Ixio Corporation
10420 NE 37th Circle
Building Five
Kirkland, WA 98033
United States
web site
Year Founded: 2001
# of Employees: 10
Company Type: Privately Owned
Over three years ago a lawyer, Craig Kobayashi, was thinking about the technological problems plaguing small businesses, and in particular how technology wasn't being fully utilized in smaller law firm practices. Meanwhile, a computer scientist and former Microsoft technologist, Martin Pagel, began working with a software engineer, Troy Schauls, to define a service oriented architecture for an essential building block of web services-a platform called the "Smart Data Machine." Those three met together with Patrick Steele, a 25 year veteran of the information technology industry, to create Ixio Corporation, whose purpose is to bring simple and affordable technology to any business, large or small.
To showcase the Smart Data Machine, Ixio's founders addressed a complex problem: how can technology, particularly the Smart Data Machine, improve the practice of law? From his years of legal experience and learning from clients, Craig identified the use of technology to promote sharing of legal know-how as an avenue to confront the complex problem head-on. Ixio's founders discovered that the Smart Data Machine could provide the critical means to better share legal know-how. Shortly thereafter, they met Network Tool & Die's Gregory Miller, another lawyer and technologist working in venture capital. Gregory had built the first law firm web development company, Inherent.com in the early 1990s.
The more they talked, the more they realized that TCP/IP networks (what the Internet is built on) would have an essential role in delivering complex computing capability in situations where no infrastructure to support enterprise software was available. In fact, that's the motivation behind web services. And the legal market was ripe for this shift to "on demand computing" because the majority of lawyers are in small practices and unable to enjoy the benefits of larger-scale information technology.
Finally, Craig and Gregory compared notes and recognized that three problems plaguing the practice of law were all actually symptoms of a single trouble spot.
These symptoms are well understood by anyone managing a law practice today. Clients are increasingly dissatisfied with their lawyers. More lawyers are leaving the practice due to burnout. Practice inefficiencies and dwindling work create financial pressures; in some cases bankrupting firms with generations of history. All these problems point to a single source: an inefficient process for producing the documents that result from the practice of law.
That long-standing process is all too familiar. Too much time is spent replicating and cleaning up a new draft based on a copy of a previous work, as well as chasing down the knowledge necessary to complete the assignment, whether from file notes, practice guides, or quite often-fellow lawyers. Ixio's founders recognized that by focusing on this inefficient process of document drafting, they could help lawyers reclaim their time, sanity, and profitability. With Craig's experience as a lawyer, and with input on best practices and processes in document drafting from top attorneys around the world, Ixio became the first to introduce smart document drafting as an on-demand Internet service.
The problems with traditional means of document drafting are nearly self-evident, and a handful of software vendors have tried to answer them. Ixio is the first, however, to provide a simple, scalable solution-QShift-that can be returning benefits, and paying for itself, within the first hour of use.
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