Nehal Madhani Followed the Paperwork

Nehal Madhani built a marketplace for lawyers and businesses. Then he closed it. The useful part, it turned out, was tucked inside: software that helped people get their work done. For a founder who had walked away from a career at Kirkland & Ellis, this was another change of direction. Leaving a law firm was one decision. Accepting that the new business needed a different purpose was another.

The marketplace opened in 2013, under the name Plainlegal. It paired lawyers with businesses and supplied tools to make the relationship easier to manage. By early 2014, restrictions on attorney fee sharing and the economics of acquiring customers had made the model difficult to scale. Madhani kept the productivity software and turned toward intellectual property. A closed marketplace became the beginning of Alt Legal’s more durable business.

There is a pleasing lack of inevitability here. Madhani had been a restructuring lawyer. He had never practiced trademark law. His own experience trying to register trademarks exposed a process full of repetitive tasks, and he initially built software to help prepare applications. Customers then explained that they had another problem: keeping track of the trademarks they had already filed. The paperwork after the paperwork was where they needed help.

A lawyer learns a second language

Entrepreneurship had already shared space with his education. Before law school, Madhani started Blue Freak, a marketplace where college students could buy and sell things. He continued running it while studying law. His academic path took him from a Northwestern bachelor’s degree in biology and economics to a Penn law degree in 2009, with a certificate in business and public policy from Wharton. Business was already sharing desk space with the law books.

At Kirkland, his restructuring work included debtor representation across industries. He also coauthored research with Wharton professor Eric K. Clemons on digital businesses and antitrust. That earlier work examined how online business models complicate regulation. The later company would address a smaller, more immediate question: what happens when a legal professional has to carry information from one system into another, over and over?

After leaving practice, he spent months teaching himself to program and built the first version of his company’s software. PHP did not suit him; Python did. Django supplied the framework. “I wanted to understand the underlying technology,” he explained. There is something useful about a founder acquiring enough technical vocabulary to argue with his own assumptions. A product idea becomes rather less abstract when you have to make it run.

“I wanted to understand the underlying technology.”Nehal Madhani, 2017

The filing is only the beginning

Madhani’s customers supplied the next lesson. Filing an application was a discrete task. Maintaining a portfolio meant tracking an accumulating set of records and deadlines. In 2021, he described the move from application automation toward docketing: customers wanted help following thousands of trademarks already in the system. He adjusted the product around that demand. The sale had started with making a new filing easier; the ongoing work gave the business its focus.

He did not build the trademark product alone. Charles Amoako brought the experience of an IP paralegal as well as technical knowledge. Gabe Kneisley brought product design. Together, the three worked with the trademark community to develop a system that reduced manual entry. Their backgrounds mattered in combination: legal practice, the detailed work of maintaining records, and the design of the screens through which people would actually do it.

The promise required some unglamorous engineering. Customers switching systems carried years of accumulated data, along with habits developed around their existing software. Madhani identified both migration and ease of use as obstacles to adoption. An elegant new screen would accomplish little if a firm could not bring its old records along. The company had to make the journey into the product workable, too.

“Things are working fine.”

Asked for the best excuse he had heard for avoiding technology, Madhani offered those four words. He noticed professionals tolerating cumbersome office systems while readily adopting convenient devices in their personal lives. His criticism was pointed, but the product challenge underneath it was practical. A workaround can become familiar enough to feel like a feature. Selling a replacement means understanding the routine you are asking someone to give up.

Focus became another acquired discipline. In the company’s early years, he wanted to support many kinds of intellectual property across jurisdictions. He later described making more progress by concentrating on the initial offering. The name changed from Plainlegal to Alt Legal as the business evolved. The ambition remained international, but the route depended on doing a bounded task well enough that customers would trust the next addition.

Trust also accumulated through people. At his first trademark conference in Hong Kong in 2014, Madhani knew just two people among nearly 10,000 attendees. By January 2020, he was writing about the value of that professional community under the title “It takes a trademark village.” Alt Legal Connect gave those relationships a conference of their own. For a software founder, showing up in person supplied a useful complement to writing code.

