Clearing Content at Scale: The ClearDraft Story
Bringing content clearing to the masses
Almost every major publication you read, watch or listen to has crossed a lawyer's desk before it reached you - and that lawyer was expensive, slow, and one of a shrinking number of people qualified to do the job.
In this episode of Releveraged we look at what happens when the reading stops being the billable work, and why the founder who built the machine to do it is adamant that it should never be the one making the final call.
David Burgess has spent 25 years as a media lawyer at Netflix, The Independent and the Evening Standard. He is now co-founder and co-CEO of ClearDraft. In this conversation we discuss how a book that used to take him 22 hours to clear now takes under an hour, why his product trains on lawyers' reactions to content rather than on the content itself, and the blind testing area running quietly inside his own system where machine and lawyer compete at spotting issues. The machine is winning.
He also gets candid on the editor who greeted him on day one with “why the f*** do I need another lawyer, you cost more than three journalists”, why generalist VCs looked at a TAM he considers enormous and saw nothing worth funding, the model railway enthusiasts who sold their steam train to pay the legal bill after one trustee defamed another, and why founding a company isn't one hard thing - it's 500 moderately hard things.
What's in the episode
00:00 - Introduction to David Burgess and ClearDraft David is a clearance lawyer, and he starts by explaining what that actually means: reading, watching and listening to content on behalf of magazines, newspapers, TV companies and book publishers, flagging the legal risk in it, and getting clients to the point where they can publish with confidence. ClearDraft productises that — an AI clearance platform that runs articles, scripts, manuscripts and podcasts through bespoke media law models, flags defamation, privacy and contempt risk, and keeps expert lawyers in the loop. It launched this year on the back of a $1.4m seed round closed in April. Asked the standard opening question — AI bull or bear, on a scale of one to five — he lands on a four, and explains the missing point as pure risk mitigation: he doesn't want to be proved completely wrong.
02:08 - What ClearDraft Actually Does The origin isn't a lightning-bolt moment, it's a career-long irritation. David has always believed lawyers are too expensive for the job they do in this market — the editor who swore at him on his first day at a newspaper made the point better than he could. After leaving the Evening Standard and The Independent he founded Reviewed & Cleared, a specialist firm built on pooling very good lawyers and dropping the price. ClearDraft is the next version of that. The key move is separating what used to be one indivisible task into two: the long laborious business of reading 900 pages, and the valuable business of spotting the eight issues in there and knowing what to do about them. Clients, as he puts it, no longer have to pay for the reading — they pay for the lawyer to find the problem and fix the problem.
07:27 - Three Ways to Buy: Enterprise, Pro, and Direct The go-to-market fell out of the product organically, in three tiers. Enterprise builds ClearDraft into a publisher's content management system — already underway with two national newspapers — so in-house lawyers clear content inside their own workflow and reports generate back to journalists automatically. There are perhaps 25 companies in the world that can afford in-house media lawyers, and David's pitch to them is that those lawyers can stop being distracted by clearing an article about Kylie Minogue and get back to the work they were hired for. Pro is software plus services: clients push content into ClearDraft's queue and ClearDraft's own lawyers clear it, faster and cheaper. Direct is the one he's most excited about — a risk management tool for creators at a price point that has never existed, where a book review that costs £2,000-£5,000 today can be run for under £200.
11:49 - Training an AI on Lawyers' Judgment, Not the Content Asked how he knows the system isn't missing things, David is blunt: that's what the last six months have been. ClearDraft was deliberately built to over-flag on day one — “the keenest paralegal you've ever met, the annoying one who comes back with a memo with 500 marks on it” — and has been tuned downward ever since. The clever part is what it learns from. It doesn't train on the content; it trains on the lawyer's reaction to the content. Every “no need to flag this, they're dead, you don't need to flag when someone's dead” is a data point. Inside the system, invisible to customers, there's a blind testing area running lawyers against machine on a continuous basis, and on issue-spotting the machine is consistently winning.
