From Paperwork to Productivity: How CaseBlink is Transforming Immigration Law
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast. I'm very pleased to have another guest, Khalil Zawi, whom I met, as I have several guests recently, at the

Legal Tech Fund Summit in Miami this past December, but he's joined by a co-founder of his, Tina Zedkineza. How do I pronounce it? Do it again for me. Zedkineza. Zedkineza. Zedkineza. So I got that right after having forgotten earlier the pronunciation that Tina gave me. Welcome, both of you.

Tina and Khalil, as I mentioned, are co-founders. Khalil is the CEO and Tina the COO at a legal tech startup called CaseBlink that operates in the immigration law area. We're going to get into that quite heavily, but I'd like to again welcome you. Say hi to the listeners. Khalil? Thank you, Charlie. Very excited to be here. Thank you for having us.

And Tina, say hello. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Charlie. We're honored to be here with you. Well, the pleasure is all mine. The honor is all mine.

So I have a little bit of a head start having spoken to Khalil down in Miami last December and having spoken to him again on a Zoom call. This is my first time meeting Tina. But I want to begin, as I often do when we're talking to founders, by having, I guess, Khalil first tell us a little bit about what CaseBlank does. It's a target market.

what problem it solves for that market. And we'll talk a little bit more. So Khalil, take it from here and talking about CaseBlank. Yes. So CaseBlank streamlines immigration filings and we help attorneys spend 80% attorneys, paralegals, writers working on these cases 80% less time.

How it works is it uses AI to streamline the process. It's built on top of three pillars. The first one we call document understanding, the second one case research, and the third one drafting. So document understanding is a process where AI reads and understands documents, extracts information from them, generates summaries. Research is the AI independently doing research based on those documents, having all the context it needs about the visas, the case law, the regulations, and

And then drafting is where it assembles all of those pieces and starts drafting the petition for the attorneys. So the goal is so that they spend less time processing these cases because they're complex and time consuming, and they can process them faster and also do more of these cases. Well, I had the benefit of watching a demo video that Khalil was kind enough to send me, and I was very impressed.

The application case plank had a very straightforward, understandable UI.

And it worked pretty rapidly in doing what Khalil described it could do. Khalil, by the way, you impressed me with your academic and scholarly background because Khalil featured himself and his own immigration-related documents in conducting the demo. Is it the case that immigration lawyers typically work on a fixed fee basis?

Yes, I think 80% of immigration attorneys work on a flat fee basis. So there is usually a price point for a visa or a green card. They tell the foreign national in advance, this is what they would have to pay. And they charge for this type of work on a flat fee basis. So there's

clear incentive for efficiency, right? So if they spend less time working on these cases, then they either make more margins and can process more of these cases, or this potentially can also lead to prices going down and therefore more access to justice. So more people can afford paying for these visas.

Yeah, we'll talk about some of the access to justice aspects. One other thing I'll add, though, some of the lawyers can go home and see their family a little bit more frequently. Absolutely. Not unimportant, having been a lawyer myself for too many years. How did you build it? Is it...

a piece of software that relies on one of the large language models that are foundation models that are out there. You had, you have a third co-founder. Is that your technical person on the IT side, the software development side, the AI side? Well, we,

We started as just me iterating on the large language models. And then Tina and John, my co-founder, joined. So we were three at the time. And then the company grew. I think we're 12 people full-time now. Wow.

Yes, so we grew a lot since we started. So I can't say that I am building it right now. It's a full team dedicated to building Caselink. A mix of attorneys, paralegals, AI scientists, engineers working together to build this product.

But what we do is we tailor the large language models to some of the use cases and more importantly, we feed them with the data that they need to be able to put together these cases. And early on, one of the challenges was that, you know, back in 2023, we were seeing a lot of hallucinations. So these models where it can't make up information. So it was really tailoring them, making sure they have all the guardrails so that they don't make up information and they really use the data that we give them to produce those petitions.

And the data consists principally of case law and regulations from the authorities, federal authorities. And so is it a sort of fine-tuning that you've done to –

to put the guardrails in place. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Important. I liked what I saw in the demo. And it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The lawyers who work on a fixed fee basis, this is...

uh golden to them because uh it not only uh makes for less grunt work but it also as you said either enables them to offer themselves higher margins or take on more work or both and as i joked even seeing their kids and i hope it's not a joke i i hope they can do it uh tina what uh

What do you see happening? Is the agentic buzzword of the day, is that something that is going to or has already been applied to Case Blink where you can actually, as I understand, how these agents can work? And I know that

A lot of development is going into improving them. You actually enable them to do multi-step, carry out multi-step processes on their own. Is that something that's being built or has been built?

