Celebrating Tech Trailblazers for Women's History Month - Edition 2 with Carol-Lynn Grow
Published Mar 16 2023 11:48 AM 2,166 Views
Microsoft

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As part of the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we’re continuing to highlight women-owned businesses, their solutions, and their journeys growing their business on the marketplace during each week of Women’s History Month in March. In our second edition of the series, Microsoft’s @Yvonne Muench  sits down with LawToolBox’s Carol-Lynn Grow to discuss the story behind the first online matter management system in the legal space, her experience with building for the commercial marketplace, and reflections on Women’s History Month.

 

About Yvonne: Yvonne is a Senior Director who runs global programs to help ISVs build, publish and grow sales of their applications on the Microsoft Cloud. She’s worked in a variety of roles at Microsoft, across Engineering, Licensing, Developer Evangelism and Cloud Marketing, always engaging with partners in each role.

 

About Carol-Lynn: Carol is Co-Founder and COO at LawToolBox, an award winning legal SaaS provider that transforms Teams, Outlook and SharePoint into a collaboration suite for lawyers that is now available on marketplace. Prior to joining LawToolBox in 2001, Carol Lynn worked at IBM in Tokyo and Singapore managing Asia-Pacific distribution and started her career in Tokyo as the first western hire at Show Aluminum in Tokyo Japan.

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[YM] Each Women’s History Month for me is a time to reflect and appreciate. I enjoy learning a bit more about women path breakers that opened doors to the opportunities I’ve enjoyed. I also reflect on the present, and enjoy seeing women breaking new ground every year. My personal favorite this year lies outside of Microsoft. I started my career as an Officer in the Navy, so the first ever all-female crew of US Navy pilots that conducted the pre-game flyover at the Superbowl brought a smile to my face that lasted days. I also like to participate every year in Women’s History month at Microsoft. So I’m delighted to take part in this series of interviews focused on women leaders in our ISV community.

 

[YM]: Tell us a little bit about your time at LawToolBox. What inspired you to join? 

 

[CG]: I spent 7 years at IBM managing a Global team based out of Singapore and Tokyo and was an IBM executive fast track.  In the late 1990’s when the internet was taking off,I was inspired by the idea of working at a startup with my husband in a company focused on making the practice of law more efficient and leveling the playing field between solo attorneys and litigators at large corporations. 

At the time, we didn’t even know what to call a product on the internet, and we called what is now referred to as a SaaS solution by many names - for example “cyber” solution, or a “web” application.  In 1998 we filed for a patent on the business process, which wasn’t granted for several years because of the novelty of this class of patents. We were one of the first online matter management system in the world and were first in the legal space.


The early years were very exciting years. We had clients giving us great quotes like “you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread” and “you don’t sell a solution, you sell peace of mind”.  It was very rewarding to go to events and have attorneys literally hug us. One law firm had literally lost all of their calendar data, and the managing partner came up to me with tears in his eyes explaining how he was able to restore ALL of the deadlines on ALL of their matters from LawToolBox.

The downturns in 2003 and 2008 hit everyone hard, and during those rough times, we let many law firms use our product for free so they could stay in business.  I think because we always put our clients first, we’ve had some clients using our cloud-based system for almost 25 years. 

When the pandemic hit, everyone in our company was already using Microsoft Teams, so we all just grabbed our computers and went home for a year or two.  We helped our clients on the journey to figure out how to work remotely using Microsoft Teams, and we again offered deals to firms that were struggling often letting them use our product at no cost while they got back up on their feet.

 

[YM]: Can you tell us a little bit about LawToolBox? What is the app, and why was it built? 

 

[CG]: At the core of our solution is a deadline calculator, where litigation attorneys can  calculate hundreds of deadlines by entering a few “trigger dates” like the “date of trial.”  Law firms using LawToolBox qualify for a discount on their insurance malpractice premium that more than offsets the entire cost of using LawToolBox.  Legalprofessionals can calculate in seconds deadlines that would take them hours to do by hand.  Multiply that time savings by hundreds of matters, and the law firm saves significantly. 

Our vision and mission has always been to help good attorneys be great attorneys, to inspire creativity and passion in representing clients, to deliver the best and easiest to use technology to automate legal procedures for modern law practices, and to give legal professionals every tool they need to win their legal matters one deadline at a time.

