‘Just make a start’: how Timothy Metz launched a Legal Tech startup during his bachelor's degree
Not many students can say they launched a business that has multiple employees while studying for their bachelor’s degree. But Timothy Metz can. He’s almost finished his bachelor’s in Tax Law and Law and has already established LawDisk, a Legal Tech startup.
We spoke to Timothy to find out more about how he launched his small business.
You study Tax Law. Which did you choose this degree?
First of all, I started a Law degree and I decided to add Tax Law into the mix later on. I always found that really interesting because it’s a bit more analytical than the standard Law degree, which appealed to me. And I'm still doing both, because I also enjoy company law. During my studies, I came into contact with Professor Egbert Koops. He gave me advice when I was launching LawDisk.
You launched LawDisk while also studying for your degree. Where did that idea come from?
I was at PLNT, which is home to lots of different startups and scale-ups. That’s where I met one of my co-founders, Sieger Suurbier from Wessel Juristen. We discussed how we thought it would be fun to develop something in Legal Tech.
We had lots of wild ideas, but in the end we went back to basics. You see, we were having lots of meetings and realised that properly keeping track of and saving all your meetings and progress is a real challenge. That's when we came up with the idea of creating a physical product that can do all that for you. And so LawDisk was developed – a piece of hardware and software that converts speech into text.
So LawDisk can take minutes of meetings?
Yes, but automatically-generated minutes can also be a very important data source – especially within the company. Taking minutes of meetings costs time and money and the result is often not objective or comprehensive. This results in people choosing not to take minutes at all, and therefore losing important information.
How does this product differ from a transcription tool?
We stand out for two reasons: privacy and ease of use. We use our own speech models rather than speech models from publicly available sources such as OpenAI. Our data is stored in the Netherlands rather than America, for example, where different rules apply surrounding data security.
We’re also making things easier for users by developing a physical device that companies can simply install in any meeting room. You don't need to train all your employees to use an app.
We’re currently developing a cloud-based variant and a local variant, where the data is stored locally on the company’s server. This doesn’t require an internet connection, which is perfect for sensitive conversations and information. So that’s very interesting for the legal sector. Lastly, we view the minutes of meetings more as a data source and our goal is to analyse that data. This allows us to develop even more Legal Tech applications.
You've made a lot of progress in six months. How do you go about something like this?
I was lucky enough to have a lot of help from my co-founders (Sieger Suurbier, Roy Zitman and Wouter Kroeze), who provided me with the necessary funding. When you develop a product, you have many decisions to make, such as: Are you going to do it in-house or will you outsource? We opted to do the prototype ourselves. Fortunately, I do have some knowledge of hardware and software. It was mainly a matter of soldering, 3D printing and tinkering. If I realised I couldn’t do something or didn’t know how, I brought in others who did have the necessary skills. That’s how we arrived at a working proof of concept.
Eventually, things really gained momentum, which is when we moved to a new office and brought in more people. Nowadays we even have interns, so we’ve managed to develop extremely fast. You also have to work fast within engineering, as ten other people are already working on exactly the same thing.
What advice would you give to students who want to launch their own business alongside their degree?
Just make a start. Of course, you do need to validate your idea first and start talking to people. But at some point, you just need to start and solve things as they come up. I also think it's important to find a good co-founder, and preferably someone who can complement your own skills. If you’re really good at the legal aspect, for example, try and find someone who can handle the commercial element.