14:06 - Why the Machine Doesn't Make the Final Call This is the philosophical core, and it's the mirror image of the argument you'll have heard elsewhere. David has built an issue-spotting machine precisely so that humans can make the call, and he doesn't intend to change that. The call depends on who the client is, who the potential claimant is, what the content is, and what's happening in the world that day — and, crucially, the lawyer usually isn't the decision maker anyway. Lawyers advise; editors and journalists decide. What he will concede is that the system will get very good at pattern-matching how issues like this one have been advised on before, and that the knowledge going into it compounds daily. He also pushes back on the framing: they're not the unemployment squad, they're the efficiency squad, and media lawyers are a dying breed at exactly the moment content volume is exploding.
19:20 - Real Defamation Stories and What Clients Actually Get For every splashy defamation trial there are hundreds of small threats nobody hears about. David, who started out as a claimant defamation lawyer at Schillings, tells two: a Kensington residents' newsletter that criticised the wrong (very wealthy) resident, and a train enthusiasts' group where one trustee defamed another in a newsletter and the steam train they had built was sold to cover the costs. His point is that defamation and privacy are personal in a way commercial disputes aren't, which is exactly why they spiral. On the product side, he walks through what clients actually see: colour-coded issues in the copy — red for defamation, blue for contempt, yellow for privacy — each opening into context, defences and sources, with a chat function connecting journalist and lawyer, plus data no publisher has ever had, including which of your journalists keeps taking risks they shouldn't.
26:16 - The Economics: From £2,000 Books to £750 Lawyers are still expensive and still need paying — so the model is scale, not margin compression on the same volume. A book that took one lawyer a week now takes under an hour of lawyer time, which means the same lawyer clears twenty books in the space they used to clear one. That's how a £2,000-£5,000 book review becomes £750-£900. And it changes the conversation with publishers: instead of legalling the 10% of the catalogue they're most nervous about, run the whole catalogue through, find out where the risk actually is, and then price the human work against the issues that are really there.
27:55 - Raising From Strategic Investors Instead of VCs David is refreshingly unsentimental about the fundraise. He and his co-founder Alex Wade assumed they'd wave the idea around town and VCs would fall at their feet; instead they discovered that a TAM which looks like an insane amount of money to a small-to-medium business looks like nothing to a fund underwriting one unicorn out of thirty. Realising they were in the wrong rooms, they went to strategic and angel investors instead — and the company that led the seed round came with a contract and a systems integration attached. For the audiovisual version of the product, he's specifically looking for investors from the TV production world.
31:27 - The Roadmap: US Launch and Beyond Focus for now is enterprise and pro in the UK, where both founders are qualified. US paralegals are already in place and the RAG layer is being built out, with a US launch targeted for Q1 next year or earlier — helped by American clients who've said they'll buy when it's ready, and some who want the UK version now simply because it still flags issues in their content. Then audiovisual, Europe, Canada and Australia. He closes on what founding has actually been like: better than working, but a slog, and a promise that if this succeeds he won't go on a podcast and tell you how great it is. Founding isn't one hard thing, he says. It's 500 moderately hard things — most of which you've never done before.
Full Transcript:
Alex (00:10)
Hi everybody, welcome to Re-Leveraged, conversations with founders building interesting businesses in the legal sector. Today's guest is David Burgess. David is a media lawyer with 25 years of experience, including senior roles at Netflix, The Independent and the Evening Standard. He is also now the co-founder and co-CEO of ClearDraft, which is an AI-powered clearance platform that runs articles, scripts, manuscripts and podcasts through bespoke media law AI, and it flags defamatory, privacy and contempt risks with expert lawyers kept in the loop. They launched this year and raised a $1.4 million seed round in April. David, welcome to Re-Leveraged.
David (00:56)
Thank you, Alex. It's very nice to be here and good to see you again.
Alex (00:58)
So look, we have this standard question that we ask everybody at the start of these podcasts, but I think I probably already know the answer to this with you. Are you an AI bull or an AI bear? Scale of one to five?
David (01:17)
On a scale of one to five, I'm a four.
Alex (01:24)
Okay, excellent. And what makes you say that you're not a five?
David (01:30)
Because I don't want to be proved completely wrong. If the future proves that I'm wrong, I'd like to have left myself some room.
