Mishin: Need to rethink law firm model
A US company that last week announced a $60m Series A fund-raise is set to bring the model of a law firm backed by its AI system to England and Wales, Legal Futures can reveal.
The backing of investors including Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Quiet Capital values Manifest OS at $750m.
Manifest OS currently focuses on business immigration work and its AI-native software operates through Manifest Law, an alternative business structure (ABS) licensed in Arizona, the only US state to have changed its rules to allow ABSs.
Founder Dan Mishin told Legal Futures that both the demand among US clients for global immigration support and the established ABS regime made England and Wales an obvious location to expand internationally, with work going on to apply for an ABS licence and open this year.
He said the “central thesis” of the business was that lawyers spend too much time on non-legal tasks.
Manifest Law is essentially a platform akin to the likes of Keystone Law that allows practitioners to build their own law firms under a common brand, with access to the technology and a centralised back office.
The software is an end-to-end solution for client communications, legal research, document drafting, billing and reporting.
Manifest openly revolts against hourly billing and lawyers charge either fixed fees or on outcomes-based terms.
Mr Mishin, who is based in New York, is a serial entrepreneur who set up Manifest OS in response to his poor experience, as a Ukrainian, of using a lawyer to navigate the US immigration system.
He blames the billable hour for tying lawyers’ economics to time spent rather than outcomes delivered.
“To truly shift the market to outcomes-based pricing and to democratise access to high-quality legal services for clients, we needed to rethink the entire business model of a law firm from the ground up,” he said.
“We made the hard choice to not sell our AI software to existing law firms who are often beholden to billing customers more hours as a means to better compensation.
“Instead, we partner with forward-thinking lawyers to help them become market leaders in their respective practice areas, with AI at their core from day zero.”
In its first 18 months, more than 100 immigration lawyers have joined the platform – out of 5,000 who applied – and between them conducted over 3,000 client engagements. Manifest claims a visa approval rate of 15% higher than the national average and client response times three times faster than traditional firms.
Clients have real-time access to all their legal matters through a portal, including timelines, activity logs, defined milestones, document status and revision histories, as well as direct communication with their lawyers.
Mr Mishin stressed that Manifest was interested in lawyers who wanted to grow their practices, employing other lawyers as they did so, rather than sole practitioners.
“We prefer to power law firms that can scale,” he explained. “In five years, I would hope Manifest OS would power 100-200 law firms that will then employ thousands of lawyers.”
Marketing is centralised. Client can select specific lawyers and, where they do not, there is an internal marketplace where firms operating under the Manifest brand can review available assignments.
Manifest also helps identify the lawyers suited for a client’s matter. The firm said it encouraged lawyers to collaborate, rather than compete, with each other.
Mr Mishin said he had a list of other practice areas he wanted to expand into but was not making it public.
Manifest investor David Schellhase, former general counsel at Salesforce, Groupon and Slack, commented: “I’ve spent my career as a general counsel for some of the largest tech companies in the world and seen firsthand how the billable hour model creates friction on both sides of the table.
“Companies want fee transparency, predictability, and speed. Lawyers want to focus on delivering results, not justifying billable hours. Manifest OS’s model and use of advanced technology align those interests in a way the traditional system simply doesn’t.”