We wanted to solve attorneys’ calendaring and collaboration needs but also wanted to meet lawyers where they already work. So when we saw Office 365 around 2012, we just knew that this solution was going to eventually become the market leader again.  We made a huge pivot and shifted resources and our roadmap to build around and amplify Office 365. 

We submitted our first Outlook add-in in 2013 and were one of the first ten add-ins  in the Office store (which would later be called AppSource), Since 2013, we’ve been going 500 miles an hour building applications to amplify Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365) for lawyers. 

Because we had made an early pivot to building an add-in for Outlook, Microsoft worked with us on many of its new initiatives.  We worked directly with product managers across Exchange, Outlook, Groups, Teams, Graph, and SharePoint who were all generous in allowing us to request features and functions we needed in their various products to make our integration work smoothly.  For example, when Microsoft Teams was still in development, Microsoft flew us out to Redmond and worked with us to build our first Teams app.  Because of the support from the great Microsoft developers we worked with, we were able to build the bones for what has become an amazing and comprehensive Teams application for legal.

We expanded our target market from litigators to all different types of legal professionals, and we focused on expanding to cover thousands of civil courts, administrative courts and regulatory agencies in the US and countries around the world. LawToolBox is a matter management platform built on top of M365 and  Teams,and we are constantly reinventing our solution to amplify assets in M365 that we think lawyers could benefit from.  Because our product lives within the M365 platform, LawToolBox inherits Microsoft 365's security, data governance and records retention policy for free.

 

[YM]: Can you talk about your experience in building an app for the commercial marketplace? How has Microsoft supported you along your journey?

 

[CG]: Because we had tied our fortune to M365 at an early stage, when Microsoft was developing new solutions and features, they often asked us if we wanted to participate in these new initiatives at an early or pilot stage.  We were approached many years ago about being an early participant in the first version of the Microsoft commercial marketplace, and as.  part of our onboarding, LawToolBox was the second product in the world to implement SSO with Open ID for Office 365.

We have achieved many milestones with Microsoft: creating a ubiquitous experience between Outlook, Microsoft Teams, browsers, and mobile devices; becoming co-sell ready;
creating one of the first transactable SaaS offers in the commercial marketplace where clients could buy LawToolBox on Microsoft paper; and, being one of the first third party apps that M365 admins could buy from inside their admin portal, to name a few. LawToolBox was also one of the first third party solutions to have an offer that could count towards a customer’s Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC).


Transacting through the Microsoft commercial marketplace has opened doors with many Microsoft partners, too.  LawToolBox partnered with trusted technology advisors such as Pax8 and TD Synnex by creating private offers for them to sell SaaS offers like ours and receive a margin. Just two months into partnering with Pax8 and embracing the commercial marketplace, LawToolBox has seen a 105 percent increase in licenses transacted through the marketplace.  And now we have recently achieved the status within the Microsoft ecosystem of top tier partner which has opened some amazing benefits, doors and opportunities for us.

Because we have committed to the Microsoft ecosystem in such a big way, Microsoft has supported us and opened the door for us to sit at the enterprise table with all of the most amazing companies and law firms in the world.

Our Microsoft relationship has allowed LawToolBox to sell in three new ways:  (1) through 90k+ distributors and Microsoft Partners through the Microsoft Partner Center CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) portal where partners can bundle in their own managed services and offers with ours, (2) co-selling with hundreds of Microsoft inside salespeople, and (3) direct from Microsoft Teams Store and AppSource to law firms and legal departments. Selling though the Microsoft commercial marketplace has been a very important channel for our company.

But aside from all the awards and recognition, Microsoft has supported us in ways we never expected.  They have involved us in partner groups and meetings and helped us create solid foundation for our solution to serve legal organizations - all the way from solo law firms up to the largest enterprise customers and firms in the world. .  And continuing this journey together, LawToolBox is excited to join Microsoft in introducing AI into real world activities such as enhanced usage of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Word, and also using AI to determine and manage legal deadlines.

 

[YM]: What does Women’s History Month mean to you? 

 

[CG]: Women’s History Month is a time for women and diverse communities recommit to participating in the technology roadmap discussions for their organizations, schools, and communities.  I’m passionate about helping women who may not be full-on coders recognize the importance finding their seat at the table where technology discussions are had and decisions are made.  As our children and their children navigate through implications of things like ChatGPT, data privacy and social media, we can’t underestimate the impact technology and innovation have on our personal and professional lives.