Yeah, I think, you know, with that technology, they're able to do a lot of the review process, case research, and then drafting too. So, you know, with that new technology, you're able to review large amounts of data from documents that attorneys upload onto the platform, parse a lot of the information, and then also conduct additional research, whether in our databases or online, and then

then also, you know, help with the drafting too.

And are you, if I remember correctly from the conversation that Khalil and I had, are you principally aiming at the business-driven immigration needs of enterprises as opposed to, I don't know, the consumer retail side of immigration? Yeah.

Yeah, we started off with business immigration law. So we work exclusively with law firms and immigration attorneys and starting off with those who represent companies in preparing visa applications. So things like the H-1B visa, O-1, national interest waiver. And we started specifically with the ones that are very writing intensive and document heavy.

Because those are the cases that take the most amount of time to prepare, require sorting through a lot of technical documentation evidence. A lot of times as an attorney, you have to, before you prepare a case for somebody, for your client, you have to first fully understand what it is that they're doing. And a lot of times these are experts in a technical field, whether that's AI themselves or scientists and scholars. So being able to understand what they do

and then translate that into an understandable petition and putting all the information together in a letter for the immigration office to understand. So as I gather from the demo, there's a letter, there's research that goes into preparing a brief that accompanies the letter and a set of exhibits that is part of the package. And

Case Blink can play a major role in helping the lawyer who remains in the loop to put all that into the package? Yeah, so it'll guide them through the whole process, starting with the documents piece where the lawyer can upload all of the documents for the case onto the platform, get summaries of it, be able to build an exhibit list.

from that, then they can add additional information to strategize on the case. So that's the most important work that attorneys do and they remain in the loop on that. You still have to decide what's our strategy, what's our angle on this case.

then you're able to do case research that we help you do automatically before drafting the letters. So it takes all of this information and then puts it together in a comprehensive legal brief, as well as putting the exhibits together and generating a packet, which a lot of times

people underestimate how much work goes into that, just being able to shuffle all the evidence and put it all together, organize neatly. And so it's all of that mundane work that attorneys don't necessarily want to be spending their time on or their paralegals or legal assistants, as well as the drafting. And so we started with the business immigration cases,

But I think it's applicable to other areas of immigration law as well, including asylum applications or waivers of inadmissibility. So looking to expand to other areas, too. And that, I suppose, would be one angle that is particularly important to the access to justice aspects of an application like Case Blank.

Because I can't help but believe that if you can make things, well, first of all, I don't want to forget to make the point that having heard what Case Blink does, it allows, it's not a phrase original to me, it allows the lawyer to practice at the top of his or her license. So the lawyers are not relegated to doing the grunt work as much as they would otherwise have to do.

But if legal aid lawyers or lawyers that specialize in access to justice, either on a profit or non-profit basis, can avail themselves of the efficiencies, I can't help but think that it's going to make for a more, applying justice tech to make for a greater, have a greater impact on access to justice.

And I'd like to think that at the legal tech startup focus community, people are indeed very much interested in that aspect of practicing law. Before we go on to more general matters, and I open this up to both of you, of course, what do you think it is about Case Blink that –

distinguishes, it differentiates its features and benefits from competition out there. Care to take a whack at that? Yeah. So first of all, when we started in 2023, there was nothing that was doing what we were attempting to do because the technology had evolved so much that before then there was no even

it wasn't even possible to imagine that AI would be able to do this much work. So when we started, there was nothing around us that was doing what we were doing. And I think what made us really different is that

seeing the advent of generative AI and the first versions of GPT 3.5, and then hearing about agents, right? If you ask someone what an agent is, I mean, even now people still, it's being figured out, but at the time specifically, no one would be able to really explain what an agent is. But seeing the opportunity early on and realizing that we could break down the work that

paralegals, writers, attorneys do into small agents that would essentially replicate that type of work? And would that be able to pretty much eliminate all of the administrative work that Tina was talking about earlier, which is sorting documents, labeling them, organizing them, extracting the right information from them with the context of the visa and what those agents are supposed to do?

that was really groundbreaking, right? So, you know, and even now, you know, people are realizing more and more of the capabilities of AI, but it is mind blowing what it's able to do, right? So what makes us really different is that we are essentially replicating a process end to end that involves attorneys, paralegals and writers with full AI automation.

This isn't saying that humans don't have their say while this is happening. So now what humans are doing, they're essentially reviewing what the AI is doing. They are guiding it. So Tina earlier was talking about strategy. That is still very important. It's really to guide the AI and how it's producing that case. You give it all of your know-how, all of your expertise. That's what goes into the strategy.

