Mike Kochkin didn’t stumble into legal tech. He saw it coming early enough to start coding at university, launch his first legal tech startup with friends before graduating, and begin asking questions about the profession that most of his peers weren’t asking yet.
He still went into big law. He specialised in banking and corporate work, stayed the course, and did what ambitious law graduates do. But by 2018, something had crystallised. Demand for tech-savvy lawyers was growing, the associate trajectory felt increasingly narrow, and Mike had already spent years trying to do both coding and big law simultaneously at a cost to his health; he’s candid about it. Eventually, the decision made itself. He left.
Not out of frustration. Out of conviction. The profession, he believed, had everything it needed to train the next generation of great lawyers. Everything except the right tools. BeSavvy is his answer to that.
The absurdity hiding in plain sight
“We still speak about using Harvey and Legora in our daily legal activities,” Mike says, “but we still use PowerPoint presentations to teach about these tools. In my understanding, that’s pretty absurd.”
It’s a contradiction that anyone who has sat through a legal training session will recognise. The profession constantly talks about AI transformation. The way it actually teaches those tools and legal skills more broadly has barely moved.
BeSavvy is built around simulations: digital versions of real legal projects, broken into steps that replicate the experience of doing actual legal work. Not watching someone else do it, and not reading about it and doing it. Mike breaks skill development into four stages: learn, practise, get feedback, and integrate and argues that most training programmes have significant gaps between each. Simulations close them. The loop tightens, and you learn more in less time.
For anyone interested in legal AI or legal tech more broadly, that’s the insight worth taking. The innovation isn’t the tool itself. It’s closing the distance between learning and doing. That’s what firms are still getting wrong, and what the best training approaches, virtual schemes, simulation platforms, and hands-on learning are slowly starting to fix.
Your law degree still matters more than you think
Mike’s views on AI are more nuanced than most people in his space are willing to be. Access to legal tech tools at the university won’t define who succeeds and who doesn’t. The tools are designed to be easy to use, which is what makes them good products. Knowing how to operate them isn’t the differentiator. What firms hire for is still judgment, thinking, synthesis, and communication. Law school builds those. Don’t rush past the hard parts to get to the tools.
Where he does see danger is in people reaching for AI before developing the ability to think without it. “First principles thinking is important because it gives you a framework to analyse any problem,” he says. “If you don’t have it, AI-powered solutions may confuse you, because you don’t have something to fall back on.”
The foundation law school teaches you how to find the core of a problem, and how to reason through it, which is precisely what makes AI useful. Without it, you can’t prompt well or evaluate what comes back.
Be a builder
The advice Mike gives to people at the start of their careers cuts deepest.
Across his experience working with interns and aspiring solicitors, he’s noticed a consistent pattern. The brightest people are often excellent at individual tasks. That, he says, is the baseline, not the ceiling. “True experience and understanding of how different systems work only comes from when you’re building systems,” he says. “There is a big shortage of people who can find a problem, build systems to solve it, day after day, non-stop.”
Designing something others can use after you. Creating something that outlasts the task. That kind of thinking, he argues, should start from day one, not after you’ve qualified, not once you’ve earned the right to have opinions. Now. It’s advice that comes from someone who didn’t wait either. Mike built his first legal tech venture before he’d even finished his degree. By the time he left big law, he already knew what he was building toward