This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristina Subbotina, the founder and CEO of Lexsy, an AI-powered law firm for startups. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I never planned to start a law firm. I’d been a corporate startup lawyer for almost a decade. When I left my last job at Cooley, a Big Law firm, I decided I wanted to join a VC fund as an investor.
To help attract potential portfolio companies, I started sharing legal tips for startups on social media. It worked, but all of the founders who reached out to me wanted legal support, not an investor. Some even started offering equity in addition to cash for my services.
A couple of mentors told me that this is clearly a real problem in the market. They said to stop chasing what you think will be successful, and respond to what the world needs from you. So I started my own law firm for startups called Lawlace, which I grew to over $1.3 million in revenue in two years. Now, I’m growing it into something even bigger by productizing my expertise.
I grew my audience by going against traditional advice
The secret sauce for the law firm’s growth was social media. In Big Law, there was a stigma around social media — the idea of a top-notch lawyer dancing on TikTok was cringe.
But I kept operating from two foundational principles: meet people where they are and provide value. I started telling real legal horror stories with short videos — sometimes dancing, sometimes with comedy — because the entertaining format makes founders stop scrolling long enough to recognize a problem they’re facing. They’ll watch a 20-second story and realize, “Wait, we never signed IP assignments,” or “We don’t have vesting,” or “Did we file an 83(b) on time?”
Those stories went viral. The videos received over 5 million monthly views, and Mark Cuban reposted my content. Instead of legal knowledge living only inside partner meetings, it reached founders where they already give their attention. People watched my videos and avoided costly legal mistakes before they could afford me, which eventually turned them into clients.
Law is a relationship of trust, and content is a way to build trust at scale. That content is an evergreen investment that brings me new clients even when I’m not trying to acquire them.
I expanded my business by building software instead of a service
Like many service-based founders, I found scaling my business challenging. Legal work used to live only in lawyers’ heads: manual, slow, and impossible to scale.
I never wanted to build a traditional law firm, so I started automating workflows right away. By late 2025, it was clear AI agents could do genuinely complex work — essentially the job of a junior associate. So I started building a new iteration of my business: Lexsy, an AI-powered legal operating system for companies.
Our clients buy a subscription and run their entire legal life on the platform. It runs on autopilot with a human lawyer in the loop, so founders have less friction. Everything done on the platform is protected by attorney-client privilege.
We’re an AI-native company, which means we have an army of AI agents that take a first stab at everything while senior team members set strategy and review. That’s how we grow fast without adding head count. Our human team consists of five people — me, a head of product and operations, and three software engineers — plus a handful of part-time support for the podcast, AI architecture, and social media.
I raised money with specific goals
Last year, I closed a small fundraising round of $650,000, which is nothing by Silicon Valley standards. We had revenue and were profitable, so I was intentionally picky about my fundraising and sought the money for very specific reasons.
First of all, I wanted enough money to stop sales for six months so that I could build Lexsy. I had already bootstrapped and tested the platform before I started raising — I needed enough funding to build the platform and agents, and to hire the team.
Also, if an investor couldn’t help the business in other ways, such as media support or customer introductions, I didn’t take their money.
This small raise allowed me to take a risk and build the productized version of my business without worrying about payroll for a few months. It could have failed. Instead, we came out of stealth in June 2026 — going from quietly building behind the scenes to launching in public — with $372,000 in annual recurring revenue from clients who migrated from the law firm, word-of-mouth growth, and my social following.
My advice for service-business owners: Productize yourself. Keep the human touch for what matters, but automate execution. You don’t have to be technical, and you don’t have to raise venture money — you just have to provide value. That part never changes.
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