Our goal, at the end of the day, is to become that go-to global platform.
There are so many tools that we can build on top of this platform to help organizations increase efficiency internally, tools we can build to help legal services organizations and pro bono attorneys actually do the work better and in a more automated way. So I think there's just a lot that we can build on here, because there's been such little initial development and investment in pro bono technology to begin with.
Do you see competitors that are trying to do the same thing that you've been doing with Paladin?
The only other organization that I know of that does something like this is Australian-based Justice Connect. They're great. They're friends of ours. They tend to work more in Australia and [the Asia-Pacific region].
In general, no one has really thought about pro bono as big business before. And that's our opportunity, not just to build a powerful and scalable tech platform. I think we can do a better job as a community in articulating the business aspect of pro bono overall. Think about benefits like professional development, business development, firms working with corporate clients on pro bono. Think about marketing, retention, recruitment, employee morale, ESG. I mean, pro bono fits squarely into all those avenues. No one has really, I don't think, done a good job of articulating that value. So we have the opportunity and the data to start telling the story of how powerful pro bono is, not just for the community but also for the attorney and the firm.
What do you think about the impact that artificial intelligence can have on access to justice?
We talk so much about AI and advanced technology and legal tech. Especially for the legal aid community, where the technology is a bit more antiquated and we can't afford the types of investments in AI that other big firms are making, we really do have to do a good job of starting with the basics and making sure that the foundation of our technology is strong. And then build on top of that. So when I think about all the hype around AI, I'm excited by the potential and the opportunity. I first want to make sure that we nail the 101. And I think there's a lot of groundwork to do there before we get too deep.
AI has not been a part of Paladin's initial product, and it's because we want to make sure we get those fundamentals right first. I think AI has a tremendous opportunity to help make legal services organizations and pro bono teams more efficient internally — the day-to-day processes — and also in guiding some of the practice management part of the pro bono work itself. But really, again, we need to make sure that foundation is strong.
And then there's a whole other untapped area of leveraging AI and advanced technology to help clients themselves. And the reality is that these clients are already using ChatGPT to answer their legal questions. It's already happening with or without us. I think that's an opportunity, and really an obligation, for us to understand how we can leverage these new tools to at least provide better legal information to help people.
Besides the pro bono numbers you mentioned earlier, what else do you consider to be a measure of success for Paladin?
Currently, the Legal Services Corporation reports that 92% of low-income individuals' civil legal needs are not met or not adequately met. My end goal would be to make a significant dent in that number. Practically, what that means is getting advanced technology like Paladin and AI tools into the hands of more legal aid organizations, attorneys and pro bono volunteers to help as many people as possible and increase capacity.
For us, internally, it's all about the impact, which is hard to quantify. But it's also how many people we're serving at the end of the day. This year, we'll surpass 50,000 pro bono connections made over the last few years. Our goal is to do many more than that around the world, and help people access the system who might not have had a fair shot before Paladin.
Pro bono managers at law firms say they have plenty of attorneys who want to do pro bono, but connecting them to these opportunities is logistically challenging. What prevents more firms from taking up Paladin?
Two things. The first is that it's important to get buy-in from firm leadership on adopting any new technology. And I think the ability to articulate the business case of pro bono, aside from the business case for Paladin, is really important for us as a community to articulate.
The second is change management. Changing any new system is hard, and there's never been an existing pro bono matching platform before Paladin. Creating a new product category and changing behavior is hard, and I'm excited that we do have the proof points that we have — with Dentons, Wilson Sonsini and Clifford Chance — that demonstrate that the adoption of these platforms will actually be additive and not intimidating.
What plans do you have for Paladin's future?
Big focuses for us this year, number one: internationalization.
Number two: building additional tools for legal aid organizations. They've been so underserved for so long, and this is a place where I think we can add a lot of value at little to no cost.
The third area where we're focused is on law schools. And you'll see more about this coming down the pike. We've had a lot of interest from students and law schools wanting to get involved with pro bono. I think we have an exciting opportunity to essentially be an end-to-end system for attorneys, from when they start out in law school and start their pro bono journey, to really building out a portfolio and making it a part of their ethos as they become lawyers and move forward. I'm really excited about that.
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
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