Francisco de Abreu Duarte LLM ’18, CEO, The Legal Place
Francisco de Abreu Duarte is the CEO and founder of The Legal Place, a platform dedicated to legal training using artificial intelligence. He pursued a PhD at the European University Institute after graduating from NYU Law, where he developed his passion for the intersection of law and technology. His legal education journey inspired him to innovate within the legal space. Read more below.
What made you decide to pursue a career in entrepreneurship/venture capital/startups after NYU Law?
I have always been passionate about legal education and wanted to pursue a PhD. When I graduated from my PhD program in Florence, at the European University Institute, I decided I could try and create a platform to expand legal education using AI. Ultimately, what made me pursue this path was the desire to teach more broadly and allow more students to access legal education.
How did NYU Law prepare you for this career?
NYU was actually the moment in which I started thinking about law and tech, so in a way, it ignited all of this. Learning from Joseph Weiler [University Professor and Joseph Straus Professor of Law] or Benedict Kingsbury [Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law] spurred a great interest in considering legal studies as an essential companion to technology and innovation. I jumped from NYU to the EUI to pursue a PhD precisely on Online Speech and Education, and from there I launched The Legal Place. To some extent, NYU was really the beginning of it all.
Why do you think lawyers find success in this career path?
I think lawyers often fear this path. Unlike business schools, many law schools see the legal profession as conservative and stable, and they deem those characteristics as a token of respect for the profession. I strongly disagree with this. Legal innovation, especially in today's AI-dominated landscape, is one of the areas strong enough to launch a business in.
Lawyers actually do very well once they venture because of the discipline and hard-working culture we impose on every law graduate. Lawyers will likely work harder, and push more than most average business or management students.
What was the biggest challenge you faced as a lawyer in this career path?
The biggest challenge we face as lawyers is limited training in finances. While many of us do corporate law and big M&A, we often overlook the financial dimensions of our deals. We engage with the law but not with the numbers.
A lawyer must understand that she cannot do everything and needs to surround herself with the right people. Delegation is key in any business, but for legal founders this is even more acute. There is often this idea that a lawyer can learn just about anything. We need to be modest and realize that we need to invite the right people into the business and let them teach us key dimensions of building a company.
What is the most important thing students should do while they are still in law school to prepare themselves for a career in entrepreneurship, in venture capital, or at a start-up?
The most important advice I would give is to select your law curriculum strategically. Today's legal education offers so much that sometimes it is difficult to know where to turn. Choose your courses with a clear objective in mind. If that is becoming a founder, then look at corporate and innovation law courses to boost your imagination, and IP and privacy courses to find the limits. Be well-rounded in law and technology disciplines, as they now constitute 90 percent of your startup opportunities.
Then network with former startup founders and incubators from very early on. Ask them for advice and learn from their own mistakes.
What was the most important lesson you learned in your career thus far?
Hard work is more important than being smart or having a great idea. It seems like a cliché, but it is 100 percent true: there are many smart people, and there are even more people with brilliant ideas. However, finding a person who is clever but understands hard work is where it gets hard. Those are the founders who will go far, in my opinion.
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