 

[YM]: How does Microsoft shine when supporting ISVs?

 

[CG]: Microsoft provides a platforms like Azure and Microsoft 365 for companies like ours to build on and thrive. The Microsoft commercial marketplace extends our sales force by 90K + Microsoft Partners. We, and our clients, benefit from a level of security that we could never build on our own with peace of mind for us, and for our customers.

Our customers tell us how much easier and faster it is to get approval knowing that they can skip the PO process and purchase and manage their LawToolBox licenses through Microsoft in the same way they manage their Microsft 365 licenses.

Another major growth opportunity for us is in the enterprise space where our existing and new customers can apply Microsoft Azure Credits (MACC) on their Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EAs) toward their LawToolBox SaaS Subscriptions. We think this is a game changer! 

 

[YM]: What is the best piece of advice you would give to women who are trying to grow their careers in the technology industry? 

 

[CG]: Find, use, and amplify your technology voice. Inspire friends and colleagues to do the same. Go to tech events, experiment with new apps, share your findings with friends. Reach beyond your comfort zone and community. Share your passion with others. Create a community, help others and ask for help, let go of perfection, and be authentic.

 

[YM]: What inspiring women leaders do you look up to? 


[CG]: Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of ALM's Law Technology News for 17 years in New York, helped me prepare for my first legal conference at LegalTech New York in 2014.  She gave me pointers on what to say and not say when speaking with the press and saved a seat for me at a press conference.

Gavriella Schuster, C-level Microsoft executive for 30 years, inspired me to find, use, and amplify my voice. At the Microsoft PAC (Partner Advisory Council) keynote, she announced Microsoft Teams as a new place business professionals could get their work done and spent the next 5-minutes describing how LawToolBox creates a suite for Lawyers in Microsoft Teams.

Susan Decker, president of Yahoo in 2007/2008, encouraged me not to be superwoman but instead build a support network to help me juggle homework at night, kid carpools, and pulling off strategic partnerships.

The common theme was “if you want to go fast, go alone - and if you want to go far, go with a team”. 

 

[YM] How has Microsoft supported you as a woman-led organization? 

 

[CG]: This year, the Microsoft commercial marketplace incorporated a badge for third party apps identifying diversity-led organizations.

 

Identifying as a diversity-owned company acknowledges the LawToolBox commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. This commitment to diversity aligns with the values of many customers, partners, and team members.  It also provides LawToolBox with a competitive edge in the marketplace, as it empowers us to broaden our vision and approach business with an open mind. Additionally, by publicly identifying as a diversity-owned company, LawToolBox can help promote and amplify the voices of underrepresented communities, and support broader efforts to increase diversity and equity across the industry

 

[YM] What women-led initiatives have you taken part in in the past?  

 

[CG]: In February 2017, I was invited by Microsoft to participate in a National Entrepreneurship Week event. In addition to showcasing great businesses and entrepreneurial programs, the event underscored the role of government in supporting small businesses. At the event, I also heard about Voices for Innovation (VFI.org) and met the program’s director, Jonathan Friebert, who encouraged me to get involved with VFI and later join a small group of tech business leaders who attended a CEO Listening Session in the West Wing of the White House.

        

With the help of my Denver WIT (Women In Technology) network, we joined forces to launch the first parent-led coding club at my ten year old's elementary school.

 

[YM] What is something that excites you about the future of technology?

 

[CG]: When I look ahead 2 months and 6 months and imagine how our customers will leverage AI across Microsoft, access to justice will have met an unprecedented inflection point in world history. And when you combine efficiencies gained, balanced with access to the underlying source of AI content (like ChatGPT), it’s an unbeatable recipe for success for tech-forward attorneys.

 

[YM] What could companies be doing better to develop and support women leaders? 

 

[CG]: I’ve attended too many conference and industry events where was one of the only (or the only) woman in the room.  Companies should encourage women to raise their hand to participate in technology discussions and decisions, invest in women’s attendance at technology conferences and industry associations, and encourage participation in programs to beta test new tools. I can’t think of a better time to encourage women to gain experience using AI so they can participate in and lead AI roadmap and governance conversations in their organization, industry groups, and communities.

 

[YM]: What is something you wish you would have known early in your career? 

 

[CG]:I wish I had sought mentors earlier in my career. The doors that we need to walk through are generally not visible.

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Have questions for @Carol-Lynn Grow? Comment below to continue the conversation!

 

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