Alex (01:38)
That's a very, very risk-mitigating lawyer answer. Well done. Cool. So I've given a very brief introduction here to you, but can you tell us a bit more about what you're building at ClearDraft?
David (01:53)
Yeah. To give the best context is probably to explain what I do. I'm a clearance lawyer. So I have worked for magazines and newspapers and TV companies and book publishers as the lawyer that clears the stuff. So we read, we watch, we listen, and then we flag to our clients what the legal risks might be in that content, and then help them mitigate that risk or deal with that risk, and then get them through to where they can publish with confidence.
Alex (02:23)
Okay, got it. And so what were you doing previously when you worked for some of these very big publishing businesses? Like how did you tackle this previously, and what was the thing that made you go, do you know what, this is not befitting of 2025 and beyond?
David (02:40)
I'd love to say that I had that moment where I think this isn't befitting of 2025 and beyond, but it was never that sort of straightforward. To legal things, I had to read them or I had to listen to them. Maybe at the very most I could put a podcast at 1.25 and really concentrate so I didn't miss anything. But the process of clearing content has always been very human driven.
And I'm always on the side of saying that lawyers are expensive. When I got a job at a newspaper, the first day when I met the editor, he swore at me and said, “Why the f*** do I need another lawyer? You cost more than three journalists.” I said, “It's very nice to meet you. I look forward to working with you.”
But I've always been very conscious that — I'm a huge fan of freedom of expression and I want people to tell their stories, and they need lawyers to do that, and good lawyers to do that — but I'm also very conscious that lawyers are expensive. When I left, I was an editorial lawyer at the Evening Standard and The Independent, and I left there and created a firm called Reviewed & Cleared. The idea being that we just clear content and we make lawyers as affordable as possible, just for creators to keep creating and to do it safely. Reviewed & Cleared was a business model version of that, where we pulled really good lawyers together and we just did that, and for that reason we could bring cost down.
ClearDraft is sort of the next version of that, where it's just another way to make lawyers more accessible and make media law advice more accessible for creators. As you know, things like this didn't exist 10 years ago. People are now able to create their own content. What hasn't kept up is the infrastructure around those people to make sure they're publishing safely — that they're not risking their houses from stupid comments that might not necessarily make the creative content any better.
Alex (04:46)
Yeah. Okay. So you spent a good few years running your firm, and that must have given you a lot of institutional knowledge about the workflow and what to look out for. And in essence you've got a bunch of experience there that, as far as I understand it with ClearDraft, you've now productised into a technology platform that enables a content producer to run that same content through your platform and get the same outcome that you might get as a lawyer. Have I understood that correctly?
David (05:28)
Yeah. So ClearDraft flags the legal risk, and then what it does is present the legal risk in a really cool way where it explains the broader context. It explains what the issue might be. It gives the defences that might be available if you go ahead with this problem, and then it presents all that information to either the journalist or the lawyer to then decide how to proceed.
So we've separated what traditionally was — lawyers would read the content, and while they were reading the content would fix the legal risks. What we've had to do is turn that into two parts. One is the long, laborious process of reading a book. And second is pulling out the eight issues that are in that book and, as lawyers, presenting that information in order to solve that problem. Clients unfortunately had to spend whatever, hundreds of pounds an hour, for the lawyer to read the 900 pages to get to the one problem about a Labrador.
So what we feel is we will change the dynamics of the industry, in that clients no longer have to pay for the legalling. They now just pay for the lawyer to do the bit that they want the lawyer to do, which is find the problem, fix the problem.
Alex (06:41)
Okay, got it. And so what is this then? Is this a pricing play where you can provide the same service at a fraction of the cost? Is this going into new markets? And actually more broadly, like what is this? Is this a technology platform? And are there humans in the loop? And if so, how does this all work, and what are you thinking around it?
David (07:12)
Organically, it came up that we would sell this product in three ways. So forgive the names, they're kind of cheesy, but we have an enterprise version, a pro version and a direct version.
The enterprise version is where we give the product and they build it into the content management system — which we're doing with two national newspapers. We build it into their content management system and their in-house lawyers use it. It flags the risk, the in-house lawyers decide it, and then it automatically generates reports to journalists. There are maybe 25 companies in the world that can afford in-house lawyers. We will sell to them. We will make their in-house lawyers stop worrying about legalling. They will suddenly be able to deal with responding to legal threats — all the important things that lawyers are in-house to do, that they're often distracted from by clearing an article about Kylie Minogue. That can stop now.
