"Want to make a big impact as a vendor in legaltech? Think small. Look relentlessly for real lawyer and legal professional pain points and remove them."
— Stephen Embry
What a great quote at the end of Embry’s LegalWeek 2025 wrap-up in TechLaw Crossroads. It really spoke to me, with my career in legaltech startups enmeshed in the Lean Startup philosophy. Steve Blank, father of the Lean Startup movement, insists: “There are no facts inside the building, so get outside.” In other words, go find the pain points. That’s exactly what we did at nQ Zebraworks.
Step 1: Get Out of the Building
Dreaming up big ideas in the boardroom based on assumptions rarely works. Instead, Ken and I spent time with our firms, finding the pain points causing problems in law firm operations.
Having previously built ProLaw and been part of Elite, we were looking for ways that we could enhance financial management, an area we know well.
We didn’t start with software—we started with a simple question:
“What are the biggest challenges in your billing workflow?”
We got a lot of responses to that one. It quickly led to all kinds of follow-up:
- What is taking up the time of your billing and collection professionals?
- How are you delivering bills to clients?
- How do track the status of invoices, matters and clients in A/R?
- How do you send A/R follow-up?
- How are attorneys involved in this process?
- How do you get paid?
Step 2: Validate the Pain
Steve Blank teaches that startup success lies in solving a validated, painful problem. We spoke with dozens of law firm CFOs, billing managers, and partners. What we found were consistent, unaddressed pain points hiding in plain sight: the workflow between finalizing bills and getting paid was broken.
That gap is where we focused.
Step 3: Build for the Job to Be Done
Instead of another billing system, we built tools that work with the systems firms already use—solving the specific pain from invoice to cash:- BillingQ Invoice-to-Cash: Automated workflows for delivering bills and A/R notices with preferences by attorney, client and matter
- PayQ Online Payments: Client portal for a superior payment experience
- Real-time transparency: accounting and attorneys knowing exactly where things stand
The Big Win: Found Money
By focusing on these real world problems and validating relentlessly, it empowers our clients to:
- Cut 5-7 days from every billing cycle
- Improve collection time by 10-20 days
- Increase realization rate by 100 to 300 basis points
- Free up staff to focus on higher-value work
- Unlock hundreds of thousands to millions in Found Money
