In 2022, Guy Bockamp, the founder of Temion, took off on a sabbatical year. Before that, he had worked for a legal tech company, which was sold to a competitor. He decided to take some time off to spend with his 13-year-old son, whom he felt he had not spent enough time with before. So, in a leap of faith, he closed his private practice, cashed out, and took some time off to go to the U.S.
„I realized that there is more to living a fulfilled life than work. There are the ones you love and care about deeply. That is a contribution to life that we often do not value enough,“ Guy, short for Guido, says. He admits there was also a competition clause to honor: „You can see this as a burden or an opportunity; I chose the latter, I guess.“
„That summer we hit about every museum and every art gallery on the east coast“, Guy remembers. „I am extremely grateful for this chance to bond with my son. He has grown into a very amiable young man, and I am honored and lucks, that he allowed me to be a part of his journey.“
„I realized that there is more to living a fulfilled life than work. There are the ones you love and care about deeply. That is a contribution to life that we often do not value enough.“
– Guy Bockamp
But after a long trip around the U.S. and meeting with family and friends, he found himself working again; this time with AI from a beautiful place on the edge of Hamilton Heights in West Harlem, New York City, and later from the Lower Eastside. „To say the truth, I was completely fed up this practicing law. I could not stand it anymore. We dived into art and culture. We meat wonderful people. That was, what was needed for me and for us.“, he says.
A recovering lawyer, who fails to quit
But the dislike for the legal profession didn’t last very. Soon Guy found himself going to court hearings and chatting with lawyers.
At that time AI was right before take-off and while most of it was happening in San Francisco, there were quite a few companies in NYC. And the Big Apple was is still the legal super hub. Looking at this from a lawyer’s perspective, he saw paramount potential for AI in the legal industry.
So he started working with some household names in the legal industry, but was soon alienated with how AI was being viewed by lawyers. „There is a lot of distortion in the way legal professionals look at AI. For example, major players are cutting entry-level jobs usually staffed with law school graduates, hoping they can cut costs and have AI do this. I think this is a fundamental mistake and is wrong on countless levels,“ Guy argues. For him, AI is a tool to empower, not to replace. „AI is not taking your job, but someone using AI might.“
Unhappy with how law firms saw AI, Guido started to consider doing „it“ again: „You know, I am a licensed lawyer in Europe. I can practice law myself and have done so for over a decade, so why not give it a shot?“ he wondered. A few weeks later, he was ready to start.
There is a lot of distortion in the way legal professionals look at AI today. For example, major players are cutting entry-level jobs usually staffed with law school graduates, hoping they can cut costs and have AI do this. I think this is a fundamental mistake and is wrong on countless levels.
– Guy Bockamp
„Access to law“
„We have a very light footprint still to this day. A co-working space was more than enough“. Back in Europe, Guy looked for allies to assist him with his endeavor. Soon the went to Estonia to meet with creative people there: „The Baltic countries are great. I totally fell in love with Estonia. I even got an Estonian eResidency. That really is a cool thing they do there.“
His company, Temion, first focused on digital workflows. „That was always my true trade: creating a workflow that really works for all who need to use it,“ Guy insists, recalling his work at the legal tech startup that eventually got sold.
The central question they identified was written on the back of a sketchbook Guy had bought at a paper manufacturing shop in Milan while traveling: ‚How do we make the pursuit of individual rights easy, accessible, and cost-effective, while still complying with regulations?‘ it read. Later they added: ‚… and how do we make it fun, also?‘
He read about ‚access to law‚ and discovered that it was actually a German Judge and legal scholar called Rolf Bender, who had worked on this issue and coined the term: Zugang zum Recht. „You can have the best laws on the books, but it means absolutely nothing if people do not have easy access to their rights. Bender is largely forgotten in Germany today.
He traveled across Europe, sat in random courtrooms in Italy, Austria, Belgium, and France. He talked to lawyers and judges, often over lunch, about how they saw the future. „It was very intense, and I was otherwise pretty isolated,“ Guy recalls. „I saw my son and wife, but apart from that, not really anybody.“ He felt like an inventor in a way, tossing problems back and forth, programming, and trying. „You know how they say in Britain that all the famous Scottish inventors turned to their shacks inventing things presumably due to a lack of sunshine – I guess my garden shack was a high-speed rail cabin back then, but otherwise, it seems like a fitting comparison.“
Facilitating the workflow of claiming your rights, it turned out, was by far easier said than done. One major obstacle he identified was that it was still very difficult to engage in a legally binding contract with your lawyer without relying on paperwork. Also, there were many issues with client relationship management software. Common industry software was either niche or only suitable for a single jurisdiction, or the companies that developed the software were unwilling to cooperate. Some, Guy says, wanted totally obscene amounts of money for accessing their software.
For some time they even considered writing their own software for a while; they even spent real money on it. But it quickly turned out that this was a very futile task. They finally switched to an open-source solution called J-Lawyer instead. „That was the right decision! Jens, the maintainer of j-lawyer, is great to work with and a very nice guy, too,“ Guy says.
Getting communication right
He wasn’t alone in the field. There were numerous competitors in the market, including the one that had bought his former employer. Guy insists that while being aware of their competition, they do not spend too much time looking at what they do. „I don’t think the competitor that bought us last time ever really looked at how we could do things back then.“ He thinks that the company that bought them, probably made a mistake by not looking at how well things were set up.
For the better part of 2023, Temion focused on client communication. They tried communication by e-mail and via messenger apps such as Signal or Telegram.
How do we make the pursuit of individual rights easy, accessible, and cost-effective, while still complying with regulations… and how do we make it fun, also?
Temion’s Mission Statement
„I am not a huge fan of email, not even in my private life.“ While most of Temions competitors use email exclusively for communication with their clients, Temion wanted to do this differently.
„In fact, I hate email so much, I pay people to work my email for me,“ Guy laughs, „It really is broken, and when it comes to confidential communication, there should really be other ways to send data back and forth“. Temion has identified client communication as a major factor for success.
„I really believe that Germans are prone to over-engineering things, and yet, when it comes to data security, all ambitions seem to fall flat.“. He assumes that the delay in market entry has cost them a lot of money. But when asked for this he replies: „There are many rules for lawyers which I do not hold in high regard. Most are outdated and some regulation is truly byzantine, but confidentiality, that is something which I am simply not willing to compromise on much.“.
Though Temion had a working system for several months, they refused to bring it to market. „I think people don’t want another app on their phone, and I also think lawyers should, for ethical reasons, not send their briefs or court rulings via email, either. That’s not easy to reconcile, that I admit.“ Guy states.
Some parts of the system were working for almost two years, but either Guy’s expectations towards privacy or towards usability were not met. So the launch of the service to the public has been postponed several times due to safety and security concerns. Guy contemplates that it „was probably good, not to have outside capital“ at this stage. „I may be overly concerned with this privacy, and yet I am glad I didn’t need to argue over this with anybody.“
„When we go to market, our clients deserve a very high level of safety and security, and with our new system, we can now deliver on this expectation.“
At Temion, they think they have a solution now. Data they say will never be stored unencrypted, so even if systems get hacked into, there will be no unencrypted data to carry out. Not even their server administrators can see the users‘ data. The downside is that the system cannot operate in real time, just yet. Guy affirms that he does not believe it to be necessary to make Decisions in a legal case in real time. He adds that decisions should be thought through and that he would often advise to sleep over a decision.