Then we have a pro version, which is where we sell software plus services. So we provide the lawyers. A lot of companies can't afford in-house lawyers and they need lawyers to do this job — specialist lawyers. So we run the content through our system, our clients automatically upload it into our system, and we have a queue where we clear content. The fact is we can do it quicker now, we can do it cheaper now, because previously it would take me 22 hours to legal a book. So 20, 21 hours reading, an hour of report. What happens now is I get a report with the seven issues in the book and I can report to the client in 40 minutes. So we're going down from 22 hours to an hour for a book, which means we can reduce cost and we can do it at scale. As many clients want that, we will get as many lawyers who need to do that.
And then we have direct, which is a really interesting proposition. I'm very excited about it. Direct will be a risk management tool for creators. We will do that at very, very low prices. So let's say, for example, people pay between £2,000 and £5,000 for a book. We will do a review for less than £200. And the authors will be able to run their content through it, understand the legal risks and then decide how they want to deal with it.
David (09:32)
They can press a button and have a lawyer give them some advice, or they can go away and fix it themselves. But what we're doing is we're providing that legal risk analysis. We won't take liability, the same way Harvey and Legora don't take liability, but the offset is that we can do that at a really low cost.
Alex (10:00)
Okay, excellent. And in terms of how you think about pricing all of these, how does that compare and contrast against what might be available in the market at the moment? And is it enough of a difference that it makes your service, your offering, far more attractive than using a traditional law firm?
David (10:20)
The answer is yeah. I mean, let's take books for an example. As humans, we have to charge between £2,000 and £5,000 for a book. We can now reduce that to between £750 and £900. So for publishers, that's changing. Publishers will publish hundreds of books a year. They will get legal advice on maybe 10%. There's even a world where we can offer that we will legal the entire catalogue at a much lower cost, and then just deal with the issues as humans in order to make the margin that we need to pay our lawyers.
But what we're saying to clients now is: don't worry about what might be. Don't put that in the hands of editors. Don't put that in the hands of sub-editors. Run your entire catalogue through. We will tell you where the risks are, and then we will tell you what the cost of us dealing with that for you is going to be.
Alex (11:20)
Okay, that's very cool. The one thing that stands out to me is that a lot of the value that you're using the technology for is to read through the content. How do you know that it hasn't missed anything?
David (11:49)
Well, this is what I've been doing for six months. So we built it to catch everything. It was the keenest paralegal on day one that you've ever met — the annoying one who comes back with a memo with 500 marks on it. That's how ClearDraft started out. That's how we wanted it to start out.
I think we've been really clever in the way we've done that, in that we've convinced clients to run their content through our product, and the product learns from the lawyer's comments on the content. So it doesn't train on the content. It trains on the lawyer's reaction to the content. So as a lawyer I've been saying, “No need to flag this, this is why it's not a privacy issue. No need to flag this — they're dead. You don't need to flag when someone's dead.” And over the course of months we've just been bringing it down, bringing it down. And our accuracy levels have been higher than humans.
Within our system, which customers can't see, we have a blind testing area where we have lawyers versus machine happening all the time, and we're consistently seeing that for spotting issues, the machine's winning. Now, we have not built a machine that makes the call. I don't think we should. I think that's a human interaction. I think that's a human moment, because there's a lot of things to consider about who the client is, what the content is, who the claimant is, what's happening in the world that day. I think if we tried to build that AI product, we would have failed. And so we very quickly realised we were building an issue-spotting machine to allow humans to make the call.
Alex (13:51)
And do you take this one step further, where the machine at some point can also make the call? Let me give you a bit of context around the question. You spent six months building the machine to understand what is a risk and what is not, and you've trained it on a whole bunch of human judgment. Now, once those key points are extracted, is there not an opportunity to then extend that model into actually making the judgment calls around the risks that have been flagged?
