Nicole Bradick, a former Portland lawyer who’s built a new career around bringing technological innovation to the legal industry, has launched a new legal tech startup in Portland.
Bradick this week announced the creation of Theory and Principle, which will focus on designing and developing software and other technology products for the legal industry.
While she believes the legal industry is ripe for the adoption of disruptive technology and online tools, it’s a sector that hasn’t received as much attention as others, such as financial services, for example. After spending the past few years working in legal tech product development, she’s confident in her claim that Theory and Principle will be the country’s only software development firm focused exclusively on building custom legal technology.
“Our team’s mission is to continue to evolve the global legal market and systems of law and justice through technology,” Bradick said. “We are focused on bringing our clients’ visions to life and creating effortless digital experiences.”
Most recently, Bradick was a partner and chief strategy officer at CuroLegal, which is a legal innovation consulting firm based in Dayton, Ohio. While at CuroLegal, Bradick led the product development team that built a number of digital products, including Hate Crime Help, an easy-to-use online portal for people to report incidents of hate crimes, and LawHUB for the New York State Bar Association.
Theory and Principle is essentially splitting off the product development work from CuroLegal while the latter continues consulting on other non-product innovations in the legal space, Bradick said.
This is not Bradick’s first entrepreneurial foray. In 2011, after cutting back her work hours as an attorney at a Portland law firm to spend more time with her children, Bradick ended up launching a company called CustomCounsel LLC, which helped match experienced lawyers looking for greater work-life balance with law firms needing to outsource legal work. She successfully ran that firm for several years before it was acquired in 2015 by CuroLegal.
Bradick is still in the planning phase, but said she will continue to build a local team in Portland.
“Really, I want to make Portland into the place where legal industry players globally come to workshop their legal tech ideas. I’m super happy to be back to owning a Maine company,” she said.
