The first thing you learn in Econ 101 is how supply and demand impacts prices of goods and services. Higher supply of something means lower prices. Higher demand, higher prices. A hallmark of many industries is that supply is artificially constrained, which leads to higher prices for consumers. Think diamonds held in vaults by De Beers to keep prices high. Or taxi medallions limiting the number of drivers on the road. Or caps on the number of doctors and lawyers credentialed each year by their respective governing bodies. In all of these cases, limited supply equates to higher prices, and therefore, lower consumption. Any time you can find a company or technology that blows the top off the supply cap, you should see a concomitant explosion in demand. We saw that firsthand when we invested in Uber: Suddenly, a massive shadow market of demand for transportation became unlocked, with people taking net-new trips they previously wouldn’t have taken, growing the total market and pie for both drivers and riders. When we met Dan Mishin, CEO of Manifest OS, ahead of their Series A, we saw the potential to do the same thing for the legal industry, where it turns out most people would welcome better access to legal advice if they could access it.
Just as Uber created more supply by increasing the number of drivers on the road, Manifest uses AI to dramatically increase the throughput and productivity of existing lawyers. For businesses, that means ditching the opaque, open-ended, billable-hour model in favor of fast, more predictable legal support, without sacrificing quality. Manifest automates much of the manual, unstrategic work that lawyers take on—business development, marketing, client intake, initial document collection from clients, billing, etc.—freeing them up to focus on the actual work of delivering legal counsel and guidance to clients. While Manifest can’t create new lawyers, it can help lawyers serve many more clients with a consistently great experience, which has the same ultimate impact. That also means clients get more transparent timelines and pricing, additional legal reviews for error control, and more strategic oversight. Manifest is bringing what was effectively a luxury good—high-end legal advice—within reach of businesses and end customers of every size. And the lawyers who work on the Manifest platform not only get to spend their time helping their clients (rather than mundane back-office tasks), they make more money by taking on more cases.
One thing that really struck us the first time we met Dan was how laser-focused he was on enabling Manifest OS-powered lawyers to provide their clients with better-quality, higher-touch legal services to achieve better results. The total market here is massive—the 80th biggest law firm does roughly $800M in revenue, and even the 200th biggest pulls in close to $300M a year. But Dan made it very clear to us, as investors and to anyone joining the company, that the goal of Manifest is to build a generational business that changes the lives of its customers—and to do that the right way, even if it means going slower at times. Fortunately, the team he’s assembled is truly world-class, drawing from some of the most operationally dialed companies, from DoorDash, Rippling, Headway, and Instacart, and the company has continued to maintain an incredibly high bar for quality while becoming one of the fastest-growing companies in Menlo’s history.
And it feels like they’re just getting started. When we first invested, Manifest was entirely focused on B2C immigration. In short order, the company has started working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the world to support their own global immigration needs in a B2B capacity. With the product and engineering team Dan has assembled, we’re excited to see Manifest expand into other practice areas as the company powers the next generation of law firms to become market leaders in those spaces.
At Menlo, we see a lot of pitches for companies that are incrementally improving some workflow or derivatively tweaking an existing product. It’s rare to find founders like Dan who are taking on and reinventing one of the largest markets in the world—one that hasn’t meaningfully changed in centuries. And it’s especially rare when success for that company means better outcomes for businesses and consumers who deserve world-class legal advice but, until now, couldn’t access it.
Croom is a partner at Menlo Ventures focused on application layer AI and spends most of his time in financial technology, healthcare IT, and vertical software. Since joining Menlo in 2017, he led the firm’s Series A investments in Arch, Finch, NationGraph, Numeric, Prodigal, Rivet (acquired by Zelis), and Slash…
