Wilson Sonsini and its new tech ancillary business, SixFifty, may be ushering in a new wave for providing legal services and law firm marketing. The combination promises to provide automated legal services for more commodity type services under the Wilson Sonsini brand in hopes that it will generate more lucrative business for Wilson Sonsini later.
Background
Wilson Sonsini is a premier tech related international law firm with long standing roots in Silicon Valley. It describes itself as the “premier legal advisor to technology, life sciences and growth enterprises worldwide.” That’s probably not much of an exaggeration. When it comes to tech and corporate work, it doesn’t get much more well known in tech circles than Wilson Sonsini; Antonio Garcia Martinez, in his fascinating book about the power machinations of Silicon Valley, Chaos Monkeys, called the firm “the most expensive and formidable firm in Silicon Valley”.
SixFifty is a business created by Wilson Sonsini and Kimball Parker, a legal tech entrepreneur and former director of LawX at BYU Law School . He was also an attorney with Parsons Behle in Utah and created a Parsons Behle subsidiary and ancillary business there as well. While there, Parker created an automated tool to help clients cheaply and accurately navigate GDPR compliance. Composed of lawyers and engineers, SixFifty seeks to develop similar automated tools to make legal processes more affordable and efficient for Wilson Sonsini clients and, of course, potential clients.
Several months ago, Wilson Sonsini reached out to Parker in hopes he could work with the firm to create automated services (that don’t, of course, constitute “legal services” for UPL purposes) to those who might not be able to afford Wilson Sonsini lawyer rates or who are unwilling to pay Wilson Sonsini rates for the kind of services they think they need. Specifically and