And also in your style, right? So attorneys have their templates that they use. They have their style of the way that they've been doing things for years that works. And so they want to maintain that style. The nice thing about CaseBlank and that differentiates us is that they can also upload their own templates and have the AI follow their style and the way that they draft.

So not only the technological aspect differentiates us, but also as a team, just having my expertise in AI, Tina's know-how in immigration, and John's in infrastructure as a repeat founder, made us really different from the get-go. Because combining those three together, that's how we envisioned CaseBlank, and that's what made CaseBlank what it is today. Well, yeah, if you've reached in the short time that you've been here,

You've been out there on the market, a headcount.

uh, the, the headcount that you mentioned that that's a testament to, uh, to success. Uh, uh, I would be remiss and we don't get into politics and I don't intend to get into politics really here, but I, I, I do have to ask with all that's going on in immigration, um, since, uh, uh, the beginning of the year, has it had a material impact on, on the business that you're, you're doing, uh, more volume, uh,

different kinds of requests made of the software? Yeah, the demand on attorneys has really, really gone up since the Trump administration. Since day one, immigration is one of the things that has been targeted for change. And there's been a lot of changes in policies. And that's led to, one, an increase in work for immigration attorneys. Playing it simple, yeah.

Yeah, they feel really overwhelmed, partially because their clients, you know, are no longer maybe as confident filing cases on their own as they were before. They're looking more towards the expertise of attorneys for help and just, you know, going to them more. That translates to...

then also putting in more work into every single case that they prepare because they know that the request for evidence rate is going to go up. The denial rate is going to go up because that's what happened during the first Trump administration. And so attorneys are already anticipating that. And we're already seeing some of those trends come through where the denial or request for evidence rates are skyrocketing.

And because of the amount of work that they're under, they're looking to find any way they can to be more efficient. And so that's also important.

you know, helped our business in that they are looking more towards utilizing the latest technology and what can they take from AI to help them be more efficient, to help their team get these cases prepared faster so that they can spend the time needed talking to their clients.

And I think this has also pushed us to continue to improve too, because the legal briefs that attorneys prepare and file have to be a lot more robust because they're under a lot more scrutiny. And so- That's the word I was thinking. Scrutiny, yes. Heightened scrutiny, yep. Exactly. And we want to continue to ensure that the quality that we're providing is high to meet those needs too.

So it's a double whammy, not only more cases, a higher volume of cases, but the intensity with which the review process takes place and the heightened scrutiny as yet another factor that frankly puts pressure on not only the client, but importantly, the lawyers. And it occurs to me that

having practiced, and the more time I or people junior to me could spend thinking about the important issues, the strategies, the negotiations, and the less time that we had to spend on the routine clerical aspects,

facing the pressures that immigration lawyers face now, I can't help but think again that this is a boon to be able to offload that and spend more time thinking about the stuff that is a make or break matter for the client, not just a matter of labeling things and assembling things in certain orders and fashions.

Yeah, so I wouldn't be surprised if when we next speak, you tell me that you've doubled your head count. Good to hear all of that. Let's talk about some of the things that we had a chance, Khalil and I, to talk about that might be of more general interest to legal tech startup leaders who are listeners to the podcast.

We're not going to ask Khalil and Tina to give away any of their secrets, the secrets to success. But speaking more generally, let's talk about marketing. What has been key in your marketing journey to get the word out about Case Blank to the right people? Early on, it's really been our network and our credibility.

So as an early stage founder, I think you should leverage that as much as you can. So Tina is an immigration attorney. She practiced and she has a lot of connections from working with a lot of people in this industry and people who trust her. So when she goes to these people and tell them, hey, we built this platform. Do you want to try it out? There is a level of trust that goes into Tina that makes them want to try the platform.

It's also our credibility as a founding team, you know, our accomplishments. So people look at our profiles and they think, oh, you know, they seem like they might be the right people building this tool. So I want to try it out. So early on, it's been a lot of, you know, building that trust very based on our network or our credentials and

and then word of mouth right so you know i've tried this hey i've tried i know this you know i know kalila i know tina and i tried this and it's amazing you should look into it there was a lot of um founder-led outreach as well early on and usually that's how you catch the early adopters right and i have to say we're lucky because people are very well i'm

Historically, it's known that it's very hard to sell to attorneys, right? But with AI, things are a little different. People get excited about AI. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that they know if, especially attorneys know that if they don't use AI, they will be left behind because they're

the technology is moving so fast and it's able to do things really well at this point that if they don't adapt, then they might lose the opportunity and a piece of the market. In terms of marketing, what's worked early on was essentially the word of mouth, our own connections.

