A pair of Portland attorneys, familiar faces with the local tech ecosystem, are launching a new law firm that takes their experience in the tech world and applies it to a practice built from the ground up.
Macro Law Group's founders are attorneys Bonnie Page and Bill Pierznik. Both have experience working within tech companies as in-house counsel as both chief legal officers and general counsel.
Page’s career includes Webtrends, Smarsh, PK and Brandlive. In 2020, she launched her own practice Clementine Legal. Pierznik’s career includes Jive Software, Jama Software and Act-On Software. He also had stints with Stoel Rives and founded the firm Alto Law Group.
“We got to talking about what it would look like to spin up a modern law firm,” said Pierznik, noting that modern software tools and the evolution of AI offer interesting new ways to serve clients and modernize the business model of a law firm.
“Both of us have been in-house and have 30+ years of experience seeing how good technology companies work internally,” he said. “How a really well-run engineering team can pivot and put out fires and (stay on track). What if we take those concepts and apply them to legal services. There is no customer success or account management (in law), things tech companies have evolved. Law firms are still operating the way they did in 2002.”
The pair see a need in the market for fast high quality legal service for businesses. They intend to build the practice with technology tools as the backbone that can automate where needed and create new workflows.
By building something new, Macro doesn’t have to deal with adding new tools to old, legacy systems that are hard to change.
“We are a tech-enabled service provider,” said Page. “There are legal tech companies and legal service providers. We are in the middle. We aren’t legal tech or matching making (to those that provide services), we own the deliverables and the relationship and the outcomes.”
The two, which started talking about working together earlier this year and launched in February, count more than a dozen clients already on the books.
Target clients run from pre-revenue startups to $300 million in revenue. For smaller companies, they offer services in incorporation, financing, contracting and privacy issues. As clients get bigger the offerings change form being outside general counsel to supporting in-house general counsel, Page said.
The firm expects to innovate with its own business model. They are starting with the traditional billable hours model but are keen to shift to something more like subscription or flat fee structure.
The format can help with predictability on both sides: Startup clients get predictable costs while Macro gets predictable revenue.
The firm is launching as a team of two but expects to bring on more help as needed. The first big position they are looking to fill is a fractional CTO, said Pierznik.