David (14:27)
Here's what I'll say, and I'll say this really carefully. Our product is the stupidest it's going to be today. It's only getting cleverer and better. There will be, over the course of the next year, two years, three years, an incredible amount of human knowledge just going into it on a daily basis. So every time a lawyer comments on something, our system's watching and our system's learning. So it's getting better, and it will start to see patterns on how advice is given. So it's not inconceivable, quite quickly, that it can at least start to say: this is what the advice has been in the past, this is how we think you can resolve the issue.
I still think that's for a lawyer to make the call, because the lawyer is often not the one making a call. It will be the editor. You have to remember, lawyers give advice and editors and journalists decide how to implement it. So a good lawyer will say, “in my experience you'll get away with this”, or “in my experience you won't get away with this”. Whether we can replicate that, I don't know. But what I do know is that we will be able to build thousands and thousands of examples of how issues that are grouped together have been dealt with in the past.
Alex (15:38)
Okay, great. Very cool.
David (15:41)
We're not the unemployment squad, as we were labelled when we went into one building in New York. We are the efficiency squad, and I can only see us helping make media lawyers more efficient. The fact is, we are a dying breed anyway. There are not many of us, and as that goes down, content goes up. There's a problem in the industry. There's a lot of very busy media lawyers.
Alex (16:10)
Yeah, that's a really interesting point about the market, and one that I was actually just about to come on to. You described those sort of three tiers of product earlier, which clearly cater to different client demographics — with the enterprise for the biggest publishers in the world, and then you've got your direct, which I imagine is individuals that are creating content that they are commercialising and they want to ensure that they are compliant.
What of that landscape, what of the market from the content production side of things, are you most excited about? Is it making media lawyers that are already doing their job more efficient? Is it entering into new markets where perhaps content producers and publishers just can't afford to access this type of capability? Where do you get most excited?
David (17:19)
This sounds really worthy, and I'm not a particularly worthy guy. I'm very passionate about freedom of expression. I think that it's nothing to do with the lawyers who are in the industry. It's to do with the fact that we're expensive and there's not many of us, and people who want to create content are not getting the legal access that they need to safely do it. People's lives are ruined by defamation actions. I think we can help.
And there's six million self-published books a year. When I was at Reviewed & Cleared, I would get people calling me saying, “Can I just do it for £400? I've got a credit card. I really want to get my book out. I'm worried about this.” And we'd have to say no, we can't afford to do it, because we have to pay our lawyers.
That will change now, in that if you are a content creator and previously you've either not been aware of the risk — which, you know, tons of people aren't; there's probably 90% of YouTubers who just think it goes off into the void and there's no problem — but for that 10% who are, for example, on Substack or on Beehiiv, who are writing really incredible journalism without legal support, we can fix that. There's a world where they can run an article through for a couple of pounds.
Alex (18:50)
And so for anyone that sits in that space that is watching this, what are some of the risks of producing content that you put out there into the ether on Substack or Beehiiv or YouTube or Spotify, wherever it happens to be? What are some of the risks that you've seen in your career that these people need to be aware of?
David (19:05)
Well, I started as a defamation lawyer, a claimant defamation lawyer, at Schillings. And for all the big splashy stories about defamation trials, there are hundreds of small threats happening at all times.
Two I worked on: one was a residents' group where a newsletter had said that one resident was behaving particularly badly. Unfortunately for that person who wrote that newsletter, that residents' group were all very, very wealthy. It was a housing block in Kensington.
And there's the terrible story of the train enthusiasts who built a steam train, and then in the newsletter one trustee defamed another trustee, and the train ended up getting sold to pay for legal costs. So it ended up with a broken-down train enthusiast group with no train any more, because of a defamation action.
They're expensive. But the problem with defamation — or if you're a claimant lawyer, the good thing about defamation — is it's people's reputation, it's people's feelings, and it's really personal. When you get screwed on a business deal, you can sort of maybe take a call on it and let that go. When it comes to defamation, or even invading your privacy, these are very personal, and lawyers become involved and it spirals and it gets very, very expensive. And I've seen journalists crying. I've seen people upset because they think they're going to lose the house. And some people, sometimes, they do.
Alex (20:37)
So is the key then, if you are producing content, just to not say shitty things about people?