The people behind the reminders

Madhani’s public work has increasingly included the professionals who keep trademark practices running. In May 2024, the International Trademark Association launched its beginner certificate program for trademark administrators. He was part of the leadership team as vice chair of its Trademark Administrators Committee, alongside chair Kara Fielder and the program’s directors and project leads. The eight-chapter course covered practical skills, intellectual property basics, protection, enforcement, and technology.

His committee work sits beside a broader policy role. In December 2023, he was appointed to the USPTO’s Trademark Public Advisory Committee. The office’s 2024 annual report lists his term as ending December 1, 2026. He also founded the International Intellectual Property Standards Group, a nonprofit concerned with making global IP laws and data more accessible and standardized. These projects extend the same concern beyond a single company’s interface: information should be easier to obtain and use.

In October 2024, Alt Legal acquired the customers of WeberMark, a trademark paralegal support business, and introduced Alt Legal Assist. Amy Weber joined the company in the transition. This added experienced human help to the software offering. A system can identify work that needs attention; someone still has to perform it. The addition acknowledged that the person receiving a reminder may need more than a better reminder.

A bigger company, the same invitation

The expansion had precedents. In 2019, Alt Legal agreed to acquire MarkTend, a trademark docketing and monitoring service. Its docketing customers were to move onto Alt Legal. MarkTend had been started in 2008 by Michael Kassing and Steve Johnson. For Madhani, growth included taking responsibility for practitioners whose existing software was going away, a demanding version of the migration problem he had already identified.

The financing story changed, too. Earlier, Madhani described operating mostly through revenue, with some angel investment from legal professionals and customers. In December 2025, Alt Legal announced a growth investment led by SSM Partners with participation from The LegalTech Fund. The stated purposes included international expansion, product development, and scaling Alt Legal Assist. The announcement marked a new stage in how the company would fund its plans.

Then, in April 2026, WebTMS became part of Alt Legal. The announcement paired Alt Legal’s automation with a business founded in 1998 and experienced in global portfolio management. It also specified a Customer Advisory Board to give practitioners direct input into development. By then, Alt Legal reported more than 1,300 customer organizations and connections to more than 180 IP offices. Those are company figures, and a dated snapshot of the operation he now leads.

In a subsequent public post, Madhani described Alt Legal, WebTMS, and CedarIP colleagues sharing a booth at INTA’s London meeting, many meeting one another in person for the first time. There is a considerable distance between knowing two people at a conference and helping bring several teams together at one. The invitation he extended remained conversational: come by, meet the people, say hello.

Pizza dough and a manual camera

Outside the trademark business, Madhani’s interests are comfortably tangible. He makes different kinds of pizza from scratch and photographs New York with a manual camera. His LexFusion biography, where he serves on the advisory board, introduces him as a father and a pizza addict. A family photograph supplies a less orderly composition than a corporate headshot. The children appear entirely unconcerned with portfolio management.

His jokes about technology tend toward useful household equipment. In a 2017 conversation, he wished for an affordable robot chef that could begin with preparation and eventually learn his recipes. He also constructed a Python-to-Django connection through movie titles and Samuel L. Jackson. Someone who has taught himself a programming framework is still entitled to answer a question about it with a very elaborate film reference.

Making room for the next first draft

In April 2026, Penn announced Christy Xie as the inaugural Madhani Legal Tech Fellow. Her venture, InVera IP, addresses the early patent process. Madhani’s support made the year-long fellowship possible, providing resources and mentorship for students developing legal technology. The connection is concrete: a Penn law graduate who once built an initial product is helping a current student develop hers.

The fellowship offers a fitting place to pause his story. His first legal technology business changed because the original model did not hold up, and then changed again because customers described a more pressing task. He has since built software, services, professional education, and relationships around that task. At each stage, the work has required attention to people already doing something difficult. The next useful idea may arrive in much the same form as the last one: a customer explaining what still takes too long.