Meet the Startup Building the Matter Management Layer Legal AI Forgot About

I keep hearing about legal AI tools that do the work better.

What I haven’t heard, until now, is anyone building the tool that remembers what the work is actually for.

In this episode I chat with Dillon Hirandiran, founder and CEO of Counsel (gc.inc)

Dillon previously worked in investment banking, then built his first startup during Covid. The experience of navigating legal work as a founder - seed rounds, Delaware flips, cap tables - is what first drew him to the problem Counsel is now solving.

Counsel is an autonomous matter management system for law firms - reading every email, every message, and maintaining a persistent context layer across everything a firm has going on.

We discussed:

→ Why the hardest problem in legal AI has never really been document generation, but instead it’s CONTEXT retention across matters.

→ Why clients can’t always evaluate the quality of legal work, only its responsiveness

→ What a “10x attorney” actually looks like when AI handles the document layer, and why being a workhorse is the worst thing a junior lawyer can be right now

→ Why the biggest risk to Big Law isn’t pricing pressure from in-house or AI, but is actually their own talent leaving.

Want to sponsor or feature on the Best Practice Podcast? Email [email protected]

Get full access to Best Practice at bestpracticeai.substack.com/subscribe