David (20:43)
This is the problem, because journalists are supposed to say shitty things about people, because people do shitty things. And so what happens is, if journalists stop saying shitty things, people will keep doing shitty things. And we need to — I sound so worthy — but we need to protect that. Some of the stuff people do on Substack and some of the stuff people do on Beehiiv is incredible, and they need to be protected. And lawyers are expensive and slow, and we can fix it.
Alex (21:17)
I like it.
David (21:18)
No, please don't say shitty things. Everyone said you should.
Alex (21:23)
Otherwise ClearDraft's in a tricky situation. Good point.
David (21:27)
Yeah, I don't think there's any risk of that happening given everything that's going on in the world at the moment. So I think you're in good shape.
David (21:33)
I think even with — people are telling their stories now. And if I tell you now that my auntie has cancer, and that inspired me to go and do a marathon — that's my auntie's health that I'm giving away to an audience that she didn't consent to. And it's so easy to do these things. I'd say it happens 20 times a day, and my auntie probably wouldn't care, she'd probably just be happy that I name-checked her. But that can turn really quickly, and that can be a problem really quickly.
Alex (22:03)
Yeah, I hear you. Let's talk a little bit about the client experience. You touched on a few things here in relation to turnaround times being significantly shorter, given that you can get the tech to do the initial review and flag the key risks that you can then work on, rather than you actually having to read a book manually — which is obvious. But how do you think about improving the client experience here? And I think for me, you've got three very distinct client demographics here that you're selling into. How does this look better using ClearDraft than the old way of doing it?
David (22:57)
Well, first of all, we will be able to provide data that nobody's ever provided before. I'll even be able to tell you which of your journalists are taking risks that they shouldn't be taking. Or I'll be able to provide targeted training. If I see a journalist for a particular client who's had four or five privacy issues in the space of six weeks, I will be able to contact the head of legal and go, I think this journalist needs some privacy training.
We've built a journalists' group who are testing it for us, and they are feeding back on how they interact with the product. The reporting process — there's a chat function in the article, with all the issues being flagged. So you click on a line, you click on a red line or a yellow line — it's red for defamation, blue for contempt, and yellow for privacy. You click on it, you have a whole explanation. You have a place where the lawyer and the journalist can interact. You have sources. It'll search the web and check on sources to see whether the journalist is on the right track, or anything peripheral that the lawyer might need to make the call. And then you just press your button, it goes into their inbox, your report's ready, and then they can start to interact on it.
I think this is because I've been in-house for so many years — there are no particularly great systems in any company. It's mostly emails to the lawyer. Here's a PDF, here's a Google Doc, will you look at it? I think at the very least, even if this wasn't AI, it's a pretty cool workflow product, in that we're centralising all the copy, we're centralising the lawyer's remarks, we're centralising where the journalists go to, and we're centralising where the reports come from.
Alex (24:50)
The way I hear what you've just described there is that you're providing a whole bunch of value that isn't just the legal work. You're leveraging all that information that you're capturing to provide more value to your clients in ways that just isn't possible unless you have harnessed the technology in the way that you're describing.
Alex (25:17)
And I can see how that really applies in the enterprise. And I would imagine for your direct channel, for the smaller guys that are producing content, the fact that you exist is where you're providing value, right?
David (25:38)
100%. 100%. And it's not just the incredible journalists on Substack, but it's just the people who want to tell their story and they want to do it through podcasts, or they want to do it through books, or they want to do it through blogs — blogs being Substack, showing my age there. But they can now do that with a feeling of safety.
Alex (26:01)
Yeah. Or at least understanding the risk they're taking.
Alex (26:04)
So let's change gears a little bit here. Let's talk some numbers. And, you know, without revealing your secret sauce and asking you to open your books — what does it actually look like now to clear a piece of content? What does it cost you?
David (26:25)
It depends what format we're on. But if we take pro as an example, lawyers are still expensive and lawyers still need to be paid. So lawyers are still making the same. Books are another way to look at it. Previously it would take a lawyer a week to do a book — or 20 hours to do a book. In that same time, we can now do 20 books.
Alex (26:54)
They don't have to read the book.