And then establishing a reputation, right? So people who tried it and who saw the value and who trusted us then spread the word and then it

from that point on, it was trying to meet our clients in person. And where we found our clients is when we went to the conferences. So the American Immigration Lawyer Association is one of them. That's when we meet a lot of our clients and solidify the relationships. So Tina, I don't know if you want to add anything to this. Yeah, I mean, I'm

Just pretty much echo that, but immigration is especially immigration is a very small community and a lot of people know each other. So your reputation is really important, but also maintaining those connections. So staying close with our customer and even if they, you know,

don't try us right away or, or want to try them later on. And I think this goes across to other attorneys too, where it can take a while to develop those relationships. And so, you know, staying patient, but continuing it on over time and not just expecting it to happen overnight sometimes. Well, and I would imagine that you find immigration law practices very

are of they're not they're not big loss size generally as I as I understand it so the horrible stories that we hear some

may contain a little bit of exaggeration, others of which are probably spot on about the enormously long and complicated sales cycles in selling to big law. Perhaps you've managed in picking the niche where you're operating to deflect some of that and get to the decision makers.

especially as Tina had mentioned, given the fact that the immigration bar, while widespread and nationwide, is still a smaller bar than and operates in by way of smaller law firms. So I imagine that has has been a help, a boon in getting getting the word out and getting to the right people when you want to close a sale. Conferences is one. Have you done any social media? Have you?

done some LinkedIn writing. Has that been material in getting the word out? You know, it's one thing to have a great product. It's another thing to know how to make people aware of that great product. I think

What's important is being out there, making sure that people know you exist. So whether that's on LinkedIn, on podcasts. Yes, we try to be on everywhere pretty much. So we looked into being on the podcasts of some of the LinkedIn influencers and immigration early on.

We try to post as much as we can. As soon as we have features that are out, we publish marketing videos.

You know, we talked about reputation early on, and I will contradict myself now saying even bad publicity is good publicity early on, right? So even if you have a very minimal product, an MVP that's two months old, it's a way to test the market. It's the way to test the appetite. And you should be out there as soon as you can. You should test the product, have, you know, test the market and have confidence

your market, have your ideal customer profile react to it before you even build it too far. Right. So, yes, trying to make sure that everyone knows you exist, everyone knows your brand as early on as you can. Well, yeah, that's interesting that. Well, first of all, you mentioned the ICP, the ideal customer profile. You know, I think at early stages, legal tech startups are

may not have marketing professionals working with them, but they have to familiarize themselves, the leaders of those early stage startups, with marketing jargon and marketing lingo because inherent in a good marketing program is becoming familiar with these ideas and concepts that really do matter. And so if you haven't thought about creating your ideal customer profile, look into it.

See what that means, create it, and then go out and let that be a guide to waste less time on the wrong kind of marketing and actually point your marketing in the direction of the people that really matter. I'd add to that as an early stage founder, you don't have time to waste like that. So you really need to make sure that if you're talking to someone, you're talking to someone who's potentially a lead and will pay for your product.

unless you're doing discovery calls. Otherwise, if you know that the person is not qualified, you shouldn't chase them. Yeah, even the idea of qualification and a sales funnel ought to be things that legal tech startup leaders at the very early stage familiarize themselves with because carving the marketing world up into the concepts that make

or break a marketing program only can be done if you know what is being meant by what is being said in marketing. So, you know, hop on that, hop on that train early and don't, don't think it's an undisciplined sort of, um,

Things that you can do just from your gut. I think there's some real discipline to marketing. Well, I know there is nothing original again to me, but something that I think very early stage people have to get their arms around even before they make that big marketing hire at the later stages when they have the money to do so.

You, Khalil, told me when we spoke initially that you actually were part of an accelerator incubator program. Is that right? Yes, me, Tina, and John, the three of us, the founding team was part of that. Oh, you were all together then. Okay, wonderful. Yes, Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator in New York City. And it wasn't LegalTech exclusively, right?

Not at all. It was anything and everything. And that didn't detract from its experience for you. Say that again? The fact that it wasn't legal tech exclusive didn't detract from...

from, from the benefits that you could derive from it? Oh, quite the opposite. Um, because as you said before, it's all about learning how to test the market, how to, uh, do sales, how to do marketing very early on. Um, and I'm a technical founder. So those are things that I really needed early on. Um, I, if I think back to a year and a half ago, I would, I tend, I tended to be a little bit on the like shy side in terms of being out there and, uh,

like telling the word what we're building. And I was worried, you know, someone might steal my idea. But that's a typical mistake, right? So you should really try to test things out, really try to be out there and test the market. And those are things that I learned from the accelerator program. And also they gave me the confidence to be able to do that, which I think without that training, I wouldn't have.

