Build the Future of
Legal Payments

We Believe Everyone is an Owner

The Role of Equity

We’re passionate about giving every full time employee the chance to own a portion of the company. Legal ownership exists to back up our belief that everyone should think like an owner. But being an owner is much more than holding stock.

Owners Understand the Whole Company

An owner looks at the company as a whole, not just parts of it. Owners realize that doing something means not doing something else. They realize that resources allocated to one department mean fewer resources in another. Owners analyze those tradeoffs, regardless of where they sit in the org chart.

To understand the whole company, an owner must understand the financials. In our business, they must know the customer acquisition cost, the customer lifetime value, our sales numbers, how much cash we have in the bank and our profitability. Without that knowledge, how can someone advocate for a new hire, decide how much money to spend to solve a customer’s problem or weigh in on conversations about strategy (something we demand of every team member)? Being an owner means understanding how the whole company works.

Owners Think for Themselves

Corporations have a litany of devices to keep their teams from having to think like owners - budgets, commissions, call scripts - to name a few. These tools were developed to keep people from needing to think strategically about how much to spend, how they should act and what they should say. We don’t believe in those tools.

That’s not to say we don’t believe in building processes and best practices. These are crucial to our success. But devices designed specifically to keep people from having to think like owners are not for us. We don’t have budgets. We have a strategic financial plan that everyone has access to and can run their own scenarios on. We don’t have commissions but base salary ramps based on progress towards personal strategic business plans - plans that involve thinking about the success of the company holistically - like an owner. We don’t have call scripts, but processes, resources and best practices that enable and support, but still require us to think strategically.

Owners Have Extreme Autonomy

At most companies, autonomy is being told what to do but not how to do it. Owners aren’t told what to do. Owners consume information and make strategic decisions about BOTH what to do and how to do it. An owner takes control of their own schedule. They take responsibility for their professional education. They determine how best to use their time and employ their skills. We believe strongly in maximizing autonomy, and our version of autonomy includes not just the “how” but also the “what.”

Owners are Last 10% People

Owners are “last 10% people.” The first 90% of almost every project is the easy part. It goes quickly. You make progress. It’s fun and fulfilling. Then you hit a wall. It’s the edge cases, the proofreading, the QA, the scalability. This last 10% inevitably takes longer than you think - paradoxically often longer than the first 90%. Many people thrive in the first 90%. Owners thrive in the last 10%.

The Ownership Circle is Small

Developing owners who have a strategic understanding of the company and who deliver meaningful impact takes time and resources. Because of that, we are intentional about how we build the team. We keep the team as small as possible so we can invest deeply in the people we have. This approach improves communication and reinforces a culture of ownership.

It also sets a clear expectation. Everyone is a doer. We cannot afford to have people sitting back and directing traffic. Each person is expected to be in the trenches and responsible for getting work done.

We use the Netflix “keeper test” to maintain this standard. We ask a simple question: if someone said they were leaving, would we fight to keep them? The answer must be yes.

Ownership is Painful

Being an owner is hard and often painful. Owners lose sleep over their company, both the opportunities and threats. Understanding the company means knowing when cash is tight, or opportunities are being missed. The company’s success is the owner’s success, but its failures are theirs too. Taking on the responsibility of an owner has tremendous benefits but it also has downsides. We must acknowledge both sides.

We Believe We Thrive in a Culture of Mutual Support

Teams Over Rainmakers

There’s a lot of competition out there. We are competitors externally, but internally we believe we accomplish the most when we collaborate and support each other. The most successful companies in the long term have teams that work together to create great things. We believe in creating a team, not a collection of individual rainmakers.

Responsibility Not Help

One of the main ways we create this culture of mutual support is by taking responsibility. We take responsibility for our work. If a team member has too much work on their plate, we ask what we can take responsibility for. This is different from asking, “how can I help?” Most people are willing to help you, but few are willing to take the burden of responsibility. We change the question to, “What can I take responsibility for?” This means that any particular piece of work gets one, and only one, owner. “Helping” or “chipping in” leads to multiple owners, which often leads to the same result as no one owning it. We shoulder responsibility for ourselves and for each other. That responsibility generates mutual support.