David (26:56)
Yeah. So the scale's bigger. So it's our job to scale in order to make the business work. Thankfully, I think we've found a product that's easy to scale and that the market will like. It's certainly — we have customers coming to us now pre-launch. There have been some rooms that are not so welcoming, mainly lawyers, but the majority have been very welcoming when we sit down and we say, we just want you to be efficient and we just want you to stop reading stuff you don't have to read. But that's how we make our money: instead of charging a large amount of money for one book, we have one lawyer doing 20.
Alex (27:40)
Amazing. And in terms of — you've raised some capital here to build the business. This feels like quite a niche sector, and maybe not an obvious venture-scale opportunity. But maybe I'm looking at it wrong.
David (27:55)
No, I think when we first met — Alex and I, my co-founder — we sort of thought we would wave around town and talk to VCs and everyone would fall at our feet. And I just don't think we realised the way in which VCs work. It doesn't make sense to people who run small to medium businesses how VCs work. It looks to me, and it still does to this day, like they want to just throw money away. And they're willing to throw money away on the basis of one unicorn, right?
So we quickly realised our TAM — for me, our TAM is an insane amount of money. To them it was nothing. And so we very quickly realised we were in the wrong rooms. So then we started to look at strategic investors, angel investors. And strategic for us are very, very important. So the company that invested in our seed round — we got a contract out of that as well. So not only do we get investment, but we also build into their systems. So, strategic. And for the audiovisual version of the product as well, we're also very keen on having investors from the TV production world.
Alex (29:10)
And so what are you most excited about in what you're building here? What is motivating you to push forward with this? Where are you most excited, and where are you taking this? Where are you going to be in five years? What is this going to look like?
David (29:30)
See, the thing is, every time I sort of try to describe where I'll be, there's a shift. The one thing I'd say about founding has been: if you zoom out, or if you have a moment to zoom out, you can see actually progress is being made. If you're living by the hour, I can't describe it. I see all these people on podcasts talking about how amazing it is. From minute to minute, it's just an absolute mess, and you're cleaning up and you're fixing. But then you stop and you go, I can't believe where we've got to.
And so for us, we have a real drive to bring this product to customers. We are from the industry. Maybe I'll be candid about this — I've always known we were an expensive problem as a lawyer. Once clients know you, they come to you willingly, but clients were always sort of begrudgingly having to use the lawyer. And so maybe it's just a desperate desire to be liked, that I create a product where we can take it to people and say, we've fixed your problem, and we're doing it for a very reasonable rate, and you can do it at a scale that you've never been able to do it before, so you can go and do the cool stuff.
And so we're going into the US, we're building an audiovisual version, we're going into Europe, we're going into Canada and Australia. And it's just a matter of time and money, really. That's all that's stopping us.
Alex (31:12)
And you mentioned earlier, when we were just catching up before this, that you've already hit some decent revenue milestones. Where do you see the most value, and where is your focus over the next 12 to 18 months in terms of the different segments, the different geographies? How are you going to grow this business?
David (31:39)
So the enterprise product is our main focus — enterprise and pro. Our main focus is the UK. Alex and I are both UK lawyers and this felt like the good place to start. The US — we already have paralegals in place from very good universities in the US, and we're building out the RAG and we're building out the product. So we see a US launch by Q1 next year, if not earlier.
We've been out to the US a couple of times. There are clients who've said to us, we will buy when it's ready. There are clients who are even talking about buying the UK version just because it does flag issues in their content. And so the real focus will be launching the product, making sure it's fantastic for everybody, and selling enterprise and pro, and then getting the direct to market as soon as possible in as many jurisdictions as possible.
Alex (32:43)
Okay. So at the moment the product isn't live, it's being used in your pro version.
David (32:52)
It's being tested in the newspaper, and it's being used in our pro, and we're blind testing at the same time.
Alex (33:01)
Yeah. But given you only launched this — how long ago?
David (33:05)
January is when I left Netflix to start.
Alex (33:10)
So you've already, like I said earlier — and I don't know whether you're willing to share this or not — achieved some significant revenue milestones in a very short space of time.