Yeah, the confidence factor, especially for a technical founder who, and I would consider lawyers who start legal tech startups, who found legal tech startups, they're technical founders in a way themselves. And law firm marketing, it's come a long way since then.

I started practicing law, but it really is a different kind of marketing from what you experience when you're selling to enterprises and when you're selling a software product. So if you can get your accelerator background

pushing a wind at your back and boosting your confidence, it can only mean that you're going to get out there more readily because you're not afraid to do so and more effectively because you've had the experience of talking about marketing and dealing with those issues at the

at the accelerator or incubator. What about investor? Go ahead. No, I think what happens is that they break your confidence and then you build it again. So they break it because you go there thinking that you know everything. And then they make you realize that you actually don't. And sometimes you don't even know what you're talking about. And so when you realize that, uh,

And work so hard to understand your market, understand what you're doing, understand what it takes to build a company, and then you can build that confidence back. And I think something that...

that really helped being part of that program is they teach you how to pitch your business over and over and over again. 30-second pitch, the two-minute pitch, the four-minute pitch. So when you're talking to investors or even potential clients, you are very confident in talking about what you're doing, right?

Yeah, it sounds like the boot camp approach. Break the person down, destroy their will, and then build them back up and you find they're even stronger. So it may be scary at first, but it sounds to me as if it's a most worthwhile endeavor. How about investor exposure? Was that an important part of the...

accelerator program? Is that part of it at all? It definitely is part of it. So they expose us to investors very early on. For us, it was a four-month program. The first two months, we were talking to mentors. And then the last two months, we were talking directly to investors. So the more you talk to investors, the more you're exposed to the questions they ask you, the more you know

You understand their expectations or, again, you realize that there are gaps in your knowledge that you need to work on. So actually fundraising, you're ready to answer those questions. And.

For us, we also were able to fundraise right after the program. So when we went to pitch Case Blank at Demo Day, that generated our interest from investors, including our lead investor. So it's very helpful in that during the process, you learn how to pitch and talk to investors. And then the

the program itself helps you, you know, it helps bring investors to you as opposed to you, you know, chasing investors or having the process. Well, you do need to have a process still, but it really is helpful that you already have investors in the pipeline from, you know, the network that the accelerator brings.

And how long had you been in business, been in operation before you joined the Accelerator? And you did mention it was an accelerator as opposed to an incubator, which I do think there's a distinction there. But how long had you been building and doing what you were doing at the start of your journey? How long before you joined? So the company was incorporated in August 2023. And

At the time, we had pretty much nothing, you know, like a prototype and minimal product. And we joined the program in January 2024. So six months before what I would call ideation slash real first MVP to starting the program.

Yeah, and... And sorry, Charlie, just to add to that, definitely pre-revenue and pre-product at that point. We did not have a single customer. And I would add here, too, that even for a very early stage company, as CaseBlink was at the time that joined the accelerator, where the founders and their team are really not expecting...

to raise money right away. They may at a early pre-seed or seed stage, but perhaps thinking later on down the road, still being exposed to investors at that very, very early stage is important because you begin to refine your pitch. You begin to understand the gaps in your own approach to investors. So I think that's wonderful. The sooner you can get in front of investors

even if very early in your business's journey, the better. And then, of course, down the road, you're that much more prepared when you're ready to go out and raise than you would have been otherwise. You know, I've always...

I try to be jealous of our listeners' time, so we keep the podcast to about this duration of airtime. But I'm so glad, Khalil, we met and had a chance to talk in Miami and now have this podcast. You're the third person here.

three podcasts now in a row including yours where uh the podcast guest or guests were uh people whom i met at uh at the legal tech summit and uh i've got one more coming in fact

So Tina and Khalil, thanks very much for spending the time with me talking about Caselink and giving some advice to other early stage founders. If people want to reach you or the company, what's the best way to do so? Caselink.com or Khalil at Caselink.com, Tina at Caselink.com. Very straightforward, very easy, very good.

Uh, so as I have said to all my previous guests, um, let's get together for me and Khalil will be one more time. It'll be a first time when we get together in real life, Tina, but let's make sure we do so. Uh, and, uh,

I wish you what I can only help but say is continued success, because it sounds like with your headcount growth, you're already on your way. So again, thanks for participating, for being such great guests, and continued success. Godspeed and good luck. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.

Thank you for listening to the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in LegalTech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free LegalTech Startup Focus community by going to www.legaltechstartupfocus.com and signing up. Again, thanks.