We Believe in Impact Over Profit

Our legal and financial systems are antiquated, often unfair, and overdue for change. Operating at the intersection of money and law, we witness the financial friction between law firm and client. We are motivated by reducing that friction. Along that journey, we will not just impact the system, we will also impact each other, our partners, our law firm customers and their end-clients. It’s this impact that pushes us more than dollars earned.

Impact on the System

How can we make legal services more accessible by adding financial flexibility at the point where lawyers and clients transact? How can we enable more accessible fee structures, and more flexible payment options? How can we help clients get paid more quickly in a contingency matter after months or years of waiting? These are the types of problems we think about every day. We get energy from solving them, from eliminating friction in the system and bringing the best financial technology to legal.

We also think about our impact on legal aid. IOLTA accounts generate legal aid dollars from interest on money law firms hold in trust, but the associated ethics rules make these accounts challenging and stressful to manage. Helping firms handle that complexity means healthier balances for the firm, more interest generated, and more dollars flowing to legal aid. We're proud to be part of growing this program and have plans to increase our impact here even further in the future.

Impact on our Community

We invest in ourselves, our growth, and our ability to do meaningful work. We demand a lot of ourselves, not through dictatorship but through mutual inspiration. We do great work and that work inspires others on the team. This positive cycle helps us grow in our capabilities and careers, generating positive impact on each other along the way.

There are many ways we impact our law firms and our partners, helping them build better businesses, create new revenue streams, get paid faster or eliminate manual work. But what we believe matters more is the little decisions: how we handle a customer support call, how we handle pricing and negotiations, our presence on a sales call. In each little interaction we push to make a positive impact on our community and have others come away feeling like they are part of a system that just works better.

For the end clients, who are oftentimes facing some of the greatest struggles of their lives, we work to make that experience less of a struggle, whether it be with our product or through direct interactions like helping them unlock their long-awaited settlement payment. Even if they don’t remember the Confido name, we focus on making their lives better and the experience of working with a lawyer and interacting with the justice system that much easier.

Impact is Personal

We believe it is up to each person on our team to find the impact that energizes them most. We come to work for the opportunity to make a unique impact that matters to each of us, not because of a corporate mission statement. We explore and find areas of impact that matter to each of us. For some, that impact is on other team members, others it’s the product, and others it’s clients or partners. We’re comfortable with those differences. What matters most to us is that making a positive impact remains at the forefront.

None of this is charity. We're building a real business. But the decisions we make along the way, on pricing, on compensation, on partnerships, on where we put our energy, are meant to reflect what we actually believe: our impact matters more than optimizing the bottom line.

We Believe in Building for the Long Term

Time is Overrated

The world over indexes on time. There is a constant pressure to get things done sooner, to hit quarterly targets, to move faster. We believe the best way to build real value, and paradoxically to move faster, is to decouple time from our objectives. This allows us to build a more durable product and stronger relationships with our customers and our partners. We are not focused on the quick exit but the long-term value we deliver to all our stakeholders - our team, law firm customers, legal tech partners and shareholders.

In the military, an order is given to execute a mission at a certain time, but beyond that moment, time takes a back seat. The phases of the mission are then executed when conditions are met, not according to arbitrary timelines. Bill Gates famously said, “People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” Overindexing on time results in thinking smaller because we limit our goals to fit within our timing expectations. By freeing ourselves of fixed time constraints, we operate more efficiently and we think bigger.

Long-Term Success Requires Continuous Strategy

Most companies have a time-based strategy with quarterly planning, annual planning, January sales kickoffs and more. Time-based planning is not for us. We believe in continuous planning. Strategy should be focused on the most important objectives at all times. We chase those objectives until they are done, whether they take a week, a year or a decade. Short-term thinking pushes teams into a time-based cadence that we believe slows a company down and hinders long-term success.

The Short Term / Long Term Trade-off

What does it really mean to prioritize the long term over the short term? If you can have a dollar today or a dollar tomorrow, clearly you would take the dollar today. We would too. But what if you could trade a dollar today for two dollars tomorrow? These decisions are not obvious. We ask the question, “Which path will build a better company ten years from now or twenty years from now?” Typically, this makes decisions much clearer.

Uniting Our Stakeholders

We have team members, customers, partners and investors. While each group we serve may have different short-term priorities, their interests align over the long term. By focusing on long-term value, we avoid competing priorities and keep all stakeholders moving in the same direction.