David (33:21)
Yeah. One of the interesting things is we've been lucky enough for our clients to agree not only to let us legal their work, which we can make revenue from, but also train the product on our comments. So for me it's been an ideal way of getting paid to train our product while providing service as well. And then all of those clients post-launch will move onto the new model, onto pro, and their costs will come down. So our pitch has been: we will do it for human rates now, and once the product's launched your rates will come down.
Alex (33:53)
I think one of the amazing things about what you've done, David, is that in a very short space of time you've done a whole bunch of things. You've launched a law firm. You've won a bunch of clients. You've built a technology platform around it, which you're just about to launch. You've raised capital to do all of these things. That is a lot. So hats off to you.
What's been some of the learnings from all of that? And if somebody is thinking about applying the model that you've applied in the content clearance space into their own areas of law, what's the advice that you've got for them from what you've learned?
David (34:35)
I mean, the first thing I should say is there's a founding team of five of us, which lightens the load. So Alex Wade and I are the lawyers, and we have a CTO, CFO and a chief product officer with lots of experience. So the development side of all the work, it's been a dream. Alex is selling the product and maintaining relationships and sourcing staff, and he's been fantastic as well. So a lot of the product and company side is falling to me and the CFO.
So it's been hard work. But it's this thing where, if you zoom out, incredible progress; day to day it just doesn't feel like that. And I think, if you were going to ask me what I would advise people — it's been great. It's better than working. But it's a slog. I promise myself that if this business is ever successful, I will not go on podcasts and say how great it is to be a founder. It's a real slog. But it's a hell of a fun challenge.
Alex (35:57)
Yeah. What would you say has been the hardest bit?
David (36:04)
It's just a lot, you know. There's just new things. I laughed a lot at a meme the other day where there's this founder who's been given a million dollars and then realises they have to build enterprise software that matches the security levels that their enterprise clients want. Even that — they're new worlds, and you're like, how do you do this, and when do you do this, and how much does that cost, and I can't believe that cost that much. I wouldn't say founding is not one hard thing — it's 500 moderately hard things.
Alex (36:37)
And 500 moderately hard things that perhaps you've not done before.
David (36:45)
And, you know, I founded Reviewed & Cleared and ran it to a reasonable size. But it's nothing like this.
Alex (36:57)
Yeah. And you've got to learn everything new. Particularly when you're doing something that might be in the same space that you've known all of your career, but now you're just doing it in a completely new and innovative way. And so understanding how the tech integrates with that, understanding what the commercial model is behind it, what your financial projections are, how you run this business, all the different people that you need to be able to run this business that aren't the same as running a traditional law firm. And then how to take all of this to market and partner with whoever it is that you happen to be partnering with, for looking at distribution channels in the publishing sector, etc. I imagine it's all very new, and whilst it's challenging, also very exciting.
David (37:54)
Yeah. Also to add to the mix, my wife's chief of staff, and so that's a new development to our relationship. But even the fact that she's doing that takes so much off my plate and Alex's plate. And it's just been finding — luckily, finding people who are really good at those things, and sort of trying to prioritise what you're working on as well.
Alex (38:20)
Yeah. Cool. Well, David, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I love what you're doing and I love how hyper-niche it is. I think if you deliver on what you've said you're building, you might not be a unicorn, but I think you're building a very, very exciting and scalable business that's going to be extremely valuable for anyone that is producing content. And if we think about that as the total addressable market of what you're doing — well, maybe it is a unicorn. Who knows? Time will tell.
David (39:10)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Look, I've also appreciated getting — this legal tech community is really very nice to each other, and the fact that you opened your doors to me and talked to me when I first contacted you and said I had no idea what I'm doing. Just the fact that you guys met with me and talked to me — and there's lots of people like that. And maybe another thing is to say I'm trying to pay that back, and I think everybody who comes into this world should also try and pay that back. It's been a real help.
Alex (39:38)
Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you, buddy, for your kind words. For anyone that's listening who wants to find out a bit more about what you're doing, it's cleardraft.com, right?
David (39:49)
That's right.
Alex (39:50)
And you're pretty easy to find on LinkedIn — David Burgess, search for you. Great, David. Thank you again. That is Re-Leveraged.
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